No Filter: A Tribute to My Aunt Janet

The Aunt Janet in my memory is my age (40-something) with sun-kissed skin and dark, curly hair framing her face. She is sitting on the steps of our beach house, her legs curled to the side, laughing, her mouth wide open. She is fierce in this snapshot in my mind: young, healthy, bursting with life and personality. Her fierceness was her defining quality for me. It permeated every aspect of her life.

I remember having butterflies in my stomach in anticipation of seeing my extended family for our annual vacations. These are the people that make me recall my childhood in a magical way—like the re-reading of a beloved children’s novel. There was an unspoken loyalty between our band of seven cousins that no one had to earn and, as an added bonus, we had a great time together.

It wasn’t just my cousins that created the keen sense of anticipation, it was the prospect of seeing my Aunt Janet. She was unlike any woman I had ever met. She seemed to lack a filter of any kind. She spoke loudly and unapologetically, expressing her feelings without the burden of worrying about what others thought, a foreign tongue to me as a young girl growing up in the south where being a “lady” was paramount. I was never very good at being a lady and Aunt Janet gave me hope that I didn’t need to be.

I always looked for opportunities to go to the store with her during our summer vacations because I loved to witness her unorthodox behavior in public. This was before the advent of cell phones and, if Aunt Janet needed to remind Jason to grab a carton of eggs, she didn’t bother with the inconvenience of walking up and down the aisles to locate her son. She simply screamed her request at the top of her lungs, “JASON! GRAB SOME EGGS FOR ME!” It absolutely blew my mind. I would return home from those summer vacations and regale my South Carolina friends with stories of my Aunt Janet’s grocery store antics. I’m not sure anyone believed me.

Aunt Janet’s fierce parenting was legendary. She threw herself, headlong, into all activities involving her children—from band competitions to soccer games, she did it all. And this didn’t stop when her kids left the house. She and Uncle Joe helped Jeannie and Jason navigate the complicated logistics of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, vesting themselves into their adventure and hanging on every word, every snippet of their journey. When it came to her children—and later her grandchildren—Aunt Janet did nothing halfway. She was all in. She wore the pride that she felt for her family on her sleeve like everything else—unabashedly and without a filter.

Aunt Janet will always be laughing in my memory. Or belching. Or saying something snarky and hilarious. Her lack of filter was her defining quality for me and it’s what I loved most about her. She laughed loudly and often, belched with reckless abandon and loved her family with absolutely no filter.

Filters, as Aunt Janet would teach me, are wildly overrated.