Remembering Julie

We paid our last respects to a dear friend Wednesday.

That is such an odd statement because none of us will fail to respect the person she was or cherish the lessons she taught us for as long we live. The theme throughout yesterday’s service and gathering was love. Repeatedly I heard, “Julie loved everyone and everyone loved Julie”. Not a platitude – a fact. I have never met anyone so positive and at the same time so genuine in my life.

I’ve known her husband Al for over 30 years; Julie less than five. Our group from school, like most established clusters of friends, can probably be a fairly intimidating bloc to approach as a new girl/boy-friend. We spoke yesterday of how Al at the time hoped we would cut this new girlfriend some slack. There was no need to worry.

Two pictures in the gallery that attends the reminiscences of anyone’s death these days caught my attention, the first taken at a high school football game in 1979. If a ponytailed girl in a poodle skirt is the symbol of the 50s, this photo of a radiant, smiling eighteen-year old in Florissant, Missouri has to be the model of an All-American girl in the late 70s. A girl who loves her friends, her family, her hometown – loves life.

Thirty-four years later she still did.

The second photo was a white board, I would guess at her room in a hospital, with her name spelled out and things she loved for each letter. In addition to her friends, family, husband Al and daughter Carly, she lists her job by name. Your brain screams out, “C’mon, who loves their job so much that it would make a list of the top dozen ‘things I love’ while you face serious illness?” Julie did. The last item on the list was rainbows.

Rainbows.

As if daring someone to make fun of her naiveté.

You’d be a fool to do so and everyone would know how big an idiot you were if you did. She was far from naïve, she was enlightened. She knew how to love what was given to her while so many of us scorn or ignore the gifts life lays at our doorstep every day.

I’ve buried both parents and a dozen or so aunts & uncles, but this is the first close friend I’ve lost as an adult – the first that many of us have lost from our peer group and we’re scared.

We look at our wife or husband and wonder what we’d do without them. We look at our children and worry how they’d manage without us. We look at each other and wonder who’s next.

Every cough is now potentially lung cancer in our minds; every mole, skin cancer and it will be like this for a while. I knew I was closer to the end than the beginning at this point, but this has made it real for everyone. Denial gives way to fear on a day like this.

Oddly enough, the one person who was never scared was Julie. She beat the cancer in all the ways that counted. In the end it had to settle for just killing her and beating the rest of us instead.

The large viewing room at the funeral home was packed. All the standing room was taken and the hallway outside was filled with people for the service. It would have upset Julie to see so many people dear to her filled with such grief, but pleased her to see so many of the people she loved in one place, loving each other.