Her Last Summer in New York City

Bad food, and conversations about cholesterol: my aunt's last days in NYC.

Illustration by Pat Barrett

The last time I saw my aunt, the wild one, was three summers ago in 2010. She visited New York City over two odd days in the middle of a week in August. It had been eight years since we’d seen each other. Back then, I was still a teenager growing up in the Bay Area and she was in her forties. I called her Shiao Ayi, or “little aunt,” since she was the youngest of my mother’s sisters and the only one among them who didn’t let her austere upbringing affect her. She once tried to convince me to ride the hip new Vertigo rollercoaster with her at California’s Great America. I was too cowardly, so she rode off on her own, leaving her young daughter with me. She arrived an hour or so later at our meet-up spot with flushed cheeks, a twinkle in her dark eyes and her black medium-length hair a bird’s nest over her rounded shoulders.

Since then, she had been traveling the world with her husband, a successful businessman and a wisecrack and adventurer, just like her.

“Oh,…