My Beloved Aunt

September 26, 2011 by Simran.C

This is a true story: When my aunt passed away we where all devastated from the loss, she was a very integral part of our family, kind of like an anchor that kept our ship (family) docked to one another. She died very suddenly due to liver cancer. After her death my family had 3 beautiful portraits of her commissioned, we kept one in our home, gave another to my younger aunt and sent the third to one of my uncles. A year after her death one of my distant cousins shows up at our house with one of the portraits we commissioned, the picture was in terrible shape. The edges were water damaged, torn and dirty.

My cousin who brought the picture, found it on the outskirts of another city. He was traveling home from a new job site, when he drove by a board; he thought he noticed something strange. The sign had a picture leaning on the bottom of it, for some reason he felt the urge to go back and take a look at it again. When he turned the car around and drove back, he was shocked to see it was my aunt's portrait. He had a very strong bond, with my aunt, she loved to tease him about how he was getting old and that he was never going to find a wife if he didn't settle down soon.

When he returned the photo, my family phoned both my younger aunt and my uncle. My uncle still had his portrait, but my younger aunt said that theirs went missing. When we asked her what she meant by "missing", she confessed that she had visited a local psychic who told her that someone who had recently passed was out to bring misfortune and that any items you have connecting to the deceased should be discarded. My younger aunt’s family took the portrait and threw it into a large river that flowed near there home.

They threw the picture away 7 months after my aunt passed away, my cousin found it a year later. When we learned that my younger aunt tossed the picture away, we became very angry with her for even thinking that my deceased aunt would try to harm her family. All in all, we consider it a miracle that my cousin was the one who recovered the photo hundreds of miles away. I have no idea the journey that portrait must have undergone, or who or what propped it up on that lone board but one thing is for certain. I now believe that my aunt is still looking after us and that death could not keep her from coming home to us.