My Beautiful Cousin Nancy

 My Beautiful Cousin Nancy 

"To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig."
My mother used to say this as we were coming home from shopping in the big city of Watsonville.

Watsonville was about 20,000 people in the 1950s, which was big enough for a little farming and food processing town, not to mention the brothels, which I probably shouldn't mention, but they were a big part of the town's economy back in the day, and I write for adults, so there, I mention them.
The brothels of Watsonville and Pajaro affected my family's life.

After the death of my grandmother, Lyllian, from Pick's disease (a dementia that affects young to middle aged people. You can look it up) in 1938, my grandfather consoled himself in the brothels of Watsonville, and across the river in Pajaro.
He brought some of the girls home, to the extreme annoyance of his adult daughters, and eventually married one named Sally. They had an agreement that Sally would stay with him until he died, at which point she would inherit the ranch.

But Sally – oh, Sally – at some point got weary of her promise, or perhaps got a better offer, and she ran off for about six months.

When she came back, my grandfather changed his will. She would no longer inherit the whole ranch, however she would get a lifetime income from the ranch, until she died. After her passing the ranch would go to my grandfather’s heirs.

The heirs were my grandfather's four children, Thelma, John, Lois, and Vivian (called Chick).

Two of them, my dad John and his sister Chick, died long before Sally did. Chick from multiple sclerosis (1964) and my dad from heart disease (1975).
Chick and her husband Art had two daughters, Nancy and Charlotte.

Nancy was about 9 months older than me, and we bonded early and deep. After I moved to Washington state, we didn’t see much of each other for a few decades except for occasional visits, but we talked on the phone and sent each other cards and letters.

Nancy and her sister Charlotte and I developed a running joke: "Is Sally dead yet?" Meaning, are we getting an inheritance yet? It made us laugh. We were not exactly holding our breath for that big pie in the sky day.

Nancy and I used to talk for hours on the phone, and one time when she called me, I had been having a rough time and when she asked, "How are you?" I said, "I am - just - *ucking - peachy." 

We both fell out laughing.

Later she was diagnosed with colon cancer and she had surgery and chemo. That went into remission, and then it came back, and “*ucking peachy” seemed like an apt expression for how things were going.

The cancer finally got Nancy in 2014. Isn’t that just *ucking peachy?

 She talked to me beforehand about knowing she was going to die, and knowing the surgery and chemo were stalling tactics, and about the nights she cried, alone in her bedroom, knowing her life was going to end, and how scared and sad she was.

She also lived her finite life to the fullest. She and her sister Charlotte went on road trips around the West. I got included in some of those trips. I went to Glacier Park with them, and decided that Glacier Park should be on everyone's bucket list. My gosh. Natural beauty like I had never seen before.

We also did a cemetery tour in Watsonville, where various relatives were buried. My parents, our grandfather and grandmother, a few great aunts and great uncles, and next generation aunts and uncles. My stillborn sister, who rests in an unmarked plot under grass.

In January, 2014, Nancy went blind in one eye, the result of her chemo treatments.

That’s one of the things about cancer treatment. The treatments can be more brutal than the disease.

At that point Nancy said, I'm suffering, and she decided to stop fighting the cancer.

In April she went into hospice, at her home in Benicia, California.
I went down to see her.

Now, Nancy was the most ridiculously upbeat person I have ever known. I cannot tell you why. Life sure did not give her many breaks.

Her favorite song, which she asked me to sing for her, was, "Smile." The haunting melody was written by Charles Chaplin, and the lyrics were added later by a couple of guys named John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.I sang it for Nancy:

Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it’s breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
you’ll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You’ll see the sun come shining through
for you

Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile what’s the use of crying
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you’ll just
Smile
©Copyright 1954 by Bourne Co. Copyright Renewed All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured

I visited Nancy, I sang the song for her, I said farewell and came home to the Northwest.
Sometime in May her sister Charlotte called me and said that Nancy wanted to talk to me.
Her voice was so gravelly from her illness that I could not understand what she was saying, so I had to ask her to repeat herself a couple of times.

Finally, I got it.
She was saying, "Is Sally dead yet?"*

That was the last time I talked to her.

She died about nine in the evening on my birthday in May.

It was about five months after my husband Rick died. I spent some time being a little pissed off at God then. How was I to get by without those two, who had known me the longest, and known me the best, and loved me anyway? You know how I did it - how we all do it - one foot in front of the other, one day at a time. 

How I miss them both. 

*Sally died in 1990 or ‘91.  We did not hear until months afterward.