Dear Risa

Dear Risa:

I wish you could see me and I could see you. I’m wearing this beautiful hot pink mohair sweater you knitted for me fifty-four years ago. Your love is in every stitch. I feel it. You made sure to include every detail. You knitted braided columns for oomph! You covered over each white pearlized button with pink mohair to match. I’ll never let it go. It’s the only physical memento I have from you. I’ve remembered you all these years. You made a significant difference in my life.

Remember our apartment on Springdale Avenue in East Orange? When we were juniors at Upsala College? Well it wasn’t exactly an apartment. It was one very large room bedroom/living room/study area with long tall windows that allowed lots of sunlight in, and even in dark rainy days it was a pretty cheery place. Our mini-apartment was in a very large three story old house built in 1930 with a separate full kitchen, which included an eat-in area. We shared the bathroom with others who had rooms on the same floor. Privacy wasn’t a real concern of ours then. We reveled not having to live at home with our parents, not living in a dormitory with countless rules and regulations, our own place, our own space. I looked forward to becoming seniors and graduating together. Processioning and picking up our diplomas, greeting our parents, sharing personal and family joy together. Here’s where I get tearful, Risa. I am blotting up water droplets on this paper as I write. Thinking of how much you suffered and never lost your smile, never lost being kind to me and everyone else you knew.

Instead of returning to school for our senior year, I watched you being buried on a hot summer’s day, August 30, 1963 at Beth Israel cemetery in Woodbridge, NJ. I watched intently as your mom and dad and your younger brother each put shovels of dirt over your coffin. Then it was closed and lowered. It was a heart-wrenching scene. Seeing your distraught parents torn apart tore me apart. I turned away. I couldn’t look at them face-to-face. I convinced myself they couldn’t have seen me in the midst of this huge crowd of family and friends who came to comfort them and say good-bye to you.

Risa, I want you to know how much your family helped me. They protected me from knowing how sick you were. They protected me from earlier grieving. Until you died. Then it was a shock to me. A total shock. A bolt of sadness descended upon me. It surrounded me. It enclosed me. I couldn’t get free. How could such a loving, kind, benevolent, generous young woman be fated with lymphosarcoma, cancer of the lymph system, before she ever lived long enough to see her twenty-first birthday? A few months before you died, you said, Carol, pray for me. I heard your words concretely, literally. I didn’t listen to the underlying, pleading message. I missed pray for me to live, only pray that I return to good health. Of course I prayed for you. Of course, you would get better. How wrong was I!

After your burial, I couldn’t imagine being at another, not for a very long time. But my father’s was a little less than two years later. Letting you go was very difficult. Letting my father go was very difficult. But two holes in my heart remain.

Carol.