my Aunt Jane died recently. it seems odd, but i had not seen her since i was eighteen, although we kept in contact by letter, all rather Victorian in many ways. she was related on my father's side of the family, a family (because of considerable ill-fortune) had become just me, my brother and her.

then last year, the letters stopped, and i had no way of knowing what had happened to her. her obituary was placed in the Daily Telegraph by her solicitor, who has organised her funeral, and this is how i found out she had died. i'm going to her funeral on the 4th, and wonder if i will be the only person there. it's all very sad, and a very lonely end to her life.

i wrote this:

i'm on the raw, rough edge of low; i feel sloughed by it; all sad and sorry and hurt. i cannot let my grief just be, and fall into that dark sadness. i want it to hold me, to be cushioned by it. instead i throw off that comfort with my shoulders and elbows. her death takes me further away from my father, and i've been thrown like a stone and am skimming across the water further and further away from those i know and who knew me; my small, fragile falling-apart family: my father dead at 29, his at 38, his at 43. stones in the water.

in her childless, fecund garden the sun shone brilliantly. she painted and was a friend of Viriginia Woolf once and then i can imagine her a young woman in a white dress and broad-brimmed hat. but it's fiction: an idea of her.

i was reading To the Lighthouse by Virgina Woolf at about the time when i last saw my aunt, more than half my lifetime ago, in her hot, breathless garden that seethed with life that summer. i was 18 and just back from France. we live on in the memories of those who know us, and then are gone Woolf wrote. she is right. maybe that's why she wrote, and my aunt painted, to leave a fragile trail that says remember me for this, and this, or this or this. do not let me really die. and at the bottom of my aunt's garden i remember looking up, being stunned by the sunshine, and could see the sparkling, flat river to which Woolf took her life. my aunt painted this view from her garden. i felt very alive there. then.

and i'll carry these memories with me for a while longer and one day sometime i'll skim them across the surface of some river somewhere, and then they will be gone.