My 87-year-old great-aunt is an amazing woman.  

Her name is Patty Looman and, in Appalachian traditional music circles, she's famous. She lives in West Virginia. We usually see her two or three times a year, most often at Thanksgiving and in June at PattyFest.

PattyFest is a day-long music festival in Aunt Patty's honor at a 4-H camp outside Morgantown. The event promotes traditional Appalachian arts and culture. Her legions of students and admirers started the festival 10 years ago in recognition of Aunt Patty's work as a dulcimer performer, teacher and authority on traditional music.

The kids love the wading creek and rustic cabins at Camp Muffly, as well as the sassafras tea and ammonia cookies. In passing they also dig the musicians of all ages and levels jamming out on dulcimers, auto-harps, fiddles, guitars and the odd jug or musical saw.

Unfortunately, this may have been the last PattyFest.

Leaving aside issues of attendance and fundraising, Aunt Patty hasn't performed at PattyFest now for the past four or five years. She's taken some bad falls and broken her wrists and hips. She had a stroke, or something like it, and she's suffered from dementia for the last year or so. 

She moved into a nursing home this winter. Now she's in hospice care.

My oldest son saw Aunt Patty this winter, but this was the younger kids' first time visiting a nursing home.

“There are a lot of people here who are sick and can't take care of themselves,” I told them. “They need us to be quiet and on our best behavior.”

They handled it very well.

For one thing, Aunt Patty was sitting up in a chair, being fed some fried green tomatoes and lemon meringue pie from the PattyFest kitchen. She didn't recognize us, particularly, but she could communicate when she wanted another bite or wanted to be wheeled into the hall. She seemed happy and comfortable.

Before we walked in the door of the nursing home, I told the kids that they needed to hold any questions or observations about what they saw or smelled until the end of the visit. That's what I remember hating most of all from my visits to elderly relatives in nursing homes when I was in my teens—the smell.

I hadn't prepared the oldest kid for it when we visited this winter, which was a mistake. Turns out I haven't given the kids as thorough a grounding in the “don't-point-they-know-they-have-a-problem” school of etiquette as the one my parents and grandparents gave me.

“Can I give Aunt Patty one of my rocks?” my daughter whispered. She had collected rocks from the creek at PattyFest and wanted to share some of her bounty. She showed the rock to her great-aunt while I explained where it came from. We pressed it into Aunt Patty's hand.

Aunt Patty held it in her palm for a moment. The girl took it back. 

For me, the best part of PattyFest has been giving my kids a chance to connect with Aunt Patty and my grandfather (“Papaw”) in a setting where they don't have to be constantly on their best behavior and they can enjoy the same fun as their elders.

It's sad now to be talking with the kids about how, one day, that connection will be severed.

“I don't want Aunt Patty to die,” the oldest told me.

We talk about how people age, how they wear out over time in different ways. I don't know how much of my talk about end-of-life decision-making is sinking in. But my daughter assures me that she will take care of me “when you're old, just like you take care of Babushka.”

(I suspect my 66-year-old mother-in-law would take some exception to this version of reality, but I appreciate my daughter's intentions nonetheless.)

My 11-year-old was serious as we drove home from PattyFest. “Mom, can we go to Aunt Patty's funeral? Even if it's on a school day?”

I was a teen when three of my four grandparents died. I wanted to attend my paternal grandparents' funerals, but only because I knew I would see my cousins. I am still ashamed that I used my (very real, but still) midterms in my freshman year of college as an excuse to miss my Nanan's funeral.

I'm glad my kids want to celebrate the life of their great-aunt.