My Aunt Barb

When I was three years old, my grandmother asked my mother to take me to see a child psychologist.  I had yet to speak, instead opting to communicate using primitive grunts. My mother, who has had an unwavering belief in my abilities since the moment I was born, steadfastly refused.  But she couldn’t just say no…she had to offer some kind of rationale. Thankfully, she had one piece of evidence that she could point to – I actually did talk, but only to one person, my Aunt Barb.

Over thirty years later one of my two-year old daughter’s teachers pulled me aside when I was picking her up after school one day.  “Maya keeps talking about someone named Baba or Barb, who is that?” My Aunt Barb had come to see Maya the week before and in classic Barb fashion had brought a gift specially designed for Maya.  It came in a box with her name painted on it and included a doll as well as hair ties that Barb had jazzed-up with sequins. Maya refuses to ever let anyone put her hair up…except for her Aunt Barb.  Maya had worn one of the hair ties to school and proceeded to tell all of her teachers and classmates – with tangible pride and emphasis – that she got it from her Aunt Barb.

I once heard someone explain a certain politician’s abilities as follows: “Everyone in the room thinks he is speaking to them specifically and personally.”  I would alter this phrase to describe the amazing qualities that make my Aunt Barb so special and unique: everyone who knows Barb feels like she loves them specifically and personally.

The modern-day saint Mr. Rogers recognized and honored two fundamental truths:

1. There is no more important experience in the world then feeling the strength and warmth of unconditional love.
2. Every individual person is special and unique.

In reality, though, these aren’t really two truths but one – unconditional love has to be felt on a personal level.  Sadly, too many people never experience either unconditional love or the recognition of their uniqueness and value. Thankfully, many others feel this through the warmth of their immediate family.  But my Aunt Barb has the special and unique gift – and the dogged determination to share that gift – to make so many people feel both unique and loved. And you really can’t have one without the other.  Love that isn’t unique to each person is not nearly as special or as deep as the kind of love built around someone’s specificity.

I don’t know how my Aunt Barb does it.  She is the kind of person that deserves to be emulated.  But I’ve tried emulating her from time to time, and it’s exhausting.  She must wake up every morning determined to make someone feel special that day.  And even when I tried to emulate her, I couldn’t figure out how to make such a wide array of people feel individually and personally loved.  My Aunt Barb has that effect on so many people – her immediate family, her sisters, her nieces and nephews, her neighbors, her friends, her grandchildren, random neighborhood children she quasi-adopts, etc.  She can direct a Christmas nativity play during our family Christmas party and somehow each one of twenty different nieces and nephews would feel that their role was the most important role in the production and that only they were able to play that specific role.  My Aunt Barb has a unique ability to look into each person and see what drives their passion and makes them special, and then celebrate that.  

I love Notre Dame.  And I love business and finance.  These passions and identities are core to who I am.  I don’t think my Aunt Barb has a notable affinity for either (certainly not the second).  But nonetheless every now and then I would get these special gifts from her that celebrated these passions – an antique postcard from Notre Dame or a book on an old financier.  

Often times these gifts were curated from her basement library of artifacts, affectionately dubbed “the SmithSHOWNian” (referencing her last name, Shown).  Her family tries to keep her from adding to the collection, and I have the texts to prove it [if you can’t tell, my Uncle Don didn’t originally realize Aunt Barb was included on the text; this still makes me laugh out loud]:

But the SmithSHOWNian is not the act of a hoarder.  Quite the opposite. My Aunt Barb collects these things in order to gift them out.  It’s like her canvas. She stands ready and prepared to descend into her basement and reappear with a gift perfectly suited for the specific person at the specific moment, to make them feel both special and loved.  (Often times, with an additional flare added by her amazing artistic abilities.)

I come from a family of fixers.  Every time something goes wrong in life, my father and brother leap into action.  It’s hard to understand the pain and suffering that can occur in life, and my family’s reaction is to treat it like a computer bug that needs fixed.  It’s a noble reaction resulting from an attempt to rationalize something that can’t be rationalized. But it’s probably the wrong reaction in many circumstances.

Often times we can’t fix suffering.  As a result, most of us try to avoid thinking about it.  We pretend like it isn’t there. What should we do? The only thing really left is to suffer alongside those you love.  To be empathetic. When someone suffers with you, when someone really works to understand and feel what you are going through, it completely changes the face of suffering.  I think one of the worst parts of suffering is the loneliness – “Why do I have to go through this?”  But when someone special like my Aunt Barb suffers with you, the suffering becomes so much more bearable.  Few people are able and willing to take on this role.

I can think of no higher calling than to be a person of empathy.  And man is my Aunt Barb empathetic. I think that’s why she is so political and raised political kids – she cares so deeply for others.  But it was my own personal experience of this empathy – and the Smithshownian – that really opened my eyes to it.

I love Notre Dame and finance, but my truest, deepest passion was to be a father.  And not just a father, but a father to daughters, like my mom’s Dad. I never actually talked about this.  But somehow my Aunt Barb just knew, because she knew me.  

Unfortunately, my wife and I were confronted with fertility challenges.  Although these kinds of challenges aren’t uncommon, they are rarely discussed in the open.  It feels almost taboo to talk about it. So my wife and I didn’t talk about it outside of our immediate family.  Before personally experiencing infertility, I would have had no idea what it was like to suffer through these difficulties.  After two years of trying, we still had no baby and we were starting to wrestle with the idea that we might not ever have our own children.  It was devastating.

I never talked to my Aunt Barb about this, but she knew.  I’m sure my Mom mentioned it to her – they talk about everything – but on another level I think she just knew.  She knew that I wanted to be a dad more than anything and she knew how hard it was for me to face the prospect of it not happening.

At Barb’s youngest son’s wedding reception, my wife and I could share some wonderful news – we were expecting a baby girl that coming May!  Miraculously we had gotten pregnant after two years of trying. Telling my mom’s family was one of the real joys of the entire pre-birth experience.  We will never forget Barb’s oldest daughter Stacy crying with sincere joy (empathy runs in the family).  

The next day we were at a family gathering at Barb’s house.  If you have a big family you might be able to relate, but a Ganey family gathering is a weird mixture of amazing and exhausting.  It’s like a grueling, difficult hike through a national park – an amazing experience, but one you need a few months to recover from.  Imagine a lot of love but also loud, domineering women trying to out-mother each other (with a playing field consisting of twenty-plus kids and grandkids).  My Aunt Barb is the best host, with fun and original activities each party that bring the family together in new and unique ways. She hasn’t slowed down much even though she’s been racked with pain the past several years.  She puts on a brave face and hosts her heart out. I can only imagine how exhausted she is after these parties, and the fact that my Aunt Barb has faced so much pain during her retirement is like a star athlete blowing out his knee in his prime – my Aunt Barb was built to be a Grandma and Great Aunt.  It was her time to shine. But amazingly, she hasn’t let the fact that she can barely walk slow her down too much.

Anyway, we were at my Aunt Barb’s for a Ganey get together, just one day removed from her son’s reception and the news of our pregnancy.  We were having a great time and my Aunt Barb was ultra-busy playing host despite her pain and exhaustion. When it was time for us to leave, my wife and I thanked her and said goodbye to everyone.  When we got to my car parked down on the road I noticed something sitting on my windshield. It was a children’s book:

Of course it wasn’t just any children’s book.  It was a special book that my Aunt Barb had curated from the SmithSHOWNian.  It was a book that she had surely been keeping just to give to me at the right moment.  Somehow she had slipped out during the party and left it on our car. I opened the book to the first page and read:

“How does sleep come?” Jacob asked his Mama as he climbed into bed. Jacob’s Mama tucked the covers all around Jacob just so, and then she told him. “Sleep comes quietly. Like a snowfall that blankets a meadow on a dark starry night, and lays down a soft white canvas for rabbits to leave footprints.”

Then I flipped back to the inside cover, where I found the following note from my Aunt Barb:

My Aunt Barb had suffered with me the entire time I waited to be a father, and now that the day was finally about to arrive, she was as excited as I was.  She’d had this book waiting to give it to me in celebration. I felt loved, special and unique in a way that only my Aunt Barb can make me feel. To this day, I can’t read this book to my daughter without choking up.  Every time I see those words I remember the stress and pain that came with waiting to become pregnant and then the love and warmth that we felt from our family, and from my Aunt Barb. There are few people in this world who have the gift to make someone else feel so uniquely loved, and fewer still who have the determination to fully realize that gift.  

At his friend Charlie Munger’s 95^th birthday party recently, Warren Buffett offered the following toast:

Over these 60 years, Charlie has made me far richer than I would have been.  He’s made me far smarter than I would have been. But the most important thing he did for me was not make me richer or smarter.  It was to make me a better person. Look around in your own life. How many people can you say that about? That they made you become ‘a better person’ than you otherwise would have been?  I say most of us can’t fill one hand with the number of people who have made us a better person. Yet what could be better to do than help others become better people?

So many things make my Aunt Barb special.  But most of all is the fact that so many people can point to her and say “Barb made me a better person.”

My Aunt Barb is battling stage 4 cancer.  It’s absolutely heartbreaking. Of course this hasn’t stopped her from being Aunt Barb.  On Halloween I opened the front door to retrieve a package and found a bag hanging from our front door-knob.  Inside was a small pumpkin specially painted for my daughter. Maya knew right away where it came from – “Aunt Barb!”  This was the week before Barb’s diagnosis when she was racked with pain and not eating. One week later when we were saying our nightly prayers and we all recite what we are thankful for, Maya said “Aunt Barb and Uncle Don.”  Even now, Barb is on Facebook everyday sending people messages of love and encouragement.

This sounds terrible, because dying is always sad and difficult no matter the situation, but nonetheless my brother put his finger on it – “It just sucks so much because Barb is just so special.”  You may or may not have noticed, but throughout this reflection I’ve written “my” in front of “Aunt Barb.” That wasn’t planned, that’s just how it came out. I never say “Aunt Barb.” I always say “my Aunt Barb.”  Because that’s how I feel – she’s mine, unique to me.  And the beautiful thing is that is how everyone feels about Barb.  She is their’s, special and unique to them. What greater gift is there than that?

By Jacob Benedict, December 12, 2019