My Great Aunt Pat has always talked a lot and coming from the big Irish family that we are, it shouldn’t surprise you for me to say she was loud! The one thing Aunt Pat never lacked was personality. There are so many funny stories that I remember about my Aunt Pat.

For one the dramatic fit she threw when I was born. You see I was the last cousin to be born, and in Aunt Pat’s mind, the last chance for a namesake. My mother wanted to name me Margaret and call me Maggie. Aunt Pat wanted her to name me Patricia after her, and here I am Patricia. Aunt Pat always had a way of getting what she wanted.

The time that we were in New York seeing a play on Broadway. It was “Annie Get Your Gun� with Bernadette Peters…Aunt Pat stood up in the middle of one of the acts and announced loudly to the audience that she had “already seen this one.� It was around this time that her sanity was starting to fade. Mind you she’d never been a fully sane person! However at this point we knew she could no longer live by herself in her New Jersey home, and we had to move her to an assisted living home closer to the rest of her family.

I have so many memories of my Great Aunt Pat, and they all make me smile. She’s an amazing woman, bold and witty. But she has Alzheimers and now it’s very advanced, it’s hard to believe that the woman I saw yesterday was the same woman who found out what a Scotsman wears under his kilt on her 70th birthday party...

*In the photo above Aunt Pat is the one in the blue pants suit. I'm sorry about the poor quality of the photo.