My Aunt Kathleen, aged 69, passed away this past week.

I knew Aunt Kat least well of my mom’s eleven siblings. I’m not sure how different it could have been, a reality that eats at someone ever inclined to probe the depths. She had suffered, her body broken down by some of the demons she’d faced, and she was who she was. I did not know her before any of that. Her story there is not one I know well, and it is not my place to tell it.

By the time my memory of Aunt Kat starts, she had become a steady constant amid the endless party of my extended family. She arrived early to every family gathering and stuck through them, often settling into a corner with my grandmother or a few other confidantes, ever composed and calm, head propped up by her arm as she held forth with her gravelly voice. Even if she wasn’t okay, she probably said she was okay, taking care of things at her deliberate pace, baking her famed brownies and, of course, collecting yet more Peanuts memorabilia. She diligently sent her nieces and nephews gifts and clip art cards for Christmas and for birthdays, her loyalty to her sprawling extended clan unwavering. (The final one I got still hangs in my kitchen, and will stay there for some time.)

Her faith was her solace and her eternal compass through what she endured, her very literal saving grace. Too many people who fall into holes do not have guides back out, but Aunt Kat did, and it kept her going for decades. Perhaps the only memory of her I have away from a larger family gathering comes from a night when I attended a Midnight Mass with her and my mother as a kid. I remember nothing of the service—I was, if memory serves, enjoying a novel excuse to stay up late—but I remember her at prayer.

Aunt Kat got out and saw much of the world, did a few cruises on her own; she kept that going right up until the end, with a perhaps over-ambitious final voyage not long before Covid shut down the world. In her final year she shared some of those memories on what became a weekly family Zoom, putting up past pictures of journeys I’d never known she’d taken. Thanks to those Zooms, I had the pleasure of seeing her more often over the past year than at any other point in my life, and at some point I registered how pleased she was to see me on those calls semi-regularly, perhaps providing a vicarious window after I bought a house or flitted off to St. Thomas. I never tapped it fully, but there was plenty of wealth tucked away in that mind, rich in experience from her travels and the network of friends I knew little about before the stories shared after her passing.

Aunt Kat’s death was not Covid-driven, but the pandemic still robbed us of a vital ritual, that great outpouring of collective grief that has come with other family deaths. I tuned in to the live-streamed funeral Mass from my home office, where I watched the backs of the heads of a few family members scattered about a church in Illinois; after the pallbearers exited, I clicked out of the video and promptly joined a completely unrelated virtual meeting already in progress. This is not exactly what closure looks like.

Thankfully, the family piled on to another Zoom in the evening for a virtual wake of sorts. A few more memories poured out, interspersed with discussions of the estate; naturally, she’d tidied up her affairs and left things in good order. (The tidiness of the house she left her two godsons, on the other hand, is a different story.) There were pleasant drifts in to topics far more mundane. Many were not quite ready to talk, still processing a looming absence in our midst. The eldest of the nine Maloney sisters is gone now, but she is seared into the minds of her clan.

For me, that final image is of her in the Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis. We were in town for a family wedding, passing the time between functions and touring the town I would soon come to call a temporary home. It was a warm summer day, and she’d walked a long way; she was seated on a chair in the shade, resplendent in red, tired, but content. At the end of a road of uncommon perseverance lies grace. She had arrived.