Surreal. That’s the word that comes to mind when I think of the last two months. Because that’s exactly how it felt when I got the news that my sister Lura was admitted to the hospital because of breathing problems in July. They found there was a good amount of fluid in her left lung after doing some scans. Then they extracted over a liter of fluid and then sent a sample of it to a lab to be tested.
Preliminary results showed cancerous cells in the fluid.
Upon further testing, a lab test confirmed the cells were indeed cancerous.
Then the diagnosis came: Stage 4 lung cancer — and an inoperable mass in her lung.
As the information came in, my mind started ticking in clockwork fashion trying to deduce how a woman of her age who never smoked a day in her life ended up with lung cancer. Ruling out smoking, left environmental factors to consider (again, my mind was ticking trying to find an answer because it was such a puzzler).
In the hospital, I asked her, “Were you exposed to asbestos?” Not that she was aware of. Any other hazardous materials?
She said, “Well, you know for the past three years, they’ve been doing a massive reconstruction project where I live. My landlord is completely renovating the entire property. There’s a lot of concrete demolition, masonry work, and other stuff that’s been going on, so maybe it’s that. Who knows.”
Later, I spoke to my oldest brother (who used to work with the state’s air resources board). I asked if those materials Lura talked about were carcinogenic. He said, “Well, brick and concrete do contain silica…and in particulate form can cause silicosis.”
As I was reading up on lung cancer among non-smokers, I found there are a number of common triggers that include air pollution. We’re now in the fourth year of wildfires in California –with each year worse than the previous one. All that smoke contains particulate matter, so, again, who knows what caused Lura’s cancer. It could be a variety of things. But looking for causes means I’m looking at who to blame for ending her life early.
However, I don’t want to live in a state of grievance looking for justice for fear that it would overshadow all the good qualities I want to remember about my sister.
Lura was born in Georgetown, Guyana. She’s the second of four children from our parents, Edward and Susheela. Guyana became a volatile place in the ’60s with essentially civil war breaking out between the country Indo and Afro-Guyanese groups over political and ethnic differences inflamed by the U.S. and British from the outside and from an authoritarian on the inside. By 1964, when Lura was five, my family moved from Guyana to Canada. We lived there for two years until moving to California in 1966.
Going from the only home she knew in Guyana to Toronto, Canada, then to Belleville, Canada, to Walnut Creek, California, and then to Danville, California in the space of a few years must have been jarring for a child. That’s a lot of uprooting. I’m no psychologist, but it’s gotta have an effect on a person as they get older. It may partly explain why Lura moved from place to place so much as an adult. My mother once told me a story of when we were in Canada and Lura’s elementary school teacher said to her that she was sad to hear that we were moving back to Guyana. My mom had no idea what she was talking about until the teacher said, “Well, Lura told me she was going home to Guyana.”
Finding that place to call home — and it feeling like home — is something I think we all long for. Some of us find it, others don’t. Lura’s wanderlust may have been sparked (in part) by wanting to find that place.
Danville, for me, sure felt like home. It was, after all, the only place I had an early memory of. But I also know that my siblings (Lura included) all loved living there. But when my parents divorced in the mid-’70s, it split the family in such a way that the older kids (Lura and my oldest brother, Ray) stayed with my father in Danville, and my brother Steve and I lived with my mom and stepdad (who were newly married). Lura’s time with my father grew rocky, and after a fight with him, she moved in with us. After high school, she enrolled in college but eventually decided to get her License Vocational Nursing degree and start a career in the medical field. She worked in a variety of medically-related jobs included two stints at nursing homes and many hospitals. She got married and had a daughter with her first husband. Unfortunately, that marriage didn’t last. Years later, she remarried, had another daughter with her second husband. Alas, that marriage didn’t last, either. But Lura’s relationship with her kids was very close, just like her connection to her twin grandbabies.
Before Lura died, I tried to call, visit, or text almost every day. When she was in hospice, I would often recount moments in our lives when we used to do a lot of fun things on the spur of the moment. Because Lura was six years older than me, it meant she had a car, job, and her own money way before I put my beloved skateboard in the closet because I had a license to drive. I reminded her of a few times she’d come home late from work, come into my room, and wake me up with a “Hey. Get up. Let’s go jump in my car and get some ice cream. Get dressed and I’ll wake up Steve.” And off we went (unbeknownst to my mom and stepdad) to a nearby 7-Eleven or ice cream shop. Other times, she’d pack her burnt orange Chevy Chevette hatchback with a sleeping bag and pillows, and we’d go to the drive-in and watch double features that usually showed big-budget films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a B-movie like Eat My Dust or The Van. But before going to the drive-in, she’d stop at 7-Eleven where we’d get a Big Gulp (to share) and some candy — and she’d pay for the whole thing.
I also reminded her that she was a good sister to me in other ways. Because I’m the youngest of four, I always wanted to do things with my older brothers. But naturally, they’d want to do things with their friends and would rather not have their snot-nosed baby brother cramping their style. When I was left behind, I’d either melt down or find something to do by myself (if it was a day when I couldn’t play with my friends). Often, Lura would play with me and find things for us to do that would involve some kind of art project. When I started 7th grade, and school dances were coming down the pike, I asked her if she could teach me some disco moves that she had down. As a teen and young adult, she loved disco and soul — and loved to dance. She would often come home from school or work, put on a record, and just dance, dance, dance. Steve and I would sit in the living room and watch her just kind of get lost in the music. But mostly, she looked so happy. She did teach me a few moves I could try out at school dances, and it worked. I wasn’t one of those wallflower shy guys or too-cool-to-dance-to-fast-songs dudes, so I had plenty of dance partners — which, for a 7th grader, was pretty damn cool.
All those moments I recounted brought a smile to her face.
As adults, we have our own lives, with marriages, children, mortgages, and all those things that go with getting older — which widens the gap between past and present. Often, moments in the past are certainly colored by the warm tones of nostalgia, but as it is in the present, the past was just as chaotic, volatile, and sometimes not-so-great. What the glow of happy memories brings to us in the present is, I think, a feeling of home; a place of belonging where things felt safe, where life wasn’t all that complicated, and happiness dwells. Like I wrote earlier, sometimes when I think of the times Lura moved from place to place throughout her life, I wonder if some of that wanderlust was driven by the desire to find a sense of home. I’ll never know. One thing I do know is something that I wrote to one of my cousins in England after Lura passed away on Monday:
“She was my big sister. I will miss her in a profound way, but will always be grateful for the love she showed me as a boy and in our adult life. It’s surreal to think she’s not part of this world anymore, but she lived her life as she wanted. I was able to tell her every time we spoke or texted that I loved her. And, in the end, that’s what matters the most.”
