Men of my Uncle Barton’s generation did not cry in public, but his eyes were shining with tears as he stood in the restaurant parking lot and pulled a cardboard box out of the trunk of his car. “Open this later… You’ll understand why,” he said gruffly, gave me a hug, and drove away.
For over 20 years I had been meeting his wife, my Aunt Barbara, for lunch near where I worked. After Uncle Barton retired, he often joined us. But now, Uncle Barton and I had just finished our first lunch without Aunt Barbara. “It feels so strange, not to have her sitting there beside you in that booth,” I had told my uncle. “It doesn’t seem real to me either,” he had said.
The day Aunt Barbara died I wrote her a farewell letter, thanking her for all she was and thanking her for all the special times we’d had. The next day I drove to their place and hugged my uncle and read the letter to him.
In the letter I talked about all the times Aunt Barbara had made tea for me, and how we had visited and laughed and talked while I ate her cookies and drank cup after cup of her special tea.
Tea for my Aunt Barbara was not tepid water sloshed into a mug with a teabag thrown on top. Tea meant heating fresh water till the tea kettle sang, then pouring boiling water over carefully selected teabags that had been placed in her white china teapot. Then the teapot was covered by a shining copper hood to steep the tea and keep it warm while she set the table with dainty cloth placemats and matching cloth napkins, got out the real china and prepared a plate of delicate, fresh cookies.
But even more than the tea, it was what Aunt Barbara gave with the tea that made those times so memorable. She gave me her undivided attention and her love. I felt listened to, understood and cherished.
When my husband and I had moved to the area years before, we hadn’t known Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara very well. At first, I felt a little intimidated by Aunt Barbara, whose home looked like something out of “House Beautiful” and who whipped up fancy meals like rack of lamb as if it were nothing. That was before I got to know Aunt Barbara’s sweet disposition, her heart full of gentle love and her puckish sense of humor.
Over time, as my husband and I had children, and because our parents lived out of state, Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara became the go-to substitutes, the on-the-spot grandparents for any and all occasions.
Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara were the ones we invited over for a spur of the moment party when our daughter Elizabeth was one. They laughed with us when, instead of eating this unknown new substance called chocolate cake, Elizabeth decided to paint her highchair and herself with it.
Later, Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara were the audience my kids put on a play for, a re-enactment of “Star Wars” with the curtain a bedsheet hung with safety pins from a rope that was strung across an alcove in our front room.
They were our first guests, the year we moved into our brand-new house. They brought with them a set of Christmas snowmen made of Styrofoam balls glued together and topped with hand-knitted red caps, leftovers from when Aunt Barbara had been a cub scout den mother. Somehow that homemade gift warmed the entire house; it felt like the first step toward making this impersonal new space into a real home.
Whenever I took my girls to visit Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara, they sat on the sofa with my girls between them, looking intently at every page of homework and studying every science and English paper.
They were full of praise for report cards and crayon drawings, for a first piece of knitting, and for homemade sculptures made out of modeling clay.
And not only did they nurture and love my children, they nurtured me as well. It was Aunt Barbara I called, in tears, the day I accidentally blew off an Honors Breakfast at which my daughter Elizabeth received an award. Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara met me for an emergency lunch that day and assured me that no, I hadn’t just earned the “World’s Worst Mother Ever” award, that everyone made mistakes, and that they were sure it would be ok.
When I was lonely for my family at Christmas, I often left the office Christmas party early and treated myself to an hour at my aunt and uncle’s house, where Aunt Barbara would show me all her Christmas decorations, (one year with fresh pine branches decorating every banister of the stairs). I would sit in their kitchen drinking tea and savoring a quiet hour in a quiet place before diving back into the Christmas rush and my hectic life. Spending an hour with Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara was the next best thing to taking a quick trip home to be with my folks.
Uncle Barton and Aunt Barbara’s house was the one place I could go and not be a parent, or a worker, or a spouse… it was a place I could be a kid again. A place where I could have the individual attention and love of two grownups and be temporarily free of all responsibilities.
Aunt Barbara was in increasingly poor health the last few years of her life, but she never talked about it. As her life became more and more limited, she dwelt even more strongly upon the joys of simple things. Instead of talking about the pain that had become her constant companion she told me excitedly about the delicious herbal peach tea she had just discovered, and how much she enjoyed it. When steroids puffed up her body and she could not get into her normal beautiful clothes she bought new clothes over the Internet and wore them with an air. She may have been crippled and housebound, but she still wore fresh lipstick, and her hair was always perfectly combed… and no matter how badly she felt, we always had tea together before I left.
During that time whenever I went to minister to my aunt and uncle, they were the ones who ministered to me. It was Aunt Barbara who reassured me that how I felt was normal, when I talked about the dragged-out way I felt after being sick and on antibiotic. And when I shared with her a concern about a daughter’s sinus problems, Aunt Barbara told me quickly that, “I had that for years, and that is no big deal. No big deal at all.”
The last time we saw Aunt Barbara was on Easter Sunday afternoon. Aunt Barbara was in the hospital and so sick that we had to wear masks and gowns to go into her room. But as always, she had a smile for us, and questions about how we were doing. We talked not about sickness but about what was happening in my daughters’ lives… upcoming college visits, a trip to a Christian rock concert, classes my daughters were taking, an upcoming choir trip to Europe.
The last time I talked to Aunt Barbara on the phone she told me that she was feeling better and was looking forward to being home soon. I didn’t know then that the “home” she was going to was an eternal one, on the other side of death.
Now, in the restaurant parking lot, I sat in the front seat of my car and opened the box Uncle Barton had given me. And I cried. Nestled in that old cardboard box, wrapped in newspapers, was Aunt Barbara’s teapot and its matching copper hood.
I wept because inheriting her teapot meant that Aunt Barbara was really gone. But I also wept for joy, because this beautiful gift will always remind me of Aunt Barbara. I wept for joy because I could see myself sitting with my own daughters, having special tea made in this lovely teapot, and loving and listening to them as she had listened to me.
There in the car I felt as if Aunt Barbara gave me one last bit of encouragement. It was as if she said to me, “You can do this.”
I felt strong, suddenly, and full of confidence. “I can do this,” I thought.
What I inherited from Aunt Barbara was more than a teapot. It was an opportunity, and encouragement to make the most of it. With the teapot she had handed on to me her own role of loving and encouraging the next generation…. And a new confidence that I could fill this role, her role.
She had passed the torch to me. It was my job, now, to love and nurture those in the next generation, as she had loved and nurtured me and my family.
Like my Aunt Barbara, I could be God’s partner in loving… nurturing those in subsequent generations as they needed it, with style and grace… and a cup of hot tea.