I Watched Hatred Die

          Aunt Caroline. There were two things that she hated more than anything else in the world. Asians, and Blacks, in that order. It wasn’t really her fault either. She had grown up in a world that was vastly different from the one that we know today, and her opinions were impenetrably ingrained into her psyche.

          She was a child of the South during the Great Depression, the heiress to an ancient, run down, collapsing plantation that couldn’t make enough money to sustain itself. The culture that she grew up in was one of generations of bitter loss and hardship. Had the South won, she would always say, we would all be rich right now. She wasn’t lying. The old fields had grown over and eventually turned back into forest, but if you could imagine the property with cotton fields as far as the eye could see, you would realize the power and status that her grandparent’s generation held. And she blamed her loss, as did many of her generation, on “that nigger lovin’ Lincoln.”

          As deep as that hatred goes, it was hard for me to understand how or even why she would hate Asians more. But once I took a look at her old picture album, and listened to her story, I knew. She had lost her older brother to the Japanese in World War II, her husband to the Koreans, and her eldest son to the Vietnamese. I had never expected to sympathize with her hatred, I didn’t even want to, but if anyone had a good reason, I reckon it must have been her.

          Asians and Blacks, in that order. I watched as her Asian nurse tried to give her medicine. It really was a valiant attempt, but nothing came of it and she finally gave up, sending in the doctor to do it instead. That might have worked. In the old south doctors were some of the most important people in town. Just below god and the local preacher. She would have listened to a doctor when he told her to take her medicine. She would have, but her doctor was a black man.

          I watched helplessly as the poor guy was hit in the head with the full bedpan of a ninety year old woman screaming every racist name you could think of. Once he left we sat there in silence. Eventually she asked me to tell her about my fiancé. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was engaged to a Korean woman, so I said that she was a nice girl and left it at that. Lord knows what she might have thrown at me if I had told her. That was equivalent to treason in her eyes. To her, I was mixing the family blood with sub-human mongrels.

          I tried to turn the conversation away from my marital life, and we wound up talking about the reason why she was in here in the first place. She had seven cancerous tumors, a hole in her heart, and she had been bleeding internally from her back surgery three months ago. Death was fighting an epic battle to take her down, and her stubborn resolve knew no bounds. She couldn’t die yet, she would say, she still had too many things to take care of. She had to make sure that the family blood stayed strong. She had to make sure that my brothers and I all married nice southern girls whose families were of the old aristocracy. She was completely unaware that the aristocracy is non-existent these days.

          It wasn't too much longer until the doctor returned with several nurses and attempted to sedate her. She gave a fight that would make Robert Lee proud when they tried to hold her down, and I watched closely as I saw the end coming. They couldn’t sedate her. She would give the last of her strength to fight them off, and as she fell limply on the hospital bed I realized that I had just watched the last of the southern aristocracy die.

          They made me leave the room then, and I went outside to have a cigarette. I found my fiancé and the rest of my family already halfway finished with their own smokes, and I had no choice but to break the news. We all stood there quietly in remembrance, and I remember how strange that felt. The most hateful person on the planet had just left this world for good. We all knew that it would make the world a better place and yet we cried.

          It was sad to watch hatred die. It was sad because a way of life, no matter how wrong, had just ceased to exist. And it was sad because she never realized that the world had moved on without her.