Modern Lore 7.5: Have you loved a difficult person?
ed. note: you can share memories from any prompt at any time. I will collect memories through Sunday morning. Responses can be one word or one thousand, vague or specific, and take on any format that suits you. They are not shared with anyone else.
Have you loved a difficult person?
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It was unlike father to call during his workday. I double-checked when I was flying from Syracuse to O'Hare so the conversation could be over quickly, but his tone carried the sigh of bad news. It wasn't immediately clear what happened, if it was complications from another experimental drug trial or surgery or sickness, because M.S. itself does not take one in their sleep. Father said it was explained in a note and told me not to worry about moving my flight. We could break the Jewish tradition of a burial within 24 hours. I had been her closest niece or nephew, and they needed me there. The rabbi would understand
There wasn't a large turnout. The guests were made up of our small immediate family, neighbors from the condo, a couple women she had met in her M.S. support group. She didn't have many friends. They had been pushed away by her temper, which came out suddenly and rabidly, the way I sometimes snap with subtle provocation. She was buried next to her mother, seven months before her father.
Her obituary shares no details about her life. The text is a short list of relations dead and alive. I don't know if a tribute would have had to be paid by the word, or if there was none offered. Father found hundreds of pages in her nightstand, diary entries he thought hidden, but I recall moments where she handed me a chapter during my Sunday cleaning, asking me to transcribe. They had not revealed much about her life, like the torrid relationship with the grandma I never met, but the way she wrote about California, the embrace of sunlight, the ocean, the air in Malibu, was laced with adoration.
2008