Sunday, March 05, 2006
Rest In Peace Joan Cunningham
My father’s younger sister, my aunt Joan, died today. If I have her year of birth right, she would have turned 67 at the end of this month.
Just a couple weeks or so ago, there was a day when she fell and couldn’t get up all day, until her husband came home. I don’t know how suddenly such frail health had come on, but what they found after that was lung and, worse, liver cancer, with a prognosis of three months at the outside, to be spent in nursing home care. I understand she was in rough shape as of Thursday, but this is faster than we had expected.
I hadn’t blogged about it before now, but I kept thinking of Joan the day Valerie was born; a sad corona to the brightest of days. It juxtaposed a beginning and ending of the cycle of life we all share.
It’s ironic that the name of Roy Rogers came up in conversation with our company today. The last time I saw Joan, she was excited at not only having recently visited the Roy Rogers Museum in California, but also having had her picture taken with the man himself. And that tells me it had been way too long.
My aunt shared my interest in our family history and genealogy, maybe more so, and was perhaps the family member most connected with the wider Ellis family in Prince Edward Island and beyond. Joan loved PEI, visiting as often as possible. The first time she went there, it felt to her like going home, in a way no other place ever had.
She raised three great kids, a girl and two boys. Sadly, today is the birthday of the oldest one, Jody. I’d planned to post that in one of my “happy birthday” announcement posts, but now that would seem all wrong. When my grandfather was on his own, living out the final many years of his life, she did whatever helping out he needed. In the end, she held his hand and assured him it was time, and was okay to let go. I’m glad, in the odd way one can be in these circumstances, that she didn’t linger at the gate much longer than he did. Certainly I’d take away the cancer and rid her life of its proximate cause, but absent that deific bending of fact and time, when facing the music, dance with finality, no curtain calls.
Yet no amount of lingering or flying swiftly out of this world can make us miss you less, as it should be.