Emma was my mother’s aunt, but she was always Aunt Emma to everyone from every generation in our family. She was part of a long line of my Norwegian forebears who practically built the entirety of Northeast Iowa, particularly Decorah and the sleepy bedroom-and-once-booming-train-hub community of Calmar just south of it.
My sister and I were kind of scared of Emma when we were kids. She wasn’t terribly demonstrable or huggy, she never told fart jokes, and she was completely deaf, which made it extremely difficult for us as kids to warm up to her.
A true child of the Depression, Emma never wasted a thing. She ate entire apples—even the cores, which kind of grossed us out. She turned her old dresses into quilts and eventually the quilt scraps became painting rags that she washed and reused until they crumbled into nothing.
She even darned her stockings and later her pantyhose, which made her look like she had alarmingly dark varicose veins running up and down her legs.
When her parents and grandparents (who only spoke Norwegian) got to the point that they needed constant care, Emma dropped out of business school to care for them and her younger siblings. And she never went back. She also never married, so she lived in Calmar her entire life caring for everyone and eventually for the house that her father had built and various generations of her family had lived in for almost a century.
Now, we Norwegians are of sturdy stock. Emma outlived her siblings and pretty much all her friends, and by the early ‘90s when she had to leave the family home and move into the nearby Aase Haugen Home For Sturdy Norwegians Who Are Finally Starting To Need Constant Care But Who Don’t Want To Burden Their Families, she was also in her 90s.
We drove up to Decorah to visit her in The Aase (as the locals and residents called it) as often as we could over the next few years. But her spirits were failing as fast as her body. She complained that all her friends and her entire family but us had died. She complained about the people assigned to her table at dinner time. She complained that she was just tired and was ready to go.
I was recently out of college and finally living in my first house about a mile from my parents. And in 1995 on Christmas Eve Day as we were busy cooking our traditional Norwegian Christmas meal at their house, we got a call from The Aase: Aunt Emma was failing fast and they didn’t expect her to last the night.
So Mom and I got in a car, left all the cooking and baking and table-setting and guest-entertaining to my dad and sister, and made the two-hour drive up to see her as snow gently covered all the Iowa farms and towns in sparkly white.
When we got there, Aunt Emma was in and out of consciousness and looking like she was indeed at death’s door. So we held her hands and adjusted her blankets to make her comfortable and sang Christmas carols with her.
At one point, we were finishing what we thought was the final verse of “Silent Night,” but Emma clearly knew the song better than we did because in her fog she barrelled into a final verse we only barely recognized. We did our best to sing along though. But only so she wouldn’t judge us in the afterlife.
As it got late, I realized we had no Christmas Eve dinner for the three of us to enjoy. The Aase’s kitchen had closed, so I jumped in the car and started driving around Decorah (in the prehistoric days before GPS phones and even Mapquest) to find something for us to eat.
You’d think a grocery store in a very Norwegian town would have Norwegian favorites in stock on Christmas Eve, but you’d be wrong. So I had to improvise: pre-packaged cups of Christmas-red Jell-O, Kaiser rolls (because Germany is in Europe so it’s practically the same as Norway) and cold cuts. It wasn’t much, but it would definitely become a memory.
But when I got back and we ate our bountiful feast, Emma started to rally. She was lucid and talking, and she and even the night nurse told us we might as well go home.
So Mom and I got back in the car and drove home through the snow-covered fields and little Iowa towns late on that Christmas Eve. We sang along with a “Messiah“ broadcast we found on the radio and talked about Emma and the end of an era she represented when she eventually dies, and we had a rather lovely time together.
But when we got home, everything was chaos … from a proper-Christmas-decorating perspective, and my sister begged us to never leave her alone with Dad on Christmas Eve again because he set the table like a toddler and made the Christmas trees on the Spode china crooked. CROOKED!
The next morning—Christmas Day—as we were finally enjoying our now-leftovers Christmas Eve dinner—ON CORRECTLY ORIENTED PLATES—we got another call from The Aase: Emma had died peacefully in her sleep that morning. And ever since then, her death has always added a poignant side note to our Christmas celebrations. But if you want to be remembered long after you’re gone—especially in a social-media post that gets re-posted every year in perpetuity—I recommend dying on a major family holiday.
Deaths are always sad, but Emma had certainly had a good, long run and we were all ready to let her go. And she was clearly ready to let go herself.
I don’t remember how we learned this next little tidbit because we certainly didn’t have the news on during Christmas, but we eventually found out about someone else who had died that same Christmas Day: Dean Martin. Boozy, handsome, king-of-cool Dean Martin had died on the same Christmas Day as prim, proper, sturdy, Depression-sensible Emma Christina Nystrom.
And as we pondered this odd little coincidence and mourned each person in our separate but very different ways, we all found ourselves asking the same obvious question:
What do you suppose Aunt Emma and Dean Martin are talking about as they wait in line together at the Pearly Gates?
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