The Holidays

The holidays are over. My first without Julie. Julie. I haven’t said your name in a very long time. It’s a short word, happy, ending on a joyous long ee sound rather than the more somber ah sound that most feminine names end with. I miss you Julie. Right now I’m listening to the fifth movement of Francois Poulenc’s Gloria. I was introduced to this by church – it’s such a glorious set of music.

Poulenc, or so the musical director said, was a conflicted Catholic. He was gay and of course moved away from a religion that did not accept him. But after a crisis, he returned to the faith. It’s said that the inspiration for his Gloria was Poulenc watching monks playing soccer – that interplay of the playful and the sacred which finds such a glorious expression in his Gloria. I love the playfulness of the second movement that opens with brasses blaring in off-kilter bursts introducing the buoyant Laudaumus te of the chorus. Followed by that, I love the sixth movement that opens with the chorus in full . . . Qui Sedes . . .which builds to an overwhelming crescendo and then, and then, the sweet lyrical solo female voice singing Amen. Glorious.

 Ah, Julie. I wonder if you would have loved this music as much as I do. Perhaps. Regardless, it reminds me of you. Full of almost sacrilegious jocundity and pinned through the middle with a piercingly sweet sadness. So, to get back to that horrific journey. I should have heard it in her husband’s voice, in the way his voice broke and he cried. But I was in deep denial when he said she may have 2 years or 10, we just don’t know. I wanted to believe she would have 20. Time enough for us to do our sister trips, our jaunts to Europe together. Time enough to watch our children grow up and have lives of their own.

 And so she began her first round of chemo. We thought that chemo was, or I thought anyway, something you did to beat cancer. We all thought she was young and strong; she could handle the poisoned chemo and that it would beat her cancer, kick it in the ass. We didn’t know then that she didn’t have a chance and that her strength and youth would make her dying so much more painful and drawn out. I believe that I went to visit her in October of that year (2010). She was starting to lose her hair and the oncologist had put a port catheter into her chest – this ugly wound still healing, protruding from her chest. How awful. How awful.

It’s funny, I remember her being so self conscious about a birth mark she had on her arm earlier in her life, but she made nothing of the port cath. It was a way to inject the chemo drugs directly into her bloodstream for hours at a time. But I was self-conscious in her place. I hated how people at stores stared at her, stared at her because she had lost her hair and had this thing sticking out of her chest. I hated them. Why should they recoil from her? She was my loving sister, funny, kind. It’s one of the experiences that has changed my life. At work, people will passively aggressively make noises about people who take the elevator to the second floor. But, you know, you never know what things people are struggling with. You never do. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt? How can you judge them when you don’t know?

 On my first trip, I went with her to her chemo treatments. The nurses were so sweet to Julie, and Julie, my god, the strength she had. As they filled her body with toxins to kill the cancer, she was so strong. She was still walking around at this point, and she and I would go out for coffee, but she was starting to get easily fatigued. After I returned, she posted good news on Facebook. The tumors had shrunk – the chemo was working! She took pictures of herself at the MD Anderson Cancer Center Survivor’s plaza, and I thought, yes, my sister would be a cancer survivor! But. But. But, this was the sunlight before the storm.