NOT YOUR STANDARD AUNTIE : She lived by her own rules.

April is the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot. I have never believed it, since it contains the birthdays of three of my favorite people. But after this year, I just might agree. On April 1, the day and the month barely begun, I got a call here in India from my sister in the United States saying that our Aunt Sheila, Mom's younger sister and my godmother, had had a stroke and wasn't expected to live. The next day, I learned that she had died that morning.

In India, maternal aunts are very special people. In Hindi, which has a different name for every relation, a mother's sister is called Masi. The colloquial translation is "just like mother." My Masi was not just like my mother, and yet there is a fierceness about the love I have for her that places her in that pantheon. For days the past has been clicking through my mind like slides in a projector, each image a celebration of the life of this remarkable woman. Aunt Sheila and my mother and her twin sister were born in England. Their parents, the MacGills, were both novelists and very much a part of the literary scene of London in the early part of the century. (G.K. Chesterton was my mother's godfather.) In 1929, my grandfather was invited to give a series of lectures in America and the family accompanied him on the tour. They had just arrived in California when the stock market crashed; overnight, the lecture tour evaporated and they were left stranded and penniless.

Because their novel-writing parents were almost comically inept in worldly matters, the three little girls grew up very fast. When my mother and her twin were just ten, and my Aunt Sheila seven, they published and sold a small hand-printed neighborhood newspaper. The money earned was sometimes all the family had to buy food with. That same year, Aunt Sheila appeared in the Academy Award-winning film Cavalcade. Her immortal one line was, "I don't want to be the Boers." Years later, she and my mother moved to New York City. There they fell under the spell of the Baroness de Hueck Doherty's Friendship House, and later Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Moved by the idea of houses of hospitality, they opened one in their own apartment and took in a long series of homeless women, all the while holding down full-time jobs themselves. When, after five years, my mother left the city to marry my father, Aunt Sheila continued running the house on her own for several more years, until finally marrying Leo Callahan and settling down to raise her own four children.

"Settling down" is just a phrase, of course. Certainly it does not describe the life Aunt Sheila led. Babies took up a lot of her time, but didn't stop her from working at a series of jobs (from a switchboard operator to an editorial assistant in a large Manhattan writers' agency). She also continued her involvement in the "underground church," as it was known in those days. I must have been no more than ten when she took me to Mass at Emmaus House, the radical Catholic community in East Harlem that flourished in the '60s. She and Uncle Leo hosted Masses and discussion groups in their apartment, and welcomed interminable processions of students, peace activists, and lost souls. There was a place for everyone--including a large collection of cats.

In her mid-sixties, long past the age most people are dreaming of retirement, while still working in the writers' agency, Aunt Sheila decided to take up the family trade (both her sisters were published writers). She began with children's books, and quickly achieved success, publishing four within a few years, all with Dial. In between, she also spun two mystery novels; Saint Martin's Press published both of them.

The above is all by way of introduction. But how to convey the formidable nature of her personality, the imperious way she strode through life? When I heard that she had had a stroke, I was more taken aback than anything else: Aunt Sheila? How did God dare? There was a magnificent confidence about her, a wonderful certainty about her place in the world that somehow had the effect of making all of us sure of ourselves. We were related to her, were we not? My favorite Aunt Sheila story occurred when she was around sixteen. She had gone to the beach with her friend Lois. It was a public beach, very crowded and not terribly clean. But just a short distance from where they were camped was an exclusive private club. The two girls climbed over the rock wall dividing the two and settled in happily on the deserted white sands. Within minutes, a waiter from the club appeared and said haughtily "Ladies, this is a private club. I am going to have to ask you to leave immediately."

Aunt Sheila drew herself up to her full height (she was very tall, and also drop-dead gorgeous) and said, "I am Sheila MacGill and this is my friend Lois."

"Oh, Madame," the waiter said, all flustered and apologetic. "I'm terribly sorry. I didn't realize."

It was so typical of her: the absolute truth--I can't imagine her lying--and totally irrelevant. She lived by her own set of rules and she believed in creating her life according to them, not by any arbitrary standards the world threw at her. The example of a free and independent woman that she gave to me, my sisters, her own daughters, and who knows how many others, has given us a strength we are only now beginning to recognize and draw upon. The idea that women could not be priests, for instance, she treated as beneath contempt, not even worth discussing.

When I turned forty, she called to wish me a happy birthday and to congratulate me on reaching what she said was the best age of all. "Old enough to know what you want and young enough to enjoy it," she said in her deep, slightly sultry voice. I had looked forward to telling her how right she was, but it doesn't really matter: she already knew.