“Oh, the different one.” 

That’s how my Aunt Julia greeted me after I arrived to join my mom and sister at her bedside in the Intensive Care Unit. I was terrified that she’d out me as lesbian. 

As death drew closer, my aunt’s conversation filter was disappearing. Throughout her life I’d known her to be blunt sometimes and also meddlesome. 

Recently, while writing about family memories, I came across a booklet she had written about her thirty-year career as a matron in the boy’s dormitory at the Rehoboth Mission School in New Mexico, a ministry of the Christian Reformed Church. In 1948, when her friends and sisters were getting married, she chose a different path, leaving the family farm near Hudsonville, Michigan to serve at the Mission. Paging through her memoir booklet, I recalled the night she died.

I’ve also been reflecting on growing up gay in Hudsonville, Michigan in the 1960s and ’70s and my life-long, zig-zag path to gay pride. Dutch culture and Reformed faith powerfully influenced my decision-making in my early life. My ancestors moved to West Michigan in the mid-1800s to freely exercise their Reformed faith and to improve their lives. 

From my parents, I absorbed the message that it’s best to fit in and to be wary of outsiders. To please them and society, I married a man, but we divorced. I tried counseling to change, believing, like many, that the Bible condemned sexual attraction to persons of the same gender. But years later, at age 33, I began to embrace who I am, thanks to LGBTQ+ affirming churches, my siblings, books, and a more progressive social culture.

Even so, that evening as I drove to see my aunt in the ICU, I was still carrying hurt feelings about my Aunt’s trying to pry into my life. I recalled when she and I were in line at the buffet table during a gathering at my mom’s house. I mentioned my recent move to live with my girlfriend with whom I was romantically involved.

“Well, I guess, living together, two can live cheaper than one,” my aunt said casually. Then, while reaching for a roll, she asked, “Do you two sleep in the same bed?”

“No,” I replied, lying. 

Her intrusion into my business didn’t deserve the truth, I reasoned. But the main reason I lied was that I hadn’t yet come out to my mom. Had I answered truthfully, I feared my aunt would tell my mom that I might be lesbian.

Now, two decades later, I was part of a line of relatives staying overnight with my aunt. It was my turn. She had no spouse or children. She was suffering from congestive heart failure. 

I drove into the hospital parking lot, still a bit miffed at her about her question to me in the buffet line and other occasions when she made me uncomfortable. 

But when I saw her—pale, glasses off, eyes half-open—I was shocked. She couldn’t even lift her head off the pillow. Her mind, however, remained sharp. My years of irritation with her meddling melted. I felt protective of her. She was suffering. She clutched a tissue that she brought up to her mouth when she coughed. This hack was making her miserable. An hour went by, and she continued to cough. I went to the nurse’s station. 

“My aunt is struggling so much with that cough, I said. “Isn’t there something you can give her?”

“Yes, she’s been anxious today, I’ll call the head nurse,” one of them said. 

Minutes later the head nurse appeared at the door of my aunt’s room with a hypodermic needle.

“This is the head nurse,” I told my aunt. “He’s going to give you something to help you with that bad cough.”

“Yah, it’s pretty bad,” she said weakly.

Within minutes of the injection, she was at ease and coughing less. The nurse remained at her bedside with me and I began telling him about my aunt — how she was like a parent to the many boys she cared for through her work at the Mission. I related how after she retired, she spoke at CRC churches across the country about the school. 

I got a detail wrong, and she corrected me. 

Even at death’s door she was still correcting people, but now it warmed my heart. 

More minutes went by. Her breathing became shallow. I took her hand with tears streaming down my cheeks.

“Is this it?” I asked the nurse.

“Yes,” he said.

Then we stared at her in astonishment. Her luminous blue eyes, only half-open minutes before, now opened wide. She looked up at the ceiling for several seconds. Her focus was laser sharp, upward. She seemed to go from almost dead to wide awake. We watched her, amazed.

“What do you see?” he asked.

But she couldn’t be distracted. 

Then her breathing faded to a complete stop. Her eyes returned to half-open, the life behind them now gone. Her body was as still as a stone. 

The head nurse left, but another nurse asked if I wanted to use the patient room phone to call relatives. “Yes,” I said, crying each time I informed family and friends of Aunt Julia’s death. 

My aunt was gone, and gone too were my feelings of irritation, replaced by love and sorrow over her passing. When I arrived at the hospital that evening, I had no idea my feelings toward my aunt would change over the course of such a short time. Seeing her so vulnerable changed my heart. I count being with her that night as one of the most profound moments of my life.  

I learned a lot about reconciliation at her bedside.