Sister "Bad Ass"
Pray for us!
Lent in the Orthodox church starts tomorrow.
I’m supposed to be fasting from my blog posting for Lent like I wrote here on this blog just last week . . . but I’m a lawyer, and I found a loophole with the Orthodox Lent being a week later than when we Baptists observe or, rather, don’t observe it. So, sue me.
We got back this evening from being out of town for my sister Susan’s memorial mass, and I have to go back to work tomorrow . . . but I can’t sleep, and so I write.
It’s what I do.
I found this old photo of my sister when she was in her early twenties on her Facebook page, and I was struck by how physically beautiful she was back then. Over the next fifty years as her body crumbled, her soul truly shined. How did that happen?
Maybe I can find the answer in what I’ve written in the last two weeks about my sister who I always called “Suzi Q” and who always called me “Marco Polo.” Last week, Suzi Q died . . . but only if you believe in that kind of stuff, which me and Suzi Q don’t . . . and she really doesn’t now!
I wrote four different posts about my sister this past week, "Daydream Believer," "Fire And Rain," "O Suzi Q," and "Why Me, Lord," and I included four different songs that she loved. Three of these four posts might make you cry. One of them, hopefully, will make you laugh. Those were two things that she did with such ease.
In her life, my sister faced and defeated Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma about thirty years ago and then breast cancer about twenty years ago and then a lung embolism about ten years ago and finally vestiges of her breast cancer that came back last fall and filled her lungs with fluid, which she bravely fought for four months that bought her another birthday, another anniversary with her husband Scott, another Christmas with their son Taylor, his wife, Carrie, and their children Landon, Carter, and Adalyn, as well as with all her family and friends who loved her and still do.
Taylor delivered his mother’s eulogy on Saturday at a perfectly beautiful memorial mass in the beautiful chapel of the Jesuit prep school that Susan got Taylor admitted into twenty years ago by sheer guts and her determined will.
To people who’ve asked me about her, I’ve summed up my sister’s life like this . . .
She looked death in the eyes four times, and three times she made death blink.
The fourth time, she and Jesus laughed in death’s face.
At her memorial, her son called her “bad ass.”
I’m ending this post with a song that I first heard sung one Sunday morning at a church near my sister’s house that my family attended about twenty years ago when Scott and Susan had invited everyone over as they did every year to celebrate Easter. I hope that you’ll listen to the song. As my sister taught me when we were in our teens, the answer to our questions is always in the song.