The Eldest Sibling

It seems impossible to me that my Aunt Evelyn Hushman has been gone now almost two years. She went to Heaven just a little over two months after my mother, her sister, Collene Spencer went to Heaven. I guess that isn’t really surprising to me, even if it might have been to some people. With Aunt Evelyn’s cancer diagnosis, and the fact that it was well advanced before it was diagnosed, her passing was something that was coming…like it or not. Well, my mom didn’t like that at all. In fact, Mom said to me, “I don’t want to be here without Evelyn.”

It wasn’t that any of her siblings passing was acceptable to her, because they weren’t. She missed her sister, Delores Johnson and her husband, Elmer Johnson. She missed her brother, Larry, one of her partners in crime, when they were kids. She missed her brother-in-law, Jack McDaniels, and of course, she missed her own husband, my dad, Allen Spencer. It was simply that Mom just couldn’t bear to lose another one of her loved ones. She had stayed and kept on living after my dad passed away, because she knew we needed her. But, mom didn’t want to go on without her sister Evelyn, with whom she had always been close. Mom knew that her children would be alright, because she and Dad had trained us in the way we should go. When Mom left, it was not because she was sick, but rather that she knew that it was time for her to go. It was time to join Dad, and she would see her sister again in Heaven…all of her siblings would join her someday. In reality, she was tired, just as Aunt Evelyn was tired…and, now they aren’t. They are revived, healthy, and strong.

Aunt Evelyn was the oldest of the Byer siblings, and the leader, I suppose. As often happens with the eldest sibling, they are the first to do many things, and then show the younger siblings the way. They are the standard the younger siblings want to live up to. The Byer siblings all married at relatively the same times and had children about the same times, but my parents and Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George, did things together a lot. They double dated, hung out together, and even bowled together. That made Mom and Aunt Evelyn very good sister friends. I think that the thought of her sister being in Heaven was something that made Mom yearn to go too. Now they are both there, and while I miss them both very much, I know that they are in my future now, and not my past. Today would have been Aunt Evelyn’s 88th birthday. Happy birthday in Heaven Aunt Evelyn. We love and miss you very much.