My practice of daily Holly Days posts always gets harder in the “Christmas taint” (a term I just learned from Twitter) as the wonderfulness fades. Part of my process is to reread my old posts for the day, partly to avoid being too repetitive (at which I often fail), and I was struck by my post for 2014, written shortly and gratefully after my sister Deena’s successful knee-replacement surgery, where they also found and removed a tumor. I was so grateful for her expected cure, but find myself even more grateful in even more unexpected ways in retrospect.
We had been living together for a decade before, although a couple years prior I had taken a job in the Bay Area, becoming sort of bi-urban, spending 8 hours of most weekends traversing California between Berkeley and Topanga in my beloved and thrifty little VW diesels. We had planned for me to drop her off at the hospital and then visit her daily, but Deena was an extraordinarily sensitive soul who had managed to avoid being hospitalized her whole life, and she was so freaked out that I knew there was no way I could leave her there alone, even for just a few days. So without even a change of clothes, I spent the next 3 days sleeping on the surprisingly comfortable pull-out chair that hospital provided for just such a purpose. We had been missing each other, and we were grateful for the opportunity to just hang out together.
I was 12 years old before I managed to stay awake to welcome the New Year and Deena would often excitedly share the movies she had seen on TV after I had fallen asleep. Local TV in LA was programmed more with classic films than reruns back then, and I loved her vivid explanations of the plots of her favorite films like Lost Horizon, Maltese Falcon, and Spellbound, and eagerly tried and failed to stay awake to join her when the TV Guide showed that one of her favorites was going to be on. We enjoyed movies together for the rest of our lives, and spent most of our time together in the hospital, often with her sleepless with pain or anxiety, watching the schlocky Christmas movie marathon on the Hallmark Channel or classics on TCM when the schlock got too much. We did a sort of MST 3000 thing for Hallmark, kitbutzing and laughing when they wanted us to be crying, and a film-school thing for Turner with deep discussions about filmmaking. It distracted us both, and we had a ball. Given what came next, I am so grateful to have had the chance to spend so much happy time together.
Of course what happened next, a couple months later, was that the cancer metastasized. The oncologist offered the worst possible prognosis: the numerous tumors were doubling in size almost daily, there were no chemotherapy regimes that had been shown to be effective against the chondrosarcoma she was suffering from, so that she had only days to weeks to live. It was horrible, but I remain grateful that such a dire prognosis was so definitive, sparing us all any tortured deliberation about potential treatments. There wasn’t really any choice but for our whole family to just go home together and help her through the hospice process.
Deena lived one of her lives as Kamala, the Priestess of Lifecycle Transitions in the Temple of the Goddess. Most of her work was serving women going through menarche and menopause, but she had been considering branching out into hospice care as one of her fellow priestesses had done. We were grateful that she and her wise mentor joined us to serve as our death doulas. Deena had also founded an extraordinary program in her classroom for high functioning autistic middle schoolers as well as having just completed a masters degree in counseling psychology, so she found profound purpose in her illness, deciding to give a sort of master class in dying.
I remain so deeply grateful to her for the conscious way she approached not only her death, but also our mourning and grief. It was a few crazy whirlwind weeks with her committed to having the best death ever. It was an extraordinarily beautiful process that completely transformed our grieving, for which I know we were all filled with gratitude, despite the painful loss.
Deena was my coauthor of Holly Days, which she had embraced so gaily. She was also my closest friend who I miss desperately, especially here during these Holly Days, which she loved and promoted. One can have a closeness to their siblings that can run deeper than any other relationship. She and I lived together on Paradise Lane for almost 30 years and I will remain filled with gratitude for her deep and unconditional love, her faith and belief in me, and for her love of these Holly Days until the day I join her under a little Valley Oak in the Pleyto Cemetery. Part of the reason I am here helping to take care of these little girls is to hopefully try and imbue them with some of her beautiful spirit that I carry and gratefully cherish.
Happy Holly Days, and grateful Gratitude, dear sister!
HOLLY DAYS 