Thursday Child
Thursday Child
The Girl With the Stars in Her Eyes
Sunday, March 14.
Somewhere over the Middle East.
Qatar Airways. Flight 69. Doha - Madrid.
I am on the second leg of my flight from Oman to Madrid. In Doha I race to catch my connection. A couple of hours earlier I had been in a café in Muscat, catching up on news from home while men in long dishdasha’s smoked şişa while staring into laptop screens and Arabic dubbed Hollywood action films played on a large flatscreen tv hanging on the wall. My sister had successfully undergone open heart surgery a week and a half earlier in New York and I checked my email as often as I could for news on her recovery. Then later I was in a taxi to the airport and then a flight from Muscat to Doha.
Soon after getting on the flight from Doha to Madrid I fell asleep. Somewhere over the Middle East I woke up and looked out the window. There were millions of stars outside.
A week later I was on a flight from Madrid to Chicago, via Warsaw. Arriving into O’Hare I checked my email and found a message from my sister. Sad news about her surgery. But she was home and mom and Jasper, her son, were with her, as well as the rest of us on the email and phone chain. We were all out in support and like her, we believed that she was going to pull through this, just like she’d pulled through in the past. She and I talked, she was weak and tired, but she still laughed. I joked about her superpower: resiliency.
This was Monday, March 22. On Thursday morning of that week, she passed away.
As oldest brother, I was tasked with, among other things, the eulogy. It was a heavy task and I was fortunate to have my sister Nelly help out. In my state of shock and loss, the only thing I was able to write down was a list, “Some things about her.” At the top of the page I wrote, “The Girl With the Stars in Her Eyes.” When complete sentences fail, a list can help. As I’ve mentioned before, lists can help us create order out of the chaos of the everyday. They are, at their most basic, a narrative, a story, a saying to overcome the said.
The Girl With the Stars in Her Eyes
1.When we were teens and living out in the country, we would sometimes lie down on the ground and look up at the stars and talk and talk and talk.
2.When she laughed, her laughter could be heard across three, four, five states.
3.When I see photos us as kids, I often stare at her and think there is something about her. Then I realize: I don’t remember her with two legs.
4.Her eyes, bright with stars.
5.There were times in the middle of a phone conversation when she would say, “You know, I just realized that I have one leg.” And I would respond: “Really? What happened to the other one?” After a bit she would say, “I don’t know.”
6.When she smiled the room would lighten as her dimples grew deeper.
7.Her brutal honesty as a kid sometimes grated on me. When asked what had happened to her leg she would respond with the medical term for the type of cancer she had. I would often tell her to take advantage of the storytelling opportunities; shark attack, grisly lawnmower accident, aliens, el cucuy.
8.She gifted her community with many things, many gifts, many memories. Her greatest: her son.
9.At a literary reception in Manhattan she once met David Foster Wallace. When he asked her what had happened to her leg, she responded: Shark attack. His response: No! That same thing happened to my friend!
10. She taught us all how to live.
To hear my nephew tell it, his mommy was a Thursday. She was born on a Thursday. Her leg was amputated on a Thursday. She underwent open heart surgery on a Thursday. She passed away on a Thursday.
I remember her most on Thursdays.
Thursday, May 13, 2010