Aunt Sicily died. She was my wife's great-aunt and last surviving relative. My wife, Emily's parents died in a car accident when she was a freshman in college. It was then that she reached out and began communicating with Sicily. Sicily was old even then and something of an eccentric. She lived alone on a ten acre plot of unincorporated land about seventy miles south of Pendleton. She was a spinster who devoted her time to watching her stories, as she called them, and making dolls that she would donate to terminally ill children. On our way out, he pulled me aside and gave me a pained look.