feet. But in doing so, she tweaked her back. She assumed the discomfort would subside if she took it easy for a few days but it hung on stubbornly and even got worse. She went to her doctor who prescribed stretching exercises and a mild muscle relaxant. Then she caught a chest cold she couldn’t shake. The doctor said it was pneumonia and prescribed a week in bed.
        The chest cold and pneumonia eventually improved but the back pain got worse. Word got to the California relatives – she had no one in Hawaii – that Ingrid was battling some really serious back pain. Home remedies were recommended, and insistence that she demand her doctors research the matter more carefully and provide some sort of better diagnosis, and some relief.
        In March, the pain became so severe she went to the emergency room. She was sent home with pain pills. A week later she was brought in again, on a stretcher. Tests were done. This time the diagnosis was more definitive and dire. Michael’s mother and two of his sisters rushed to her aid, clamoring around her at the hospital. They would be her advocates, assuring – insisting – that she be given the best of care, and that there be no more waiting until it’s too late.
        But when Ingrid was told her diagnosis, she quickly decided not to pursue further treatments but go into hospice care and die peacefully, without tubes, without chemo.
        But there are options! There are treatments that could reduce the pain, maybe prolong your life! No, she said. None of it. Hospice.
        Now family members were making a rotating pilgrimage to visit this aunt, to provide company, solace, the presence of loved ones, to see her, talk to her, before she was gone for good.
        Ingrid was a scholar, a professor of marine micropaleontology at the University of Hawaii. She grew up in Los Angeles, an only-child of the afore-mentioned German immigrants, attended the University of Southern California, then went on to earn a doctorate at a prestigious university in Frankfort, Germany.  Her doctoral thesis was written in German. She broke glass ceilings along the way. She traveled the world, sometimes spent long sojourns on ships gathering specimens from the ocean floor. She published articles. She taught classes at the university.
        She never married. She was engaged once, in her early twenties, until her fiancé told her he was married to someone else and had decided to reconcile with her. Then the reconciliation failed and he wanted Ingrid back but by then she was done with him.
        Over the years, Michael often wondered if this solitary aunt in Hawaii had turned from men to women for meaningful companionship – maybe had a special