Remembering Aunt Morna

Last night my aunt Morna lost her decades long fight with multiple sclerosis. We all said our goodbyes months or years ago, but it’s still painful.

I was a screaming infant at her first wedding. When I say screaming, I mean screaming. She never held it against me, though. My poor mother was such an embarrassed bridesmaid.

It’s a little strange for me to look at pictures of her from that long ago, because I can’t remember a time before she was on crutches.

Morna and her first husband, Tom, had a cat named Snowball who had two different colored eyes. They loved their kitties.

Tom was my favorite uncle; he let me play Lemmings and Marble Madness on his computer as much as I wanted.

The summer I was 15, right after I got my license, when I visited Colorado, Aunt Morna was the only relative who would let me drive her car. ‘Just ignore the hand controls,’ she told me. So I did, and we rode around just fine.

I didn’t get to see too much of her the last Christmas I spent there in 1997, since I was laid up in the basement with pneumonia the whole vacation.

She was having more mobility issues when I saw her in 1999 for my grandfather’s funeral, but she helped make my twenty-first birthday as good as possible, under the circumstances.

The last time I saw her was in 2009, when we went to Colorado for my grandmother’s funeral. She’d already been in a nursing home for a few years at that time, but she still knew me.

There are so many moments and stories and memories that I grew up hearing about that involved Morna. I love her so much, and I’ll just miss her more now.

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