Reaching 100 years old…Still here but yet so far away!

Reaching 100 years old…Still here but yet so far away!

My sister and I call her Aunty Bud, for reasons unknown. She “celebrated” her 100^th birthday yesterday.

My father’s sister, Doris “Bud” Branson, was born on August 11, 1924, at a time when William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister of Canada, and Babe Ruth was the most famous athlete in the world. Aunty Bud was a product of the Roaring’20s. As a young woman, she was something of a late-blooming flapper, rebelling against her iron-willed mother, my grandmother Eva Hart McBryde.

Now Aunty Bud is officially a centenarian, achieving a “feat” for which she will no doubt receive a medal and a newspaper footnote accolade.

But the essence of Aunty Bud has departed. She belongs to this world in body alone.

Myself teetering on the edge of the eternal abyss, I find it strangely unnerving to have a living aunt, who, until recently, addressed me with a childhood diminutive as though I were seven years old.