A Final Goodbye to 2018

Bye, Bye

Bib

Bye, Bye

Today, in the early hours of morning, my 94-year-old aunt died, the final farewell of 2018, or at least we hope.

It’s been a year of changes and goodbyes, and her parting was a finale, meaningful in its quietness.

Bib or Bibby was a tag she coined as an infant when she couldn’t pronounce her own name: Vivien. It came out as Bibi, and the family adopted it. She was the youngest of five and my mother’s only sister.

Bib spent the last 9 years of her life in a nursing home in La Grange, TX, so we shared daily visits until a year ago when I moved to Mexico.

Bib’s 94th Birthday Party, March 2, 2018

Her unique and often candid sense of humor remained in tact. Days when she didn’t feel up to par and was asked how she felt, she would reply “No f..king good.” We would then laugh and move on to other topics besides her health.

She didn’t walk those last 9 years, slowly lost most of her sight, her teeth, and her hearing, but continued to vocally join in if a song from her past hit her fancy. She outlived her siblings, their spouses, her two husbands, and the majority of her friends.

Bib was involved with the racial turmoil of the 1960s, marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. She recalled sitting in a home in the Alabama town with the voting rights movement leaders planning strategy as they determined when they would begin the now famous march toward Montgomery, the state capital.

She raised two boys, lost another as an infant, married twice, and lived in several states during her long life. She had a unique sense of humor, which was a rare trait in her family, since her father and siblings didn’t do a lot of laughing. Times were tough for the Poe family when she was born in 1924, and funds remained scarce during her growing up years.

Her mother taught piano lessons as a way to help feed the family, and I believe all five of the children learned to tickle the keys at a young age. Bib played for the school choir and at church services most Sundays in the small southeastern Oklahoma community where she was born until as a teenager she took a job in Tulsa during World War II.

As a young bride her pilot husband was shot down in China and his status was unknown for some time, but thanks to friendly Chinese villagers he was able to rejoin U.S. forces and survived the war.

Good times, bad times, she lived through many, never losing her ability to help and irritate those close to her.

Bib was a fixture in my life, although we didn’t live near her family most of the time. She could be aggravating, funny, helpful, witty, exasperating, hardheaded, loving, frustrating, sassy, unreasonable, and caring. Advanced age brought  mellowing and softening to her personality, especially with the promise of a Dairy Queen dipped cone if she was nice to her roommate. It worked most of the time.

Aunt Bib and her favorite treat, a DQ dipped cone taken in early Dec. 2018

Chocolate candy, ice cream, and a daily glass of Merlot guaranteed peace and harmony !

It is with a sad heart I say goodbye to my last living aunt, a woman I love and treasure. She is, no doubt, greeting this new journey with her tart and quirky sense of humor.

2019 won’t be the same without her, but her memory will remain vivid…especially when I eat a DQ dipped cone.