by Cory Hiles
It is my desire that Johnny Krimshaw become the custodian of my remains, and those of my husband, Louie.
Johnny, you know your gift, and I know you will not shy away from the responsibilities your gift will force upon you.
It is my desire that every time you put your gift to use successfully, that you would sprinkle a pinch of our ashes in the place where you succeed.
I knew after reading Miss Lilly’s instructions for me that there was no longer any way for me to weasel out of using my ‘gift’ for the greater good of dead humanity. Even if I could have found a way to lie to myself and ignore the gift with a clear conscience before the reading of the will, there was no way I could do so after the reading. I could not allow myself let Miss Lilly down.
I decided it was time to fully embrace my gift and start planning my life around the consequences such a gift inevitably brought with it. Though I must admit, I was still pretty relieved when I considered that I still had two years of school left, and possibly college after that, before I could really try to put my gift to use.
After the funeral we held a reception at the farm. Miss Lilly’s family and friends were welcomed into our home as if they were our own family and friends. It was a heartwarming occasion and I began to realize that Miss Lilly’s impact on everybody she touched was similar to the impact she’d had on me.
Not one person at any point during the reception launched into a case of the poor-me’s. Nobody tried to convince anybody else that the loss of Miss Lilly was somehow greater in their own life than in anybody else’s. Everybody had enough love for, and understanding of, Miss Lilly and her impact in people’s lives to know that everybody was equally impacted; nobody more so or less so than anybody else.
Though many tears were shed by many people throughout the entirety of the reception, the general atmosphere was one of gaiety and jubilant celebration rather than a somber and mournful affair, for which I was truly glad. I felt that Miss Lilly would prefer to be remembered with laughter over tears any day.
When the reception was over, the house was remarkably clean. Although June and I had protested, the guests had insisted on seeing to the chores; the full garbage’s were taken out, the food was put away and all the dishes were washed and put away.
Miss Lilly’s room had been gone over with a fine tooth comb. Not like a group of vultures had descended upon it, but with the tenderness and grace of those who were honoring a dead friend’s request to help with the painful chore of cleaning up. The only items that remained after the reception were the large heavy pieces of furniture.
When the reception ended and silence finally descended upon the house again, June and I sat together at the kitchen table and discussed the general feeling of happiness that had been so prevalent through the reception, and how much it warmed our hearts to see that Miss Lilly’s love had not been reserved solely for us, but had been distributed equally among everybody she had known.
Finally, after chatting about Miss Lilly and life in general we had exhausted ourselves enough to find comfort in sleep and we kissed each other good night and headed off to bed.
When I entered my room I immediately saw that my notepad was laying on my bed again, and also detected a faint trace of rose scent still lingering in the air. I knew that the intensity of the smell was faint enough to mean that Elle had been there recently but had already departed, so I did not bother looking for her, but instead went for the notepad.
It is good to hear you laugh, so many lose their joy in the face of sorrow.
Elle
It was the first note I’d ever received from Elle with a personal signature on it, and it was the signature that I focused on, more so than the message. I couldn’t help wondering if the fact that she’d added a personal touch to the note in the form of a signature meant that we were finally growing closer.
I knew it was foolish of me to fantasize about having some kind of relationship with a dead girl, but I couldn’t help it. Elle seemed to embody all of the qualities that make a woman wonderful.
The faint images in my mind were enough to convince me that she was beautiful beyond compare. The deviousness of hiding my clothes and hiding a spoon in my sock all those years ago showed that she possessed a humorous streak and enjoyed mischief. And the notes, along with the cradling I’d received from her showed a streak of love and compassion at least a mile wide in her. And I wondered if her desire to remain just out of sight might indicate that she was shy or unsure of herself, and therefore not prone to narcissism.
I thanked Elle out loud as I was getting into my pajamas, put the new note into my dictionary with the other ones, clicked out the lamp and fell into sleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.
I will never know if the gentle kiss that I felt on my cheek as I drifted into dreamland was real or imagined, but either way, I went to dreamland smiling at the end of a day that had been full of sorrow and joy.
By the summer’s end, June and I had begun to find our new rhythm in the house without Miss Lilly there. We never quite got over the fact that we felt like a band without a drummer, but we still managed to keep the music flowing and found our way in a world that seemed a bit darker without Miss Lilly’s light shining forth, illuminating our path.
CHAPTER 26
I have never been one to spend much time brooding. Up to the age of sixteen I had always assumed that I would be able to handle anything that life threw at me without spending an undue amount of time complaining—silently or out loud—about the curveballs, spitballs, fastballs, and inside pitches that were hurled my way.
After Miss Lilly’s death and the year that followed, however, I did seem to find myself spending more than usual amounts of time considering just how unfair life could be, and how cruel a master Time could be to us, His humble servants.
Time flows relentlessly forward like a river, sometimes serenely but always powerfully; eroding our defenses, changing the course of our lives in ways we never expect, and often carrying us places we have no desire to go. But like a boat without oars caught in the swift current of that river, we are powerless to change the direction that Time has decided we must travel.
June and I had thought that good old Father Time had played his dirtiest trick on us on June 10th, 1999—my sixteenth birthday and the Dia De La Meurte for our dear Miss Lilly. I truly wish that Time had been finished serving up bad cards then, but as it turned out, Time still had several more decks to deal from, and the hand He dealt next was was one that even dead Louie—who had nothing to lose—wouldn’t have bet on.
The new school year brought with it some new challenges. Testing was heavy that year and college prep was the dominant theme through the entire school year. Each day I came home bedraggled and weary.
It just didn’t feel right coming home after a hard day at school and not having Miss Lilly there, offering me snacks and practically begging to hear how my day went. It was the hardest part of life without Miss Lilly for me to adjust to.
On top of a heavy course load at school, I tried to pick up as many of Miss Lilly’s responsibilities around the house as I could so that June would not have to. As tired as I was each day when I got home, June was usually flat out exhausted when she got home. I just wouldn’t have felt right if she would have had to come home and cook and clean and powder my butt for me.
I had a long way to go before I was as good a cook as Miss Lilly had been, but I had been an attentive student in her kitchen and I could do a passable job at it. June was never one to complain about a meal she didn’t have to cook so we at least managed to avoid starvation in Miss Lilly’s absence.
Once or twice a week I would go through and vacuum the house and dust the flat surfaces. I also mowed the lawn every weekend during the growing season, but that had been my chore since I was old enough to push a mower.
June and I did our own laundry individually. I had no desire to see her unmentionables, and I had far too many track marks in mine to be comfortable with her seeing the
m.
To make a long story short, school was more challenging than ever the year after we lost Miss Lilly, and home had become more challenging as well. The new responsibilities at home beat the Hell out of being locked in a basement eating dryer cooked hot dogs, fo’ sho’, but it was still challenging.
Whenever I felt my stress levels rising to a point where I thought they might just kill me, or cause me to kill someone else, I would go to my room and pull the gris-gris that Miss Lilly had made for me out of my treasure drawer. It was the same drawer that contained my dictionary and several notes from Elle, as well a couple photographs of Joe and my mother.
Gris-gris in hand, I would sit at the chair in my dormer window staring out at the scenery and rubbing it gently between my fingers while thinking about Miss Lilly’s big round smiling face. I didn’t know what charms Miss Lilly had imbued the gris-gris with, but it was comforting to hold it.
More often than not I would cry while I fingered it, but the tears were not soul wrenching tears of depression. They were instead, somehow cleansing; washing away my burden of stress and polishing me up for the challenges I still had to face.
On more than one occasion, while I was lost in memory and trying to unwind, I sensed Elle’s presence in the room. Sometimes I could sense her only by scent, but other times by a scent and a gentle hand on my shoulder.
At first I looked for her when I sensed her, but she remained completely invisible to my eyes and eventually I quit trying to see her. She was growing closer to me, of that I was sure, but she was still too unsure of herself to reveal herself to me in any type of visible form other than the occasional fleeting glimpse of her shadow which I could only see from the corners of my eyes.
I tried repeatedly to make contact with her but our relationship seemed to be frustratingly decided on her terms, not mine. But usually when I found myself in the grip of despair or depression she would reveal herself in subtle ways, though never visually.
Elle seemed to be particularly tuned in to despair and I often wondered if she had suffered great tragedy in her life, or perhaps succumbed to the pitfalls associated with the deepest levels of depression and taken her own life.
I figured it was something like that but I also figured I would always be left wondering, for I doubted she would ever grow comfortable enough in my presence to tell me anything about herself. But I hoped that given enough time she would become confident enough of my love for her to open up.
Time; that cruel master that forces us forward with all the unrelenting ferocity of Pharaoh’s toughest taskmasters. Driving us forward with the whip and with the truth that the greatest reward we can hope to gain by following along placidly is a peaceful and painless death, while at the same time imbuing us with the truth that death may come to us at any time; unannounced, and far from peaceful or painless.
June had been weary all that summer, and I had taken up as much responsibility as I could to allow her more time for rest after work, but as our cruel taskmaster marched us ever onward, I began to become concerned with June’s weariness.
It wasn’t only her weariness that concerned me. June had begun complaining of lower back pain, and was eating like a bird, trying to convince me that she just wasn’t hungry. I also noticed that she seemed to be making an awful lot of trips to the restroom.
Every month that went by seemed to leave her weaker and more worn out than the month before and by November I began pestering her to go to the doctor. She resisted, of course. She was convinced that it was just the heavy workload she was bearing at work, and the fact that she was growing older.
Dinner had always been a special time in our family, similar to June and my morning ritual around the kitchen table. When Miss Lilly was still with us, the three of us used to sit around the dinner table, laughing, telling stories, talking about our day, and life in general.
I was afraid that our evening soliloquies might be dampened by Miss Lilly’s passing, but if anything, June and I became more engaged with each other and grew even closer during the dinner chats. Possibly because we realized in the face of Miss Lilly’s death that the only thing either of us had standing between us and a life of lonely solitude was each other.
It was nearly always at the dinner table that June and I had our most serious discussions, and it was where I most often brought up the topic of her going to see the doctor.
“I’m just gettin’ to be an old bitty, Baby,” June said to me one night at supper as I pestered her about going in for a checkup, “I’m going to be forty-five soon you know. It ain’t like I’m a spring chicken.”
I chose to turn her reasoning against her. Normally, even as clever as I was, June could usually beat me in a battle of wits, and always beat me in a battle of wills, but I was determined not to let that happen this time.
“Yes, June,” I said emphatically. “You are getting older, which is exactly why it is so important for you to get yourself checked out. Even if it’s just old age creeping up on you, at least we’ll know that that’s all it is and not something worse.”
“Oh, Johnny, you’re bein’ dramatic. All I need is a week or so off to relax and I’ll be right as rain. Maybe this spring when you have your two week break from school I’ll get the time off from work and we’ll take a trip to the beach or something, get a little R and R then, okay? Now stop pestering me to go to the doctor.”
I exploded. I didn’t mean to explode, and wasn’t even aware that I was going to explode until I jumped up from my chair and words came gushing out of my mouth. “GODDAMMIT JUNE! Don’t you get it? You are the only goddamn thing I’ve got left in the world! You…that’s it…nothing else, I can’t lose you too, June.”
As my flash flood anger subsided tears began to well up in my eyes, and I could say nothing. All I could do was stand there, with my muscles tensed and my fists curled into tight balls, staring at June as the tears spilled over my lower eyelids and ran down my cheeks.
June got up and came to where I stood and held me as I lost all composure and sank into her, sobbing some incoherent string of jabber about being alone into her shoulder. I hadn’t intended to cry, but was glad I did.
Turning on the eye faucets has been a reliable tactic that women have employed against men for millennia to get their way, and I found it to be an effective weapon against June’s stubbornness—albeit a weapon that I hadn’t used intentionally.
“Ok, Baby,” June cooed as she rubbed my back with one hand and held the back of my head with the other. “Shh, shh, ok… I’ll go…I’ll go… ok? You’re right, it’s time. I’ll go.”
Once I realized that the tears were working wonders, (much better than my fake, onion induced tears from years earlier) and appeared to be the one weapon I could use effectively against June’s stubborn will, it became difficult to focus on what she was saying because I was busy wondering how many past battles I might have won if I’d been able to cry on command without the pervasive smell of onions accompanying my tears.
When I finally stopped my mind from trying to figure out new and exciting ways to use tears to my advantage and began paying attention to June again, I was devastated to see that she was feeling horrible about the “trauma” she’d put me through by being so “selfish” and never stopping to think about how “terrified” I must be at the prospect of being left alone in the world.
In some ways she was right, I was terrified of losing her, but I didn’t feel that she had been selfish, and I was fairly certain I hadn’t been traumatized by her inaction—just frightened and exasperated.
Even in light of my victory in our battle of wills, the resultant guilt I felt for feeling like I had somehow misled June or misconstrued my true feelings was enough to convince me that using tears to one’s advantage was a dirty trick, and one that I’d never employ again.
Two weeks later June had an appointment with her doctor. Her doctor was not certain what was bothering her but he was fairly certain that it was a lot more than heavy workloads and old age so h
e ordered some blood work and asked June to come back in a week later to go over the results.
The following week when June went to the doctor, his prognosis was not at all encouraging. The blood tests had come back showing a significant increase in white blood cell counts as well as elevated CA 125 levels.
He suspected, but had no concrete evidence that June may have ovarian cancer. He assured her that elevated blood counts and CA 125 levels could have many different causes and certainly were not the signature on a death warrant.
He performed an initial gynecological examination and detected several masses in her uterus and decided that it would be prudent to send her on to a specialist for further evaluation. He set up an appointment with a local gynecologic oncologist for the following week to do a thorough physical examination on her.
June was terrified of what the oncologist might find and it was all I could do to keep my own fear swallowed down in order to be able to support and encourage June.
The old gambler known as Time was marching relentlessly forward in November of 1999 and He had stacked the cards against us, no doubt smiling as hope and joy were being systematically removed from our lexicons.
The oncologist’s discoveries were not good. June was diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer which had already metastasized into her lungs and liver. The five year survival rate for women diagnosed at this stage was only around eleven percent.
If June was going to have any hope of survival she would have to have a complete hysterectomy, as well as have part of her liver and pieces of both lungs removed in order to remove as much of the malignancy as possible (the oncologist called this process “debulking”) before starting chemotherapy and drug regimens in hopes of getting the cancer under control.
At the tail end of November, 1999, winter was descending on the farm with unusually cold temperatures and unusually distressing news. June came home from the doctor looking as pale and as weak as I had ever seen her and I knew the news was grim before she even said a word to me.
