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Millie Sparks
Umbrellas
My older sister tells me she has cancer in a breathless rush, like she is relaying a hot bit of nonconsequential gossip while making dinner before rushing her youngest son to soccer practice.
In fewer than two months they will remove both breasts. I beg her to let me come to help her during recovery. Although I am not notorious for being a caregiver. I need to be near her to know that she is really okay. That she is not in too much pain. That she can move on from this with the dignity of a feisty warrior princess. Which is what she has always been.
“Why do you think God gave me boys and no girls?” she asks while we watch TV shows from our youth like The Jefferson’s and 227.
“Probably because when you were in the 8th grade you were determined your daughter’s name would be Destiny Star. I think God trusted you more with boy names.”
We do not say anything about the obvious maiming of a person’s body. We gossip about friends and friends’ former husbands when we are both at an age where men leave their wives for women half her age and half my weight and don’t look back.
We do not say it should have been me because I have more of Mama’s genetic makeup and cancer runs unchecked on her side of the family. But we are still our mother’s daughters, and we snap at our well-meaning husbands when they are trying to help us, mine driving all the way from the coast to Raleigh to pick me up from her house because I can’t drive in heavy traffic…her at her husband who keeps pushing for her to go outside and take a walk when less than a week prior we were all praying she wouldn’t die on the operating table.
When young women think of what it means to be female, they think of shaved legs and scented perfumes and sexy bra and panty sets. But a middle-aged woman knows that is in the way we keep reaching for more even as life takes from us the things that we once thought made us whole– the way we reach for dignity in our long slow march towards our own inevitable deaths because forward is the only way to move…the only way to get through storms to our next rainbow period which will bear much happiness. We will enjoy that moment, too, but we won’t forget to bring our umbrellas; and you won’t find us looking back.
About the Writer:
Millie Sparks has been published in Please See Me, The Write Launch and is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys and Kakalak. She is a librarian living and working in Eastern North Carolina.
Image: Women with Parasols by Aristarkh Lentulov (1882-1943). Oil on canvas. 33.3 x 46.8 inches. 1910. Public domain.
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