My Cousin and My Friend

There were 19 of us.  Johnny, Mary Lou, Judy, Jimmy, Chuck, Angie, Linda, Mikki, Michael, Salvatore, Karen, Joey, Michael, Mark, Marci, Marianne, Maryann, Debbie and Toni. There have been 19 cousins since 1964, but as we end 2010, there are only 17 of us left.  Earlier this year we lost my cousin Judy, and just this week, we lost my cousin Marianne.  Age-wise, Marianne was my closest cousin, even closer in age than my sisters. We were born seven years and two days apart.

We were close in other ways, as well.  For several years, starting in the late 80's through the mid-90's Marianne was the director of an ensemble that I sang in. Not just me, but my mother, my sister, my husband, her sister, and several of our very closest friends. I'm not sure, maybe we were all close because of Ensemble. It was just one of those experiences that stays with you.

Marianne was amazing. She taught me so many things. She could do anything. She was like MacGyver when it came to sewing. You could ask her to make your wedding dress and she could create a perfect fairy princess gown out of paperclips and lace. In an hour. She taught me to sew, not like her, but still passably. She showed me how to cut out patterns and put all the pieces together.  She took me to buy what I needed for my own sewing box. It's pink with a flowery pattern. She gave me a set of straight pins and bought a red heart magnetic pin cushion and little pink snips for me.

When I told her I was getting married, she jumped right in and created all the decorations for the church, all the flowers, the corsages, the boutonnieres, even two topiary trees for the altar. I still have one of them at the turn of my staircase and it still looks beautiful.

Marianne taught me about music, too. When she needed a song transposed from one key to another for the Ensemble, she'd give it to me.  I know nothing about music.  I can carry a tune, but that's about it. I can't read music and I don't know one key from another.  But Marianne forced me to learn.  She taught me algebra, something I never managed to understand while in school, just by showing me how to transpose the keys in a song.  And she taught me to remember the notes in the five main lines of the treble clef by using the acronym Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. It was years later before I found out that the real acronym is not about food.

We shared so many special times and we laughed. A lot.

Marianne had become ill with cancer about 5 years ago. She was a fighter and every time the cancer struck her, she hit back. It traveled around her body, attacking here and then there, but she never gave in. She was hopeful through all the treatment, through chemo and radiation, through all the pain. When one cancer center told her it was over, she found another that would keep on treating her.

Over the summer they told her that the cancer was in her bones and there was a tumor in her brain. Then they started the radiation.  We drove to Philadelphia to see her and I thought for sure that she would not be coming home. But she did.  A few weeks later, several of the Ensemble members met at her house to talk and sing and laugh, and it was amazing.  From the woman I had seen, laying in the hospital bed, doped up and barely able to speak, this was Marianne as we knew her, laughing, talking, directing.

She did have more radiation and we went to see her again, just about two weeks before she died. We all laughed a lot. It was a wonderful time. She was telling us all about a production she planned on directing in the summer. She was bed bound, but still cheerful, still hopeful, still busy. Marianne wasn't afraid to die, but she didn't think about it because she still had more she planned to do.

At her funeral today, so many people spoke and had wonderful things to say, stories to tell, songs to sing, laughter to share. One thing that her husband said really stuck with me. It epitomized what everyone else had been saying.  Marianne was a person who lived her life fully engaged. 

I love you, Marianne, and I'm going to miss you.

Reunited

Some good did come from the two days of wake and funeral for my cousin Judy, and that was getting to see my cousin Jeffrey again. Jeff and I are only a year apart in age and we grew up together. He is actually my first cousin once removed (the child of my first cousin) but our close age and the closeness of our families at that time meant that we were together a lot. We stood up together in my sister's wedding (I was 6 and he was 5), and spent many weekends at my aunt's cottage on the lake. Jeff and his parents moved to Connecticut when he was 11 and I hadn't seen him in over 30 years. In all that time, I had always remembered him and thought of all the fun we'd had as children. From the moment we saw each other across the room, there was that flash of recognition and we spent the time together, afraid to let each other out of sight. The amazing part was that he remembered me the same way I remembered him.

Back in the 70's, when they moved away, pre-teens didn't have a lot of options to staying in contact. You could write letters, sure, but who really did that? You could call on the phone, but the cost of long-distance calls was an issue. Now, we can communicate so much more easily, through calls, texting, email, skype, twitter, facebook. This time, I have all his contact info and I plan to use it.

Death and Memories

My cousin died and we buried her on Thursday. She's the first of my generation to die. There was a very nice write up about her in our local paper.

The funeral was sad, as most are, but made even sadder by the fact that her 87 year old mother was sitting in the front row. Instead of a standard service, the family chose to have certain songs played between prayers. Before one song her husband told a story. Judy had been suffering from dementia for some time. She didn't always remember who she was talking to or what she was talking about, but she remembered all the words to her favorite songs. He would put the songs on and she would sing along. The song he played then was "The Way We Were" and everyone was in tears. In the quiet moment after the song, I heard my little 2 year old great niece whimpering softly, upset by all the weeping around her.

When my sister told her husband to let us know if there was anything he needed, anything at all, he said, "Bring her back."