Aunt Oma

You’re supposed to do what—buy your coffin and pick out a grave?

The doctors diagnosed her with cancer and gave her six months to live. Hodgkin’s Disease. Stage III lymphoma. She was a fifty-six-year-old waitress, a widow with two adult sons, and she owned a little house with a garden out back. She was able to walk to work.

This was Cleveland, Oklahoma. 1966.

You go to the doctor with a chest cold and after a few visits he says, “In 180 days, the cancer that’s spreading to both sides of your diaphragm will have scorched through your body.”

You’re supposed to do what—buy your coffin and pick out a grave?

Because, that’s exactly what she did, my Great-Aunt Oma. No one had seen her so focused. She sold her house to pay funeral expenses and divided the remaining money between her sons, checked herself into the nursing home while the cancer was finishing her. She purchased her casket from the Chapman Funeral Home, bought the burial plot next to her mother who’d died of lymphoma in ’63, just down from her father who’d succumbed to it eighteen months before.

Ida Mae Fox: 1886-1963.
Andrew Jackson Fox: 1886-1964.

Oma Crosson Fox: 1909-, her headstone said, because she bought that too, had it carved with her name and date of birth, had it planted on the burial plot. All she had to do was die.

Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes what comes for you is so horrid, you wrap your arms around it like a friend. Or a family member—which had been the most important thing to Oma, especially in that summer of ’66 when she was waiting around to die.

She didn’t, of course. Her cancer went into remission and she lived another twenty years.

They were good years. She kept her room at the nursing home, using it like most people use hotels, checking in now and then for a rest. She mostly lived with her sons or siblings, traveling back and forth between them, a permanent visitor. She was one of nine children.

She would stay with my grandmother a few times a year, her youngest sister. I remember her coming down to the ranch, a sweet woman, but very nervous, always anxious to move on. You got that sense about her. She still loved her family, but she’d made other commitments. She always had Kleenexes in her hands. She’d squeeze them into hard white balls.

On Memorial Day the family would gather to decorate the graves. There was a long row of Foxes in Woodland Cemetery: my great-grandparents and their eldest daughter Grace; their son Freddie, who’d died of tetanus when he was only seven:

                                                     Fred J. SON OF
                                                     A.J. & IDA FOX
                                                     NOV. 26, 1914
                                                     NOV. 15, 1921

I’d help my grandparents lay wreaths and flowers on the marble, listen to my kinfolks tell stories: my Great-Uncle Leroy or my Great-Aunt Lorraine. My Great-Aunt Margaret or her sister, Louise.

At some point we noticed Oma had drifted away from us. She’d be standing off by herself, very calm, no balls of Kleenex. Just standing there, studying her tombstone, only four numbers shy of completion, a short woman who never seemed to age—her hair in perfect blonde curls, skin smooth as Bible paper—staring down at that patch of prairie earth she had dedicated herself to years before.