My aunt, Lillian Sly, was a woman without the borders of convention. In 1952, when she was twelve years old, she announced to her family and friends--including the minister at the First Presbyterian Church--that she would no longer answer to her given name, Lillian. If those who knew her would not call her "Lil" then she could not be held responsible to answer them. Oh, at first, her mother and father thought little of it, perhaps even found it a bit endearing. However, her older sister, Margaret, had a somewhat sordid theory. She believed, or at least she told everyone, that Lillian had slipped from the doctor's grasp and onto the floor during birth and that was the true malady from which her sister suffered. Although it was not true, Margaret felt relieved when her friends shined sympathy rather than disgust upon her for having such an odd and boisterous sister. Well, the family spent weeks humoring my aunt. Then it turned into an irritating attempt to remember what to call her and ended with an exasperating outburst on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon.

"Lillian," my grandmother bellowed, "I am your mother and I will not call you by any name other than your full name, which is a beautiful name; one that I picked out, although your father wanted to name you Ruth. Calling you Lil makes me think you should be wearing a feather boa and belting out bar songs in a saloon and I will not let that thought keep me awake every night for the rest of my life. There is no Lil, my child, only 'Lillian,' and you are her."

Well, my aunt promptly ignored my grandmother and, consequently, spent the next six nights during dinner in her room. My grandfather, the voice of reason, gently spoke to his wife at the end of a very long and disturbing week of evening meals.

"Mary, honey, we cannot continue to keep the child from dinner, can we? Don't you think we need to be concerned about starvation at some point? She looks a little skinnier to me and . . ."

So it was, that Lil came to dinner the next night. And for every day and night thereafter, she would be known, and called, Lil Sly.

Aunt Lil was a square girl who would grow up to be a big, strong, and agile woman. She wore what she wanted, despite the cajoling of her mother and embarrassment of her sister, and she drank heavily at any early age. In high school, her friends were college women and people with jobs in odd places. Her best friend, incidentally mistaken as her boyfriend for years, was Simon, a lanky mortician with a persistent rash on the bridge of his nose from thick black glasses. They would talk for hours about mathematics or Europe while playing chess at the dining room table.

Lil could make me hysterical when I was a girl by imitating my mother; nose in the air with a look that always suggested there was dogshit somewhere within stepping distance of her shoe. She was a loyal friend and companion, a smart and worthy opponent, and a woman steeped in esteem, although God only knows why. It is like that sometimes. Out of an ordinary seed, some act of mystification will collide with a natural kind of fate to form something precious yet, unbreakable. She had no looks to speak of and could not have cared less what others thought of her. She never raised her voice that I can remember and was more honest than any other living soul. That is why it was no surprise when the nineteen year old Lil decided to tell her family what it was that she had discovered about herself in 1959.

It was on a Friday in May and, just like every other day, Lil had walked home from her factory job at the Staley plant. Her heart, however, was weary on this particular afternoon from trying to get out of her chest and onto her sleeve. Like sleeping on the unused side of a well-worn bed, she couldn't quite get comfortable in the covers of her skin and finally she knew why. For years, she had known that she was not like other women and it had taken her the better part of that time to figure it out. Despite her mother's pleadings, she had never had a boyfriend and had never wanted one. That part was simple enough and she rarely thought about her future and whether or not she would be lonely. Still, Lil yearned for a life that was not yet defined and she had no words for it, at least until that Friday.

Earlier on that day, Lil sat in the break room drinking the remnants of a cup of coffee she had nursed for most of the morning. The hangover and late night she had was making it hard for her to give a damn one way or another about much of anything. Co-workers, Toni and Lana, walked in the door, followed by a few of the other women coming in for morning break as well. Whether it was fate or God or stars colliding is still a mystery but, in the shortest blink of an eye, Lil glanced up in time to see her future in the shape of one Patsy McGuire. Now, that may sound like a dime store novel but most of life, when told properly, has a lot of dime store qualities to it so bear with me.

Patsy was a gum-chewing, lipstick-laced beauty with an easy gait that caused most people to stop and take notice. She wore bright scarves and tight sweaters with men's pants and red fingernail polish. Rumor had it that she was a war-bride-turned-widow but the truth of the matter was that Patsy had never been married and, believe me, it wasn't in her plans. Lil felt her stomach stir and, for a moment, considered that it might've been last night's highballs. But, as she watched Patsy saunter across the room and throw a knowing glance right back at her, she knew it wasn't the booze at all. Sometimes, when some thing so small occurs, you might wonder if your life would've come out the same if that moment--that event--had not happened. Thankfully, you never know the answers to such questions.

The full feeling of a heart finally set into motion is an enlightening experience. Lil stared at Patsy and every other woman in the room until she came to understand what she had somehow always known. Life had finally righted itself for my aunt and now she had to go about making that life, not with the man of her mother's dreams, but with the woman of her own.

First, however, she had to set the record straight.

When Lil walked in the front door of her childhood home that afternoon, she bellowed for anyone who could hear within a city block. "I need a family meeting after dinner." Then she picked up the phone and called Simon first, and then my mother, Margaret, telling them that she had an announcement and wanted them to come over right after dinner. My mother had married my father nine months before and was now very pregnant with yours truly, due any day, but she agreed to be there at six-thirty. After all, it wasn't every day that Lillian Sly was going to speak to her family and hardly any of them could contain their curiosity. Precisely on the half-hour, everyone gathered with their coffee in the living room and my Aunt Lil delivered this speech.

"It's a simple thing I am about to tell you and you may not understand it. I have come to know something about myself that you should all know as well so you will never have to wonder about me. I do not like men--no offense, Simon--at least, in the ways that most women do but I have discovered that I do like women--in that way. Therefore, I will not be looking for a husband, no small surprise there, but will choose a mate that pleases me from my own sex. There is no one in particular that I am ready to discuss with you at present but, now that I know my true nature, I would expect that I will find my . . . woman . . . in the near future." Lil sat down after speaking what was on her mind and, to this day, my mother still swears that you could hear a hummingbird suckling two houses down.

It is safe to say after that fateful day, the discussions about Lil went on for years but she was not usually in the room at the time. Oh, there was the initial uprising of drama but that's the dime store stuff I spoke of earlier. Mostly, our family was in shock to the point of being stupefied and by the time they were thawed, Lil was in earnest pursuit of Patsy.

Besides, someone actually living an honest life in the Sly household was a novelty and there was much to learn from it. I would venture to guess that Aunt Lil's frank revelation brought a whole new closeness to my nuclear family and, if they would've had the presence of mind to say it, might've thanked her for the fodder. As it was, they just holed up in their houses at the end of the day and whispered aloud what they were truly thinking.

"How do they . . . ?" "Where does she . . . ?" "Can you imagine . . . ?"

But how can anyone truly imagine another person's unbridled joy? And, oh, how joyous they were. Eighteen years, almost to the day, it was that Lil and Patsy were together till 1977 when another act of fate split the pair like ripened halves of a Christmas walnut. It was a day when the particulars of an event would bring my Aunt Lil into a moment of pain that would last her lifetime.

Early on a Saturday when they were supposed to go to breakfast with my mother and father, Patsy woke up before sunrise, complaining of stomach pains. She got up to find Tums and Aunt Lil rolled over to sleep. Two hours later, at six o'clock, Lil found Patsy dead on the bathroom floor from a massive heart attack. She was forty-three years old.

Now, when the heart resigns itself to sorrow, its veins and arteries are filled with a dense and lugubrious grief that changes the very sound of its beating. It is that solemn change in the beating of life that keeps you in mourning long after someone is dead. As you might've guessed, this thick-blooded presence became my Aunt Lil. She walked the streets at night and stood knee-deep in the lake on the west end of town; she sat in the last row of any place she went and did not return phone calls to anyone.

She listened for Patsy and forgot to eat; she drank until she fell asleep sitting at the kitchen table and didn't shower before going to work. She lived without being present until the darkness passed and she finally stopped struggling to see Patsy in everything around her. Life was different but it slowly began to crawl back into its rightful speed. Aunt Lil grew past Patsy's passing but not her memory. She put away her intimacies, trading them for a careful and thorough stance in my eighteen year old life; a life that was, well, that's the next part of the story.

There are times when the first thing that happens is the last thing you expect. Then there are other times when the things you thought could never happen, do. Both of these truisms applied to my parents, Douglas and Margaret Atwood, or Dusty and Mitts, as they affectionately referred to each other. In 1958, the first time these two recent college graduates had sex--after marriage, of course--they got pregnant with me. Then in the late 70s, when all of my friends were getting married, I sat down with Dusty and Mitts to inform them that I was a lesbian. My mother commented that she did not know how such a thing could happen again in one family and wondered if it was in our genes or the result of some vitamin that she had taken while pregnant.

My father asked me to go fishing.

"Uh, Dad, I said, I'm a lessssbiiiiiaannnn. I like women, not fish."

Thankfully, that was the end of that discussion. After the initial quaking wore off, my family settled into a generic acceptance that there were two lesbians in the family; one at full gallop and the other at the starting gate. My grandmother was sure that having Aunt Lil as one of my role models had somehow affected my ability to be straight but I knew the truth.

I knew back in 1971, when I was twelve years old, that the sound and feel of women would define me and draw me into a place of sensual refuge. The alternative was just too awkward and unnatural to consider. My parents named me Shirley Delores Atwood after the actress Shirley Temple but, like Aunt Lil, I would forever be called Leedee because anything else would, well, just be too awkward and unnatural to consider.

People call me a "beauty," like my mother, and I could sense her uneasiness with the close resemblance ever since she found out that I was girl-crazy. It doesn't fit to her that a beautiful woman, especially one who looks like her, would only have eyes for another woman.

Me, on the other hand, I live for that.

I was--and am--an admittedly hopeless romantic. Back then, I was frequently in love again for the last time, and my Aunt Lil was always there with a word of encouragement when I needed it. As far back as my memory stretches, she and Patsy were my mentors, role models and surrogate parents. After I had identified myself as a lesbian and Patsy had died, Lil and I became even closer. I knew that I somehow reminded Lil of Patsy in those first fresh days of grief and, while it might have been a painful awareness for her, she ultimately took comfort in that fact. She looked so intently at me sometimes, like she was catching a glimpse of a familiar ghost, and then she'd fall into a distant stare, shaking it off after a moment or so. Lil never told me what she was thinking at those times. I guess I mostly believed that Patsy was sending her grief-stricken lover a message that there is memory and connection after death, that she is never far away, and that life is worth living because of those very facts. After all, most of the things that we truly know we learned from those who are already gone.

As the grief of Patsy spread through me, I came face-to-face with greatest loss of my young life, my apparent inability to love. Never truly loving is a cruel and square thing. It is hard-edged and razor sharp. Even thinking of it caused me to stumble inward without direction and lose balance. My greatest fear is that I would never know the kind of love that I saw between my aunts and how I ached to have the kind of love that they had experienced. I wanted someone to caress my fingers and bring me spring flowers for no reason at all; someone I would long for until she filled the void that no one else could touch. It seemed, however, that I was just slightly off the mark when it came to finding a mate, especially after Patsy died. The women that I had chosen were strong enough--beautiful in ways that I liked--but when it came right down to it, each one of them had that "something" about her, something that I could not put my finger on, that did not make for a lasting relationship. Then again, maybe it was not the women I had chosen at all. Maybe it was me who placed each relationship under a microscope until I could label it "broken" and shelve it with the rest of the experiments.

It's a sure-fire way to stay away from people if you think about it.

Anyhow, ten years and three broken relationships later, I was twenty-nine years old and sure that I was putting out signals of desperation or some other dysfunction but Lil didn't believe that was the case.

"You're just not ready to see it yet, Leedee."

She told me this one rainy afternoon while we were having a late lunch at Swannies' bar beside the plant where Lil worked.

"What 'it,' Lil?" I asked.

"Ah, well now, there's the question, isn't it, Doll?"

"Okay, what's the answer?"

Lil thought for a good long while before she finally spoke.

"Sandra Dee's lips."

Pause.

"What?"

"Sandra Dee's lips."

Well, she had said it again and it made no more sense to me than the first time that she said it.

"I don't real . . ."

"I had looked at Patsy for months before I truly noticed her, you know? And, when I finally did really see her, the first thing that I noticed was that she had lips like Sandra Dee. Now I can't tell you why that affected me the way it did but I can tell you that, once I saw her lips, all I thought about was kissing her. After that, the rest was easy."

Easy? We obviously didn't know the same women. Just as I was about to speak, Lil raised her hand to stop me.

"Just hang on, Leedee, and see if you can make sense of this. I don't mean that the relationship was easy. Lord knows, in eighteen years, Patsy and I had our ups and downs. But even when things were tough, we managed. That's because we had found something in each other when we first met that was unlike anything else we could've found in anyone else. We hung on to what we'd found, knowing that it could never be replaced. That's what kept us--or any other couple for that matter--together. Take your Mom and Dad, for instance. Who but Dusty could put up with Mitts, right? When you or I look at your mom, we see a prissy woman with a wide board up her butt but your dad? He sees a young and winsome prom queen with gorgeous eyes. When he remembers what he loves about her, then he remembers to honor her and makes room for her odd and quirky ways. Now, there's a love that lasts, Leedee; an unconditional love that has a long memory about the best of who we are. I got to know the woman behind the Sandra Dee lips and, as a result, fell in love with so much more."

As my aunt spoke, I remembered the number of times I had seen my father softly touch the tiny lines beside my mother's eyes with his forefingers and whisper, "Beautiful," as he passed her in the kitchen or hallway. I felt relieved and embarrassed about realizing the intimacies that I had witnessed for years and wanted to say so but Lil began to hone in on what her point truly was--me.

"I've watched you move in and out of relationships with some pretty fine women, Honey, but never one that you truly saw for who she was. It always looked as if you were working so hard at having the Ôrelationship' that you forgot that you were supposed to be loving somebody. Before you choose another woman, you may want to know her well enough to see what it is that attracts you. Be ready to accept her as she is, not how you want her to be. That way, when things are tough, you will think the best of her by remembering what you love about her. The relationship will take care of itself."

She was right, of course.

Born a romantic, I also knew that I was less-than-stellar in the romance department; always getting hung up on the details without truly enjoying the ride. But what if I stopped weighing and measuring every last ounce of each relationship? Wouldn't I have to be vulnerable without knowing that things were going to work out? That's like trusting God or somebody to make sure that the "right" thing is happening to me.

And why in the world would I do that?

Lil read my mind as I was sorting through my possible changes and simply said, "You can't control anything, Leedee. You can only busy yourself thinking that you can. Love somebody, child. Find somebody who makes you forget that you ever wanted any control. That's the woman with Sandra Dee' lips."

Right again.

"What if she dies?" I blurted.

If this question startled Lil, she never let on. She was quiet for a long time before looking me squarely in the eyes. When she spoke, it was quiet and sure.

"We all die, Leedee, that's a fact. Not one of us will take one more breath than God intended. It's what we do while we are here that makes the difference. And it's how we love those we love that matters. The rest is just icing on the cake."

My aunt's words hung with me for the better part of a week as I weighed and examined my carefully measured life. Lil had seemed awfully sure about what I needed but I felt mostly confused and preoccupied which is about how I was one Tuesday afternoon, standing in an uncommonly long line at the corner drug. Holding an armful of necessities, I shuffled through the line as if I were in a concentration camp, staring at the tabloid headlines for signs of my life.

"Excuse me?" I heard a voice surface into my thoughts and furrowed my brow with agitation. Mustering my best intimidation, I slowly turned to level my gaze at the intruder and let her know that I had placed her at end of my "I don't give a shit" list.

You may have guessed by now that that is not what happened at all.

She was the kind of drop-dead gorgeous that only a true lesbian can understand; arms meant to hold someone and enough legs to wrap a body around with a smile that answered every question I had. She was unflappable and my most feeble attempt to give her the "glare" was met with the sweetest dimpled smirk I had ever encountered.

"I . . . uh . . . well, you shou . . . er . . . can I . . . hmmm . . ."

I seemed to have lost my ability to speak and she, standing there grinning, was quite content to let me flounder. That is a trait that I can honestly say she still has to this day, twenty-six years later.

Now, sometimes, the particulars about a story aren't always important; it's more the outcome that's likely to stand out. I could tell you about our first kiss or give you the details of our lengthy and sometimes turbulent courtship. I could spin you a yarn about our many fights or fill you with information about how Mitts and Dusty loved Kit as their own. All of it, however, would pale in comparison to telling you what we created and accomplished in our life together; that together we somehow became lovely and invincible; we defied the laws of emotional gravity and wound up asleep in our own well-worn bed.

From the moment that I knew Kit, I never lost sight of my aunt Lil's words to love and cherish what I loved about her. Years later, watching her in the garden or seeing her doze in her favorite chair, I am struck by her profile, her hands, and the comforting memory of her breath in my hair. My "Sandra Dee lips" are the soft lines around her ever-twinkling eyes and the softness of her cheek. Those particulars of hers have been my mainstay for all these many years, I am a better woman for it, and I owe that bit of insight and wisdom to my aunt Lil.

Just like any other ending that catches people somewhere between the head and heart, this one is just what you'd expect.

Six months ago, Lil called Kit and me to come to dinner at her home. It was the middle of the week and, as anyone from around here knows, there must be something brewing if it's a "weekday" meal you've been invited to.

After dinner, Lil sat in her rocking chair and, with a distant light in her eyes, she told us that it was almost time for her to become reacquainted with Patsy. The wistful happiness on her face was undeniable as she explained the diagnosis and just how much time she might have left. When she finished speaking, she pulled me into her arms--a gesture that she had become famous for--and whispered into my ear as she held me ever so close.

"I am not worried about you, Leedee, and I don't want you to worry about me either, ok? I am going exactly where I want to go, you understand? And when I do, I promise to take a small piece of your heart with me to share with Patsy until you join us in a hundred years or so."

My tears spilled onto Lil's shirt sleeve as I hugged her tight around the neck.

"How do I do this, Lil? Let you go, I mean? I'll be so scared without you and who will keep me alive and strong?" Lil shook loose from me enough to hold my face in between her big, warm hands.

"Listen to me, Doll, it's you that's kept me alive and strong for so long. If not for you, I would've ended my life years ago from sheer grief alone. You have never stood in my shadow, girl. You blazed your own trail. I am just the woman who helped you find the path. I promise, you'll be fine."

Well, it was just two Saturdays ago that I sat by Lil's bed, reading one of her favorite stories to her. As I paused to turn a page, I glanced toward the now-small figure propped up between the pillows and instinctively took her hand in mine. Lil stared straight into my eyes and whispered, "I wish you could see her, Leedee. She's still got those lips . . ."

After those words, she barely uttered a sound as she slipped into the next world where Patsy, my grandparents, and my father were waiting to greet her. The room was strangely still and I realized that my life would sound forever different now that Lillian Sly had left it.

And the same is true about a good story as well. Once it's spoken, it permanently alters the way we listen to the next thing we hear or maybe it changes the way we love. However we are affected, it is in the telling of such things that will make us who we are for all to see. And, if we're lucky, it may also make someone fall in love with the shape of our lips or cause us to remember a beloved aunt who taught us the meaning of life.

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