Yesterday, I spent a grueling day flying from my home in New England to DC and back for the funeral of my aunt, Amy Loeserman.

I wasn’t close to my aunt. In fact, most of my strongest memories of her were mixed, at best. The one that stands out was when I was around nine. She was bragging that she was the best Monopoly player ever. So, more out of curiosity than bravado–because even then I rarely cared about winning or losing board games–I challenged her. The image of all my mortgaged properties spread out on my grandma’s gray rug as I tearfully handed over my last pink $5 bill is burned in my memory. I hadn’t merely lost. I had been humiliated. And she was gleeful about it.

For years after that, I was convinced she didn’t like me. Maybe that was true. She wasn’t what you would call, “a kid person” and her relationship with my mother, her only sibling, had–until their old age–always been bumpy. Despite being a kid, I could feel the reverberations.

In retrospect, I think this was one of those harmful assumptions we tend to make about unpleasant life events in order to put them in a palatable context. And that assumption, backed by a number of less-than-perfect interactions over the years that followed, prevented us from having more of a relationship.

But relationship or not, my relationships with my cousins (her children) are important to me, so I wanted to show up. And despite the grueling day, which started at 6am and ended at midnight, I’m glad I did. For one thing, I learned in my cousin’s eulogy that Amy’s ruthlessness at board games was not a personal vendetta against me. She was known for not letting her children or her grandchildren win, no matter how young they were. When I told the Monopoly story to my cousins and their children, they laughed out loud. “Classic!” they agreed.

I also learned things about Amy I never knew. She was one of only four women in her U. of Chicago law school class in 1959. Her original intent was to use law for social justice, but no social justice oriented law firms would hire women in those days. The only firm that was willing to hire her was involved with shipping law, so that became her field, and she even got to argue a case before the Supreme Court. She also volunteered for the ACLU and handled pro bono cases on racial and gender discrimination.

I’m sorry I didn’t know how much of an interest in social justice we had in common. But I’m thankful for the small ways we did bond around music. I appreciated her frank honesty in talking about her own musical journey and how it fit into our family dynamics when I interviewed her for my piano memoir–one of the best conversations I ever had with her. She talked about how hard she worked, since she didn’t believe she had much musical talent, and how her father (my grandfather), the family music god whom we all venerated but could never live up to, would be shouting out from the back of the house… higher… lower… when she couldn’t get exactly the right pitch on the violin. It got to the point where she couldn’t stand it any more and decided to play flute instead, as well as piano.

When I saw her for the last time, last month at a family Bat Mitzvah, I was glad to have a the common topic of piano to talk about. She had recently moved to assisted living where she had the opportunity to take piano lessons again. We asked each other about which pieces we were learning. Even at 89, she was still working hard, not giving up. In fact, Amy’s life was about not giving up. From dealing with gender discrimination in the legal field, to feeding her musical passion despite not thinking she was “talented,” to going to graduate school at age 54 and getting a Ph.D. in French literature 14 years later simply because she loved French, Amy was someone whose perseverance we could all learn from, even if at times this same trait manifested in useless arguments about honoring an expired coupon (another story told at the funeral).

In these tough and scary times in our world, I’m hoping I can carry some of Amy’s perseverance with me and be as willing as she was to work hard–even when it’s not easy. And to be as stubborn as she was about not giving up.

Subscribe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com