Saying Goodbye to My Aunt Dolores at Hillside Cemetery

Elizabeth Weintraub, back row w/sunglasses, with sister Margie, Aung Barb, Uncle Bill and relatives.

The family on my mother’s side are French and German. Highly efficient people, especially my aunts and uncles. These people know how to get things done in an efficient manner, and maybe that’s where I get part of my organizational abilities, now that I think about it. Like, when a client is not present for an appointment, I don’t give them a polite 15 minutes or whatever before calling them. If they are supposed to meet me at noon, and I’m there at noon, and they are not there, I will call them right away. Grass does not grow under my feet.

Which means it’s a good thing my Aunt Pat called my sister yesterday. We were sitting in my sister’s living room in Minneapolis, chatting about nothing in particular when my sister’s phone rang. “Are you coming to Hillside Cemetery?” What? Hey, we thought it was 1 PM. Well, no, it was 11 AM and somehow my sister did not know this. I think the French / German efficiency genes skipped being passed down to my sister. Ask her. She’ll tell you. I got all the good genes in the family, according to her.

We threw on clothes, dashed out the door and found them all sitting outside near the office at Hillside Cemetery. It’s amazing, I thought, how my Great Uncle Dick looks exactly like my Great Grandpa Joe, and my Uncle Bill is almost a dead ringer for my Grandpa Hank. When people get older, they change and begin to resemble other family members, and when it’s dead family members, it’s even more eerie. Further, we are a really small in stature family. I’m not used to being almost the tallest.

Aunt Barb, my mother’s sister, prepared remarks and read them. The Hillside Cemetery made a special exception to let us spread ashes there because ever since my mother died 15 years ago, there have been too many people spreading ashes at Hillside Cemetery. This means Aunt Barb will not be joining her sisters.

Turns out my Uncle Bill lives in Reno. My face brightened, hey, I live in Sacramento, I volunteered, hoping he would say we could meet up or get together sometime. But then I temporarily forgot that I was in the middle of a Christopher Guest movie. That was unlikely to happen. What did happen was Uncle Bill said, yes, he had been to Sacramento and didn’t care for it. Besides, it’s not the best way to get to Washington, taking I-80 to get to I-5 when Highway 89 was a more direct route.

It was nice to have closure and say goodbye to Aunt Dolores. She was 95. She had traveled all over the United States in her RV, which she drove. She didn’t need no stinkin’ GPS or map book for directions, either. She knew every back road and RV park.

After Aunt Barb finished her remarks, we hightailed it off to Jax Cafe in northeast Minneapolis, one of those restaurants that stood the test of time over the years, old-school, rich carpeting and polished wood walls, and pretty darn good Polish pierogi, among other delights. Aunt Dolores bought us lunch, said Aunt Barb. Of course, I had the walleye, there, yah. We listened to my cousin’s daughter share a long story about why she didn’t sign up to work at Amway. It was a really long story, so long my Aunt Barb called her a Chatty Cathy. Being a millennial, at 23, my second cousin didn’t get the joke. We will probably see them again tomorrow before I head back to Sacramento and to my normal life as a Sacramento Realtor.