Too Young

Yesterday while surfing FaceBook, I discovered that a friend I went to high school with passed away. From the comments, I found out that she had been ill for the past four years, but no other information about her illness was posted. Many, many people expressed great surprise that she had been as sick as she was.

We were never very close, but finding out about her passing really rocked me. Her mother - who was a pretty good friend of my mom's back in our high school days - died of BC about two years ago. Her father use to be my boss. Her brother and I ran on our school's track team together as well. Again, she and I weren't particularly close, but our families had a connection - and we were only four months apart in age.

I knew that she had married a minister and they lived in Maryland with their four children. I did see her at her mom's funeral, but only for a quick offer of condolence and a hug. The last time we really chatted was at our 10th high school reunion. Our 30th is in two months and it really saddens me to know that she won't be there.

Reunions stir up all kinds of mixed emotions for me. The first reunion I ever went to was my mother's 30th high school reunion in North Carolina. My dad had a project due at work and could not take the time off, so I was her "plus one." I still have the group picture the EJ Hayes High School Class of 1961 took just before dinner. I take it out every now and again to see if I still remember where my mom was sitting and to study her face for any signs of illness. I do that because six months after that photo was taken, my mom died from the cancer she didn't even know had returned. Brain mets took her away from us almost three months to the day after her 49th birthday.

My 20th high school reunion took place about a week after my own breast cancer diagnosis. When I look at the photos we took that night, I see a happy, smiling me posing with friends I hadn't seen in a long time. But I remember that I spent the entire night wondering if I would be around for the 30th reunion. I was terrified that my child would be looking at the group picture we took that night, scanning my face for signs of illness.

Now here comes my 30th - but I'm not so much thinking about myself as I am about my friend and her family. 47 is too, too young to be buried. It's too young to leave a relatives and friends behind to grieve. It's too young to leave loved ones alone, struggling with the absence. Thinking about her family and what they are facing makes me remember my own when my mom was no longer here.

My dad was also 49 when his wife died. Although I wasn't a little girl that needed to be taken care of (I was 25), there was a definite, palpable void my mother's death created in the house. I often tell friends that it was so, so hard at 25 that I don't think I could have survived had it happened 10 or even five years earlier. But that hardly compares to the thoughts I have today at age 47 about how my father at age 49 even dealt with the death of his life partner.

If my Beloved were to just be gone tomorrow, I don't think I would be able to function. If we had children together, I have no idea how I could possibly care for them because I'm sure I would not be able to do much more than breathe - and that's not hyperbole at all. It's just too big to even fully wrap my head around.

Today, while still trying to come to grips with the death of another person in the prime of their lives, I think of my dad, my friend's husband and her dad as well, as aging has made me empathize a whole lot more with how dealing with the loss of a spouse can probably come close to totally paralyzing a person. 

What do you do with that? How do you get up the next day and not be angry at the world? How do you hold it together after the arrangements have been made and the concerned friends have stopped calling to see if you're OK? How do you just go on without them?

I simply don't know, and I'm so very saddened by the idea that anyone has to figure that out.

Another Goodbye

Audrey just before port surgery a few months ago.

My family has had a rather rough year, but the last few weeks have been absolutely crazy. Saturday, we said goodbye to the matriarch of the family, my 94-yr-old great aunt, Blanche, who died a few days after suffering a massive stroke. In four days, we will do it again for my Blanche's youngest daughter, Audrey. She died on Christmas Day from cancer metastasis.

My Aunt Audrey was diagnosed with breast cancer almost a year to the day before I was. Like me, she'd had a history of breast cysts and, like me, she was diagnosed relatively early and received radiation. While I opted for a bilateral mastectomy, she'd had a lumpectomy instead.

Ten years later, she had a new primary - a stomach tumor that made its presence known when my aunt started having extreme fatigue and anemia. She was diagnosed Stage IV from the beginning and shortly after, a spread to her liver and pancreas were discovered.

Cancer is a mean, evil, bird-flipping witch. Through the neuropathy-inducing chemo and regular blood transfusions, the tumor never even simmered down. It just continued to wreck havoc on first her digestive system and then the rest of her body. Because her stomach was so damaged, eventually a feeding tube was inserted. She lost a ton of weight, spent many days and nights in the hospital before the doctors declared that she'd exhausted all of her treatment options and suggested the family call Hospice.

Still, the flood of people who came to see her never stopped. And on days when she seemed the furthest away, any familiar co-worker, church member or neighbor's face in the doorway made her brighten up in ways that can't even be explained.

The view from her window the day she passed.

My son and I stopped by last Sunday and she talked to us a bit, asking him if he had any money (knowing he's in college, she always asked him the same question when she saw him) and me if I'd cut my hair (like she did almost every time she greeted me). Then she told me "If I'm here on Thursday…" before her voice sort of trailed off. I know she said more, but it didn't register. It felt like I'd been doused with a bucket of cold water.

When we stopped by on Christmas Eve, she was practically catatonic. Her breathing was very labored and her heart-rate was extremely rapid. I knew it would be the last time I would be able to see and talk to her. While I was sitting at her bedside, I saw a little phrase printed on the pajamas she was wearing: "The day is done." Twelve hours later, her day ended. Her daughter-in-law who was next to her said that she just stopped breathing. She would have been 66 in February.

Audrey and her oldest son, Melvin Jr  (Mick).

Hers was the sixth obituary for a family member I'd help put together. It never gets easier - and not just because high school graduation dates and how long a specific company was worked for get forgotten, but because it is just so bloody hard to sum up someone's life in a few paragraphs. Everyone has bits of extraordinary in their lives. It is very difficult to drop a sentence about a childhood or another about a career without making their life read like an anecdote. It seems that no matter how beautiful the prose, the words that paint the picture of who the person was to those who may only have known her during one brief part of it always ring hollow. And it is hard not to wonder what they may have wanted you to include or take out.

My aunt was a mother, a teacher, a devoted church member, a musician, a civil rights activist, a wife, a woman with amazing legs who had no problem telling it like it was, a person who cared about others almost as much as she cared about herself - and then some. And I'm sure there are things she did, thought about, wished for, planned to do and felt deeply about that we, her family and friends, never even knew about.

Every once in a while, she'd call me "Miss Militant" mostly because of my views on women in society and things like the terrible connotation of "good" hair in the Black community. Even before I first started teaching as an adjunct, she was the one person who called me "Professor." One of my biggest cheerleaders, she always made me feel extremely special and like I could do anything on the planet if I wanted to badly enough. "Nothing surprises me anymore. Nothing at all," she told me once. I don't even remember what we were talking about, but I do remember how surprised I was that my fabulous aunt was so, well, jaded.

She and my mom, Maxine, grew up as sisters. They were the children of two sisters, but my grandmother had left their tiny North Carolina town - and her daughter - behind to find a job in the big city (New York City, that is). My mom was one of nine kids Aunt Blanche and her mother, my great-grandma Pearlie, raised together in the Jim Crow-era south. My mom considered all of her cousins siblings, and I always considered Blanche my third grandmother.

Melvin and Audrey say "I Do!"

A few years back, I interviewed Audrey and her hubby, Melvin, for a relationship article I was writing. At the time, they'd been married for over 40 years, but the interview revealed how they met: when my uncle dared his friend to smack Audrey on the butt while they were all in an elevator together. When his friend accepted the dare, Audrey thought it was Melvin who'd gotten so friendly with his hands - and she smacked him. He tried to tell her it was his friend who had goosed her, but she barely let him get a word in edgewise. As fate would have it, they were going to the same place: the apartment of my Aunt Paulette - who was married to Melvin's friend, Lonnie. There are no accidents, I suppose…

A photo and card left on her dresser Christmas morning.

As her immediate family is overwhelmed with the shear amount of things that have to be done, I offered to help put together a board of photos for  Audrey's viewing/wake and funeral. As much of my family is staying in town between the two services, we had a blast looking through Audrey's photo albums and seeing pictures of her - and us - after Blanche's service. We found some of Audrey doing "circle time" with the pre-schoolers she taught. We found some of her in a beautiful, little black dress, playfully showing a little leg for the camera. We found some of her pregnant and on bed rest with her youngest, Courtney. We spent lots of time huddled around Audrey's dining room table laughing about times that seemed like they happened just yesterday.

But a few yesterdays ago, she was here with us - then on Saturday, she wasn't. All of my family is feeling her absence this week. All of us are dreading the difficulty that will be Friday's service. All of us are hating cancer very much right now.

We already  miss you, auntie...