 |
| Natalie: 1969 during flight attendant training. |
I grew up in suburban Sacramento. We lived in a stucco, tract home with a kidney-shaped swimming pool in the backyard. We had a standard-sized poodle, and a yard decoratively sprinkled with white oleanders. For most of my childhood, there was a Japanese-made fuel-efficient bright orange station wagon parked in our drive-way, and we spent weekends waterskiing on the Sacramento River located a few blocks from my house.
Initially, I assumed everyone lived this way, but my favorite aunt lived in San Francisco, and outside of my parents and my brother, she has been the greatest influence on my life - she taught me about a different world. Her name was Natalie, pronounced by those who loved her best as, “Nat-lee," and though growing up she was called “Pumpkin” by her parents, due to her large cheeks and sweet pumpkin-shaped face, I usually just called her, “Nat.”
In the seventies and eighties, she was a Spanish-speaking flight attendant who travelled between San Francisco and Mexico. She wore Ralph Lauren pants suits, wedge heels, and Cartier rings gifted by handsome pilot boyfriends. She spent her weekends on dates at the opera or the symphony, and used her airline pass to fly away for the weekend to places like Cabo San Lucas, or Belgium. She brought me back a small ceramic owl from South America, a painting of a sad harlequin from Montmatre, and once - during the Reagan era Cold War - she traveled to Russia with my grandparents and brought back wooden nesting dolls before anyone had really seen or heard of them.
As I grew older, she told me about her many adventures – shopping at Harrods, bullfights in Spain, and drives through the Italian Riviera. She made these faraway places seem completely within my reach and tangible. She wore a Krugerrand ring from South Africa, scarves from Hermès, and a miniature Swiss credit card charm on a long gold chain around her neck. She had regular manicures in colors like “café” or “mocha,” and she smelled of delicious French perfume. Whenever I saw her, and despite my own age and complete lack of knowledge about men, she told me stories about her first love, relayed tales of handsome Italian men in Rome and Florence, and never seemed to get over that old boyfriend who was “as close as you could get to a DuPont.”
True – she lived in a bit of a fantasy world. She was actually from a first-generation working-class American family in Woodland, California. My grandfather was a milkman and my grandmother was a housewife, and they were thrifty, practical people. They owned property in Alta and Quincy in the Sierra foothills, and though they always gave their children checks at Christmas, they were never lavish, and they didn’t like any fuss – they had simple (e.g. cheap) vacations as they grew older, and they paid off their house well before they retired. In turn, my aunt went to junior college in Sacramento, flight attendant school in Nevada and, though she was attractive, she was definitely nothing close to a DuPont.
My father was her older brother and we all used to say the two of them looked a lot alike – fair and tall and lanky - only my aunt didn’t have the mustache. They got along well, and my aunt looked up to my dad and romanticized him, sort of like she did with everyone she loved. My father, on the other hand, was a tad more cynical – he saw Nat as a funny pest. Nat and my father also had an older sister, Cindy – petite with dark curly haired, Cindy was more serious, and she often looked on Natalie as someone who lived in a fantasy land - someone who got everything she ever wanted, which she did to a degree. Later, Nat was the sister who introduced my father to the college friend who would eventually become my dad’s wife and my mother, so in many ways, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my Aunt Natalie.
When I was seven, my parents began flying my brother and me to San Francisco from Sacramento and my aunt would pick us up at the airport. She worked for Hughes Air West at the time – the airline owned by Howard Hughes. Once off the plane (a whole 15 minute flight!), Natalie would take my brother and me through the terminal to one of the other planes and we’d do a quick raid of their supplies, pocketing a few plastic pilots’ “wings” and packets of hot chocolate and salted peanuts. During the drive into the City, as the skyline came into view, I would sit in the back seat of her Navy blue Volkswagen Beetle and snack away, dreaming of my own future life in San Francisco.
During our weekend visits, Natalie would take me and my brother all around San Francisco – we had afternoons at the Legion of Honor, sandy sojourns at Ocean Beach, and brunches at Perry’s on Union Street. There were visits to the San Francisco Zoo, or Fisherman’s Warf, or parties with friends in Cow Hollow where we'd steal sips of guests' gin and tonics, the fine whiff of Calvin Klein cologne floating in the air. We would stay in her fashionably decorated apartment, my brother and I often fighting over who would get to sleep on the Chesterfield sofa. And her apartment itself was a classic spot on Broadway at Gough in Pacific Heights – it had a checkerboard marble entry-way and all the lovely details you’d imagine in a San Francisco flat, including a peak-a-boo view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Natalie taught me what it was like to live in San Francisco and how to embrace everything the City has to offer – this included weekend picnics at Stern Grove listening to the symphony, afternoons watching Shakespeare in Golden Gate Park, and my first taste of caviar and my first (surreptitious) sip of champagne. There was shopping at I. Magnum and Macy’s at Union Square, and Sunday matinees at the Clay Theater. She rarely cooked, but she showed me how to shop like a San Franciscan – visits to little neighborhood stores, like Real Foods on Polk in Russian Hill, or her corner bodega.
She also introduced me to Mission burritos from El Farlito’s, deli sandwiches from Lucca’s eaten on the lawn by the Palace of Fine Arts, and weekend kite flying in Crissy Field. She was cosmopolitan, fashionable and, considering our family, a bit of a social climber who aspired to larger things. Despite my Scotch practicality and my Irish (on my mother’s side) ear for the blarney, she also taught me to aspire in some ways, too.
For instance, I don’t think I would’ve wanted to travel without my Aunt Nat's influence – she gave me the interest and eventually the bug, and at some point I became possibly more voracious than she was about visiting odd far away lands. She also gave me the bug for a few other things – she liked to read biographies and histories and seemed to fantasize that she was an aristocrat, and she gave me a love for a good story; she also had confidence, and acted like she was highly educated, despite her community college credentials, and my mother once told me that Nat said she planned to marry “the next John F. Kennedy.”
And maybe she could’ve. I always imagined her as a sort of Armistead Maupin character – she was once referenced in a Herb Caen column, and she seemed to know everyone wherever we went in San Francisco. She had many gay boyfriends that she brought home to our sometimes stodgy family for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter; she talked about alternative medicine, organic foods, and spent her Sundays at Glide Memorial before I even understood what any of this meant.
One thing I did know – regardless of how much was real or fanticized - I wanted to be like my Aunt Natalie. So I studied English literature at Berkeley where I was close enough to my aunt to have a standing Sunday date with her in the City. She took me to lunch and a movie in Russian Hill, dinner in North Beach, or we had a coffee in a cafe in the Marina. We’d usually gossip about boys and, though she was over twenty years older than me, it always seemed like she was getting more action than me. She taught me how to parallel park my Volkswagen Karmann Ghia (without power steering!) on a hill, and though I turned out to be more Panhandle than Pacific Heights, she instilled in me an appreciation for layered sweaters, beaches where you never went in the water, and an eye for beautiful places and things.
She also instilled in me a fear of never marrying, getting sick, and growing old alone (though I've come to realize this fear may have been unfounded), because when she was only thirty-nine years old, she learned she had Multiple Sclorosis (MS). After a few more years of flying, she retired from the airlines and started working in sales at a boutique hotel in the City. She kept her illness under wraps for many years, slowly progressing through the hotel ranks. But eventually she didn't have the energy, and she decided to quit her job and move home to live with her widowed mother in Woodland. She thought if she went home, she could try to get better so she could return to San Francisco, and eventually to her old life that was so full of activity, beauty and purpose.
Unfortunately, her health didn’t improve. Her MS was progressive and her legs - initially numb - gradually grew weaker, her balance more precarious, and she had chronic pain that started in her back and eventually enveloped her chest. She studied-up, took alternative medicine, and met with her doctors regularly in an effort to improve her health – this effort included everything from a very strict diet, stem-cell treatment in Mexico, to bee stings. After a few years without much improvement, she moved to Napa where she thought the milder weather might improve her health - that, or at least make her a more popular visitor's destination for her jet-setting friends.
But in Napa she continued to slow down. Initially, she would take short trips to the store, and she’d spend the afternoon in a chair on her shaded patio resting a heated lavender scented pillow on her aching spots. During this period, she had one request for me: for each of my visits to her in Napa, which came at least once a month, she asked that I bring a burrito from San Francisco – they didn’t have the equivalent in Napa, she said. She wasn’t even eating wheat at this point, or dairy, or much else, and she was painfully thin and weighed less than 120 lbs at 5’9”, but I took to picking up a burrito from Gordo’s on Geary on my way toward the Golden Gate Bridge and up to the North Bay. She wanted it simple, and as healthy as possible – black beans and grilled chicken with guacamole on the side.
Initially during her time in Napa, she volunteered at the Napa Library, helping adults learn to read, and she met another volunteer there, John. He was a retired Navy Captain and a widower, and he became a companion of sorts. Yes, it’s classic – who else would end up with a boyfriend while chronically ill but my Aunt Natalie? But I imagine they each offered each other something special – John's wife had died from a chronic illness, so there was something comforting in their roles. Also, Natalie was a huge flirt.
At first, they had dinner a few times a week in Napa, and occasional dates to San Francisco to see the symphony. And then, as her health continued to decline, on Sundays John would bring over take-out – maybe a Chinese chicken salad from Trader Joe’s - and they would watch a movie together on her old T.V. More recently, John was there to drive Nat to doctor's appointments, and when she didn’t have the energy to watch a whole movie, he would come over on Sundays and sit and have popcorn with her.
My visits became more difficult for her, too. Where initially they took place once a month and included two to three hours of catching up, they eventually became shorter – she could only really stay up and be social for an hour at most and sometimes she would call in the morning to tell me she’d had a bad night, and could I come another time? When we did meet, she'd say over and over again, "I want my life back. I want my life back!" Her appetite continued to decline, too – she went from eating a whole Mission burrito, to half, to picking at the chips and guacamole.
Holidays were tough, too – she had nurses who came in daily to make her meals and help her take baths, and she couldn’t really handle a big group of visitors or any of the activity of a holiday. She insisted we not come by, so I took to visiting her the Saturday or Sunday after Thanksgiving or Christmas, and even then she noted that she wasn’t in the spirit for celebrating holidays. John had a daughter and son-in-law that he normally visited for holidays, but often her nurse Billy would stay with her and keep her company, though she was only up for an hour or so.
This year, my holiday visit took place around the New Year, and it was special since it included my cousin and her husband from Fort Bragg, and their baby Isabel. My Aunt Cindy drove in from Sacramento, and I came from my home in San Francisco. This was maybe one of the happiest visits we’d had in a long time, and Isabel was full of kisses for her great auntie and everyone else. Natalie stayed up and kept us company for almost three hours. After the visit, the rest of us left her to rest and we went nearby for deli sandwiches where we discussed Natalie’s health and future. How much longer could she suffer with the pain, I thought? I felt really helpless knowing that the only thing I could really do was visit her, be there, and show I loved her, but I knew I couldn’t take the pain away, or give her back her life.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of all the stories she’s told me while I was growing up – many of them about boyfriends and love and about the places she’d been or the places she’s wanted to go, and I wished I could write them all down so I could really remember everything about her. When I was a little girl, I would sit on her lap and hold her hands and marvel at her pretty fingers and her long nails. She called me, “Boo." "Chrissy Boo!" she'd say. And she was the one who told me stories about my father, who passed away in 1995, and their childhood - stories about our family, including great aunts who were beauty queens, nuns, and shut-ins; uncles who made and lost millions; and great grandparents who travelled from the Ukraine through Ellis Island to build a milk farm and a life in Rhode Island. I always wanted to gobble it all up – everything she’s always known, and all the experiences she’s had. I wanted to gobble her up. It’s as if I’ve known she was losing the energy to tell us all she knew, and I didn't want to lose her legacy.
Not long ago, when my aunt was attempting a new treatment, she abruptly went off her morphine; she didn’t think her body was addicted to it because she wasn't addicted to it, but then her health made a rapid decline, and eventually it seemed that she'd completely lost hope. Of course, this was understandable, and inevitable – she had hope when I wouldn’t have had hope. I used to wish we could bottle it. Regardless of how she felt, or the reality of her situation, she kept trying to find a solution. It was like she was dog-paddling in place in the middle of a vast ocean, but she could magically glimpse the shore in the distance – something I couldn’t see.
But when the hope was gone, she started talking about dying. She was in excruciating pain, so this was understandable, and she asked if I could help her. Initially, I thought about how this would work, but then I knew I couldn’t help her - it wasn't for me to help - and she stopped talking to me about it. Instead, we had talks about finding joy in life, meditation, and a year ago I had one of those rare opportunities to tell her all that she meant to me.
I told her about the drives in her car, the special-ness of having an aunt I loved so dearly, and how she changed me and made me who I am – how she made me someone who continually aspires to be more like her in many ways. I told her that she gave me my love of foreign places, my desire to talk to strangers, and my eye for seeing all the beauty in the world around me. After I told her this, we shared a weepy hug. She whispered in my ear that I was a joy – I gave her joy. I told her that she gave me joy, too.
On Sunday, January 20th, Natalie had a late afternoon visit with John and they sat and chatted like normal, snacking on popcorn. John said she seemed in good spirits and it appears that after that, she went to bed in the early evening, as usual. But this time she left out four sealed white envelopes on her very tidy coffee table – one to John; one to Les – her first love, and a dear old friend; one for Billy; and one for her sister, Cindy. She left two rings that she never removed – my great-grandfather’s wedding ring that he’d bequeathed her, and her triple-band Cartier ring – next to a note on the table near the sealed envelopes.
In the morning, Billy found the front door unlocked. She saw the note and the envelopes, all addressed in Nat’s beautiful floral handwriting. In the note, Natalie asked that Pa’s ring stay in the family, the Cartier ring go to her friend Glenda, and that John take his choice of any of the lovely crystal boxes she’d collected through the years that she kept carefully laid out on the glass coffee table. Billy said everything else was in its usual place, tidy and neat, and that Natalie was in bed, curled comfortably in the fetal position, completely peaceful and quiet, as if she’d simply fallen asleep.
* * * * *
Natalie Jean Loader
b. May 19, 1945; d. January 20, 2013
