Today would have been my sister Gloria’s 59th birthday. She missed it by a little over a month.

Gloria died of cancer after five years of humor, grace, courage, determination, and about a million other things that I will never know. She wanted to see her two fine sons graduate and make lives of their own, and she accomplished that. After a lifetime of creative giving, she asked for only that one thing, and through the efforts of her doctors, her friends and family, and her own self, she was granted it. She leaves behind friends who are scattered quite literally all around the world, people whose lives she touched and who never forgot her kindness, her empathy, her acceptance of everyone for who and what they were, her validation of the grace and goodness in people.

Throughout her cancer life, just as we had for so many years before, we stayed in touch and we had many good conversations, just like always. She lived in Missouri and I live in Maryland, so we stayed in touch as we always had — by long, laughter-filled phone calls and long, deep e-mails, letters, and cards. I think neither of us wanted to change that, even if we knew that we might never see each other again. The cancer might disrupt her body, but we would both be damned if we were going to let it disrupt our relationship.

She didn’t want us to see her like that, anyway, she said. But on the phone she sounded like she always did, that gentle, lilting voice, that surprisingly hearty laugh, that soft, whispering wonder. It hits me hardest when I find myself wanting to talk with her, to share some new thing or just to chat.

Gloria was an artist and a writer, and a genuine Creative. She wanted to be able to show her kids that you could try anything, take a chance, roll the dice, and that whatever happened would be a learning experience that would make you better as a person. Her life was an open book, an example, a lesson for whoever wanted to learn from it. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she started a blog that turned that experience into a life lesson, too.

She wrote in it whenever she could, poetic expressions of the extraordinary and the mundane, and of the extraordinary promise inherent in every mundane moment, in between chemo treatments and when she wasn’t flat out on her back from exhaustion — and sometimes even then. The silence between posts were at least as eloquent as the words she wrote; we knew what it meant, and when we saw new words appear, we rejoiced in another triumph.

I will never fully come to terms with the loss of my big sister. In a very real sense, I am here today, doing what I am doing, because of her. She was the oldest and I am the youngest, and I was her special little guy, and the knowledge that I was special to someone as wonderful as her was the treasure I kept in the sanctum sanctorum of my soul growing up, which no cruelty, no meanness, no abuse could take away — and which served as my touchstone for compassion and empathy when encountering people who hadn’t been lucky enough to have had such a treasure of their own.

The morning after Gloria died, I visited her blog. I don’t really know why, except maybe to just see her work again. And there was he title of her last blog post, written back in September about a fun trip she had taken with her dear friends:

such a wonderful wonderful time

Yep.

Safe travels, my friend. Thank you for those many times full of wonder.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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