I remember where I was the moment my brother called. It was a Saturday night, and I was in the shower. My dad knocked politely on the door before he spoke loudly over the sound of the running water. “Andy! Just! Called!” he said, each word punctuated with excitement. I was 17 years old, so naturally, I dramatically gasped. “Don’t tell me yet! I do NOT want to be in the shower when this happens!” I shouted back at him as I urgently tried to rinse the Pantene out of my hair and find out whether I was a first-time aunt to a new niece or a new nephew.
Evelyn was her name, born 11/12/2011 while her teenage Aunt Grace was in the shower. Next month, Evelyn turns 10. In the decade since, I’ve become an aunt to 5 more children: James, Peter, Alec, J, and Schenley. I often get asked if being an aunt makes me want to be a mom. My answer, to most people’s polite shock, is not yes.
While becoming a mom can often feel like the ultimate good thing a woman can do, I’ve had the privilege of realizing that being an aunt has been and already is a very good thing in of itself. I don’t view aunthood as “mom-training,” AKA, a preparatory experience to get ready for the “real thing.” To be clear, being an aunt is not the same thing as being a parent, but that’s the gift and the grace of it. My primary role as an aunt is to help my nieces and nephews enjoy our time together, whether we’re getting ice cream cones or playing on the swings or going for a walk. When I’m with them, it does not feel like I’m passing time or training up; it feels like I’m learning what “the good life” really looks like.
I had no choice in becoming an aunt — it simply happened (while I was getting a shower). But it has been something that has impacted me more than many of the choices I thought would matter the most in life. It has been an experience full of real love and real lessons. It’s also been an opportunity to understand the grace involved in raising and being a part of a family. And ultimately, being an aunt these last 10 years has helped me understand what “the good life” is made of — a truth that changes everything.
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In his book Strong and Weak, Andy Crouch shares the story of his niece, Angela. Angela was born with Trisomy 13, a rare condition that many children die from before their birth, and half of those who are born alive die from within the first week. Crouch poses the question: can Angela, with her condition which doctors label as “incompatible with life,” flourish? In our modern society’s understanding of flourishing, Angela is not living “the good life.” But Crouch says that we are asking the wrong questions, writing this: “The question is not whether Angela alone is flourishing or not — the question is whether her presence in our midst leads to flourishing together.” Crouch concludes Strong and Weak by writing this about his niece:
In a centrifugal world where everything and everyone fleas the demands of love, Angela was a center of gravity, drawing us back to one another and to true life — the life that really is life, that life that money cannot buy: the life of making flourishing possible, at great cost and with great tears. She could never know it, but Angela’s whole life was only possible because of an ever-widening web of extraordinary acts of love and sacrifice, authority and vulnerability.
Crouch’s stories about his niece and how he grappled with questions about Angela’s life mirrors my own family’s story and questions. In February 2019, my nephew, J, was born — the child of my second brother and his wife. J was born with Trisomy 18, which, like Trisomy 13, is another rare condition with an extremely low survival rate. Unlike Angela, J only lived a few hours. In the weeks and months after J’s passing, a passage from Gilead kept running through my mind. An aging John Ames writes to this young son: “It’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.”
While the J’s short life was not what many might call good, J’s birth, his life, his existence is and was good, full of value and meaning. Though I would never have chosen for J to be born with Trisomy 18, his “presence in our midst,” though short, did lead to our flourishing together. I felt this most acutely in the hospital room the morning of his passing. Gathered in that room with my parents, three older brothers, two sisters-in-law, and my nephew, Alec, the mere existence of each member of my family seemed to me to be the most remarkable thing. I felt such love for my family that day, and not because we were necessarily having a good time together, but because it was good that we even could be together. Simply, I experienced the grace of having a role as a sister, daughter, and aunt in an “ever-widening web of extraordinary acts of love.”
The idea that we love because God first loved us is familiar to so many Christians’ ears, but may we never become blind to it, too. May we look around the crowded room where we are gathered and realize that the love that exists there is “the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.” To be able to be an aunt, witness my brother’s children’s baptisms, burp their babies, and come alongside them in grief is only possible because of the ultimate act of love and sacrifice — Jesus’s death on the cross. “This is real love,” 1 John 4: 10-12 says, “Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.”
This is real love. To experience this kind of love, I’ve learned, is what it means to live “the good life.” The good life doesn’t start when my niece or nephews tell me that I’m a good aunt, or I finally succeed at not putting a diaper on backwards, or when I become a mom. The good life cannot be bought with money or accomplishments, with a slew of life experiences that others will approve of and call good. No, the good life is here — now — because God’s real love is already here.
My invitation to a deeper understanding of what a good life is began with by a phone call that came while I was naked in the shower. “It’s a girl!” my dad said. I was unprepared for what would happen in the decade to follow, years in which my niece would grow up and I would, too. They were ten years of dozens of birthday parties and four baptisms and three burials. We spent them in hospital rooms and church pews and around the dinner table. We each had a role to play as aunts and uncles, moms and dads, doctors and pastors, college graduates and kindergarteners. And through it all, we were witnesses of what it means to be part of an ever-widening web of extraordinary acts of real love.
In these ten years of great joy and great sorrow, Christ’s love has carried us through. But Christ’s love was with us even before that, shining brightly, showing us the way to the good life. Before the phone call that made me an aunt, before J’s diagnosis, before any of us even existed, he was there.
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