LIFE, LOVE, DEATH, MEMORY: FOR MY DEAD NIECE WHO DESERVES MORE THAN THIS

"I said I came into this world not wanted and I will go out not wanted." 

                               Ruth Howerton-Luck, January 26, 2016.

My niece Ruth Ann Howerton-Luck died April 2, 2016, nearly two years after being diagnosed with colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver. It kept metastasizing until it was everywhere from her lungs to her brain and ovaries. She tried to stop it and lived as long as she could through the pain and the nausea, the surgeries and chemo. On Jan. 30 she told me, "I will be gone in two or three months [because] my cancer is a rapid growing kind. I want to fight a little longer so Ryan and the girls have a mom." She fought. She was valiant and courageous, but no matter what she did, the cancer seemed to do one thing more, or two, or ten. It is what cancer does. She was a long time dying, and then she was a short time dying, and then she was dead. In that same Jan. 30 conversation she said, "I am not going to hospice. I mean it may look like a grand way to die but it really isn't." She had experience caring for the dying. On April 2 she died at home a few days after leaving hospital care. Her children were there, her brother, nieces and nephews, her stepmother. Her husband was there too.

It is now April 14 and no plans have been announced for a funeral or a memorial service and her family and friends cannot understand why. When news of her death was posted hundreds of people responded. People loved her, knew her, intimately followed her pain-wracked struggle, were sad for her, hopeful for her, awed by her. Now they want to share their love for her, bid her farewell, gather around their memories of her. We need to hear each other say things about her, weep together; her two daughters and her son need to say what they must and hear what they should about their mother. When? Where? Her husband spoke vaguely of "something in a few months." He has said nothing else. We don't even know what happened to her remains.

Meanwhile people talk, they text, we compare notes and messages Ruth left behind about her cancer and the misery heaped on top of the pain of her disease in the final months of her life gather into a stormy cloud. She needed for all of us to know what was happening besides cancer and made sure we did, but begged people to do nothing, say nothing, no matter how much we knew, fearing things would become worse for her and her son. We honored her request. Some of us wish we hadn't. Now that time has passed. She is dead and we are becoming impatient. The cloud is rolling and when the storm breaks it is likely to be ugly.

Ruth Ann Howerton was born in Greensboro, NC, to a teen-aged mother who already had one child by the time my brother married her. Her father was my brother John. He was a teen-ager too. It was an inauspicious beginning that grew worse as time passed. Ruth's brother was born a year or so later. Ruth's parents were hardly parents to their children at all. It is a tired old tale. They were children themselves, etc. It is an excuse. Sometimes my brother, his wife and children stayed with my parents in a house never meant for that many people because they had no money. It was crowded, noisy, always aswirl with people (mostly relatives of one sort or another. My grandmother lived next door). Sometimes they had their own place. Sometimes they left the children home alone for hours or days at a time while they went out to do the things childless teen-agers do. Their small children were left to fend for themselves and tend to each other the best they could. Their house - when they had one - smelled of dirty diapers and cigarette smoke. It was a shitty way to live and it couldn't last. They couldn't last. The life they were living caught up with them. My brother ended up in prison for something involving a carload of marijuana and an undercover cop. His wife found her own way and she didn't want her children along for the trip. Ruth and her brother were lost in the shuffle and seemed doomed to a life in foster care. Then, because my father insisted on it ("Nobody else is going to raise my grandchildren!"), they ended up with my parents. It was official. Signed, sealed and delivered. Abandoned children taken in to be raised by their grandparents.

The day that happened Ruth started looking for love. Abandoned children do that. She found it from time to time but it didn't last. She loved my mother (Ruth's Memaw, the only real mother she ever had) and was loved in return. She loved her children and they loved her. We loved her from near and far. She was not unloved and she was not unwanted. But she wanted more than that, she was greedy for it. She wanted more love closer to home. And she didn't believe she was receiving it. In the end, her fear of love lost seemed worse than her fear of dying. It was sad to watch.

Now, after the life she lived and the death she lived, the love she had and the love she craved, she deserves more than this. Soon.

 "I can't believe my life has come to this."

 Ruth Howerton-Luck, January 30, 2016

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NOTE: Since this piece was posted sketchy plans for a memorial service in Greensboro, NC, on May 14 have been posted. No further details have been announced.