(RJ's Current Facebook Profile Pic)
My brother RJ is six years younger than me. He has always done things in his own sort of way. A way that is very different than mine. I remember that when he was little he would carry around this old brief case of my dad’s and fill it with all the weirdest things and he would bring it EVERYWHERE. One of my clearest memories of the briefcase was right after Christmas. My sister (6 years old), RJ (2 years old), and I (8 years old) were all in the back seat on the way home after a yummy McDonalds outing. And out of nowhere RJ throws up his burger and fries all over his briefcase. And even after the throw up event he still carried it around with him everywhere.
I have mostly taken the “good girl” approach to life. I follow the rules. I do as I am told. I respect authority. I am responsible. I have always done a good job at winning the approval of my elders (teachers, coaches, parents, friends’ parents, bosses, etc.) RJ has not taken this approach to life. He is more in the “have fun and worry about the consequences later” approach to life. His senior year of high school he came back from a Spring Break Cruise with “5+4=9” tattooed on his foot. I asked him why and he just said, “why not?”. He is currently in his sixth year of college. No specialized degree…just taking his time I guess. For the past 10 or so years I think that RJ’s biggest worry has probably been missing out on a really fun party.
RJ has never really been one for having girlfriends. I’ve always assumed that girls were interested in him as he is both handsome and winsome. And maybe there were casual hook ups, but nothing at all serious. The serious side of life seems to be something that RJ tries to avoid.
About a year or so ago my mom informed me that there was a girl that RJ worked with at Friday’s that had been coming over a lot. When I would be home for holidays or summer visits I would catch glimpses of this new girl. She was very pretty, but also unbelievably shy. She would barely look up when I would say hi to her. I really knew was that her name was Janie and that she worked at Fridays with RJ.
I kind of assumed that as time went by Janie would probably disappear. But Janie did not disappear. I was so curious about her and why she seemed so distant and removed, and how the dynamic of her and RJ worked.
This past summer my dad got remarried and RJ more or less forced Janie to come to the wedding. This is when I first found out that in high school Janie had cancer. I don’t remember how it came up, but she ended up telling me that she had lymphoma and missed out on a lot of high school. That is all she really said.
I wanted to ask her so many more questions.
When I was home last week for Thanksgiving, RJ mentioned, in his usual light hearted way, that Janie had a tumor in her shoulder and they were doing surgery to remove it. That’s all he knew.
On Thanksgiving, RJ was on the phone with my dad, and my mom just looked over at Janie and said, I heard that you have a tumor in your shoulder and that you are getting it removed next week. And, Janie just started talking. She started to tell us her story.
When Janie was 14 years old, she had lymph node in her neck that had been swollen for a couple months and so finally they went to the doctor. They found that it was cancer and it had spread all over her body. She has had over 18 surgeries. She has had over 20 rounds of chemo and radiation. She has had a bone marrow transplant. She will most probably never be able to have children. The doctors say that she should have died and it is a miracle that she is alive. She missed pretty much all of high school. She never went to a dance. She never went to a football game. She never had a boyfriend. She never even had any girl friends. For most of those years she slept either at the hospital or in a bed in her living room and was too weak to even walk to the bathroom alone.
I sat there watching this girl talk about these horrific events. I’m looking at this tiny and beautiful girl, who has obviously become so numb and so angry at the world around her. And why wouldn’t she be.
The reason that she works at Fridays is because her parents and her doctors thought that she needed some kind of interaction with the outside world after having been kept away for so long.
That night my mom lay in bed and cried. She cried for Janie. She cried for RJ.
It’s funny how life turns out. The irony of RJ and Janie. It’s actually really beautiful. The reason humans are all drawn to tragedy is that in all tragedy there is a deeper and truer beauty there. It is in these places of pain and destruction and struggle that new life is found. I do not believe that we are most alive in the easy places of life. I believe that it is the tragedy that so often wakes us up from our sleep walk.
