My Cousin Beth

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I’m off this week, but I’m leaving a note behind. Musings about life. We got a call this past week from family back east. A cousin of mine died after a long fight with cancer. It’s usually called a battle, isn’t it, dealing with that disease. Thinking of it as a fight, though, brings it down to the intimately personal level. With all the doctors, machines, medicines and prayers thrown against the disease when it attacks, it’s ultimately one person alone in the ring with the beast. Brutal punches, black eyes and abrasions, falling down and getting back up, writhing in pain, limping dazedly and doggedly back into the fight to face the opponent once again. Over and over. 

Cousins are fun people, for those lucky enough to have them. They’re family, but not competing for space in your house and when they stay for dinner when you’re a kid your mom is nice to them and you have little secret jokes between you like brothers and sisters but there’s less fighting with them. Cousins are kind of like friends whose parents treat you like their own. Family, but friends. I had a lot of cousins, growing up. During my middle school years my family lived on the Chesapeake Bay beachfront and on summer weekends our big old creaky beach house was loaded up with cousins.

It was, and is, a big family. When we were kids  – I am among the older ones of that set – we fished, ran the beach, hunted for soft drink bottles to get the 2-cent deposit (a nickel for the big “family-size” ones) and turned the money in on the spot for penny candy and baseball cards. Then as time went on as it always does there were more cousins added to the tribe, little ones who would tag along as best they could. They were actually watched out for and kept from harm by us older kids, and somehow none ever really got left out. 

Beth, the cousin who went on to her heavenly home last week, was one of the younger set.  She will always be, to me, the sparkling little girl at the family cookouts and other gatherings who was so inquisitive and active and fun, who somehow grew up be a leader in the family, a prime organizer of the annual Brunswick Stew¹ that our families cooked in a big cauldron outdoors and everybody came. In her professional life she was a bright and gentle soul who made the caring profession her life’s work. That laugh! Her sophisticated wit, the quick hugs all around. Her family will mark her passing with an Irish wake, and all that implies. Smiles, stories, and laughter. Laugh until you cry.

I’ll see you again next week, neighbors. In the meantime, hold in your heart, or touch if you can, someone you love. 

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