Way back Wednesday: Best friends

I ran across this photo a few years ago while going through some of the photos I received after my mother died. Pictured here are my grandmother Lillian Bonds, on the right, and her sister Emmie Martin Cowan. Not only were they sisters, but they were also best friends.

This photo was taken in 1945 when my grandmother would have been 26 and Emmie was 37, the same age I am today. Despite the 11 years between them, they were very close. My mother shared with me that MaBonds, which is what all us grandchildren called our grandmother, relied on Aunt Emmie to be an adviser, counselor, therapist and friend.

Both women, from what I learned from my mother, married men who turned out to be less than the Prince Charming they were maybe hoping to land so I  imagine they poured out their hearts to one another regarding this issue as well as the hundreds of others that come with being a wife and mother.

My mother adored Aunt Emmie and loved getting to spend time with her at her home. It was her time with her favorite aunt that instilled in my mother her preference for neatness and cleanliness. Momma shared with me many times how Aunt Emmie would spend hours making sure her home was spotless and everything was in its place. Momma grew up to be, to put it mildly, a clean freak, which she tried to pass on to me. I didn't take to the notion cleaning for hours, but I did latch onto the various aspects of organization she taught me.

Aunt Emmie's life took a tragic turn in the mid-1950s after she underwent a hysterectomy. As my mother told it, Aunt Emmie left the hospital after an extended stay without a reproductive system, but with a strong addiction to Morphine, which was the drug of choice for pain relief in those days.

Unbeknownst to her, Aunt Emmie had been born from a gene pool that was susceptible to addiction so once the pain reliever got into her brain she was pretty much hooked from the get-go.  Momma told me how Aunt Emmie was able to rather easily procure a prescription pad from her doctor's office and then use it to trace an original prescription by placing a blank page over the original  and then make the tracing on a brightly lit window.

Remember, this was back in the days before prescription pads were equipped with water marks and other security measures. Plus, addiction, especially amongst well-dressed, well-spoken, white women was virtually unheard of most likely because it wasn't something anyone talked about. Additionally, Momma said Aunt Emmie was very adept at masking her addiction and continuing to live the life of a typical 1950s housewife.

Momma, who was barely into puberty when Aunt Emmie became an addict, was well aware of the problems facing her favorite aunt as were other family members; but, no one really understood the severity of her situation and, according to my mother, most folks just turned a blind eye to what was going on and tried to act as though nothing was amiss. Again, remember the time period: most people of this era thought only hobos, soldiers or beatniks did drugs, and there was no such thing as "Intervention"  or The Betty Ford Center.

Sadly, Aunt Emmie, at the age of 49, met her untimely demise in 1957 in a harrowing accident. As my mother told it, Aunt Emmie one day likely consumed more Morphine than usual. Her normal reaction to the drug was extremely different from the typical effects most patients felt in that it acted as a stimulant in her system rather than a depressant. When high on her usual dose Aunt Emmie was basically a speeded-up version of herself; but this day she was apparently running in an extreme version of fast forward.

Aunt Emmie wasn't able to handle this much of the drug in her system and, somehow, ended up falling into the fireplace, in which a fire was going, and unable to decipher both what was going on and how to get herself out of the situation, wound up burning to death in her own home. Horrific, I know.

My poor grandmother, as was the rest of the family, was immensely shocked by this tragedy. MaBonds never got over losing her sister and best friend and never, ever spoke of how she died. It was too terrible to discuss.

My momma was devastated by the loss of Aunt Emmie, but found the strength to share her tragic story with me, I guess, as a cautionary tale. Sadly, though, Momma, who ironically couldn't tolerate Morphine because it also acted as a stimulant when introduced into her system, later in her life succumbed to the siren's call of addiction that had grabbed hold of so many of her family members.

Cigarettes were her first chemical romance followed a few years later by alcohol, the addiction to which landed her in rehab four times. Diet pills such as Didrex, Dexedrine and Adipex as well as laxatives were all used for a while under the guise of keeping her weight in check. In her twilight years, Momma developed a deep love for Lortab, Soma and Valium after two back surgeries, which, I've since learned, is the way many, many people become addicted to these same drugs.

Even though she'd ingested this cornucopia of pharmaceuticals and booze over the years, cigarettes were the drug that had the strongest hold on her and were what ended up causing her death at the too-young age of 65. She'd smoked for 50 years during which those little sticks had become her nearest and dearest friend.

I've done my fair share of illicit drugs and had my own affairs with diet pills and alcohol, but I can proudly say I have never and will never smoke cigarettes. My hard-partying days are behind me now so you won't hear of me having a good time with Mary Jane or riding the white horse, and alcohol passes my lips maybe once or twice a year.

I am not trying to hold myself up as Missy Goody-Two-Shoes. Far from it. I am just a woman who knows her history, understands the volatile DNA I've inherited and hopes to set a better example for her kids than my momma did for me. I can't say my girls will never try alcohol or drugs, but I intend to share with them Aunt Emmie's story along with my momma's so they know and understand very clearly the consequences of making the choice to go down that road. I just hope they heed these tales better than my momma did.