My aunt died yesterday. Mom called me with the news this afternoon. I am not quite sure how to feel.

My aunt was my mother's sister. She had had several strokes over the past few years, and had been living in a nursing home near her daughter. As I recall, she was having trouble recognizing people. Her death was no shock.

My aunt and I were never close. We saw each other at odd family gatherings, and never exchanged more than the most general of banalities.  That said, her death is leaving me feeling fretful and unsettled. It means that Mom is the last of that generation still alive in our family. I worry about her a great deal, even though she is in many ways more healthy than I am. She may well live another ten years.

I find myself wondering odd things, like who lives in the house in Sarasota now.  Or where Mom will evacuate to if there is a hurricane -- the last time she had to evacuate was in the horrible season of '05, and she went to Sarasota to be with my aunt and my then-living uncle.

I wonder if the people living in the house have an aluminum Christmas tree with a rotating light stand and red glass globes on it. As a girl I would sit and watch the tree turn red (pink really) to blue to green to yellow. The globes would be red or orange or black, depending upon the light. It is one of my clearest memories of my aunt and uncle's house, along with watching the 1984 game between Miami and Boston College.

I wonder how I will cope when Mom dies.

I should stop thinking about these things, turn off the computer and go to bed, but I am afraid of the nightmares about dying that have been haunting me occasionally over the past few months.  So many reminders this year of how fragile life and how fleeting time are. So many things to tell me how old I am, and how limited my time or that of people in my life may be.

Sic transit gloria mundi.