Vergil taught me that death is when the wind sweeps up a body’s last breath.

My high-school Latin class translated Vergil’s Aeneid. Killing Dido, the Phoenician queen sentenced to love Aeneas, and then die, was one of the passages most likely to be on the AP test. The class killed the Phoenician queen off one by one as the teacher told each of us to translate a chunk of lines. Dido, her breath a wisp withdrawing into the wind, was born to Elysium by the goddess of rainbows. The monarchical death was relayed in mumbles and utters of students who had not studied their vocabulary. I had never experienced death; I hadn’t even purged my closet of dolls, crayons, or my fifth-grade flute.

Six years later, my aunt, Linda taught me that death is as indifferent and swift as a passing pug’s fart. Her hospital cell at Sloan-Kettering was windless.

Dido died in the lap of her sister, Anna. Dido lifted herself thrice in her Anna’s arms while the knife wound gurgled in her breast. Linda had been sedated. She could not twitch an eyelid or warm her hands under the blanket. The ventilator ensconced in her trachea hissed.

Between sobs of her mother, the rustling of our hospital gowns, and my mother reporting the plummeting numbers on the blood pressure monitor, Linda died. Poof. Gone. The heave-ho of her lungs stopped.

Linda deserved to be carried to bliss by a rainbow goddess, not Dido. All Dido did was inherit money, flee to Africa, fall in love, and stab herself over a break-up. If Vergil had poetry to say about that woman, what would he write about Linda, the woman who never uttered the word “hate?” Linda scolded me when I would scream at the radio, “I hate this song!”

“‘Hate,’ my dear, is a very ugly word.”

Linda was a child who prayed for her father to accompany her family to Sunday mass. A sister who spoiled her siblings with beach getaways and purses and matching sweaters and advice. An aunt who flew up from Newark, swooped me into her car, and drove me to her vacation house at night. “When should we go for a walk today?” We strolled the cove. She listened to me sing as I brushed my hand along beach roses and gave her the most beautiful rocks.

When I moved to New York City, she drove me to the Jersey shore, and the waves sent her rollicking and giggling on the sand. She was an aunt who held me on the phone when I, her walking buddy of years past, trembled in a bloody bath, a knife dangling in my fingers. Our love of coffee drew us to Starbucks, for her tall soy flat white, and to third-wave hangouts, for my cold brew. She sat where I sat in those grimy, aloof coffee houses: a petite, bejeweled baby-boomer alongside a college kid identifying the collection of stains on her Tretorns. We were a pair of cross-generational twins. Even though she was a hedge-fund VP in lower Manhattan, and I was a Latinist in the East Village, together we conquered our to-do lists in her condo.

The cancer bloomed after I left New York and moved to Montreal. When my mother said that Linda was on her deathbed, the flights were scarce, so I was the last one to say goodbye. I bounded into Sloan-Kettering, fell into a hospital gown, and sputtered stupid words. I wept so hard that my nose bled. I had bled on my aunt, but the blood wasn’t worth cleaning, since she was dying, so Linda expired with speckles of my blood on her skin. Dido died with blood on her chest and arms too, but from a self-inflicted wound.

In that stale, brackish hospital room, I was not thinking about Dido, whose most memorable attribute is her death. I warmed Linda’s fingers in my hands. The chemo had shellacked her skin in a yellow luster, just like Vergil’s wood and wax writing tablet. My finger, like Vergil’s stylus, traced that skin on her bald head. Linda’s mother jammed her face against the web of tubes in her baby’s orifices.

That death was disgusting, galaxies away from Dido’s rhapsodic exit. Linda’s abrupt cessation of breath, however, leaves more space in my memory for her fist, studded with the Miraculous Medal of Mary, extended to me at the threshold of Port Authority. After hanging out at the Russian Tea House, or a diner, or at the salon, I would descend into the subway, and she would catch a bus back to Jersey. My fist would pound hers in farewell, since we weren’t big on saying “I love you.” The immortal poetry lies in that moment.

– Shannon Viola