Remembering Miss Sharon Jones

I have already written this, but I was touched by all of the affection and caring that was shown in Miss Sharon Jones!

The thing that was delightful was for the first time realizing that she really was short.

She was quoted many times as saying that she was told she was "too fat, too black, too short, and too old". I didn't doubt that she was told that or that the prejudices mentioned could be an issue, but she still never seemed that short to me.

I never got to see her live, but in videos of her performing, she is such a powerful presence on the stage that I never really saw the shortness. Seeing her standing still, next to other people... okay, she was short. 

I can't explain why it made me smile so much. Maybe it was finding something new, or new confirmation of something old.

I did learn things from the movie, but the emotional impact was more one of grief. You see, I knew about the cancer, and about her beating cancer, as the movie shows. I had not seen the movie, but I knew it was there and what it was about. 

Again, she was such a powerful presence, that is probably what influenced my thinking, but I was really sure that she was good. Then it came back and she died. I was not expecting that.

Well, she had a stroke when Trump was elected, and attributed the stroke to that. She died really shortly after, so I feel pretty comfortable blaming him, but also, I had sort of forgotten how I felt about cancer.

Several years ago, three people I knew were fighting cancer at around the same time. They were a woman that my mother worked for, the father of some kids I knew from church and school, and a boy I used to babysit. They had all had the cancer, fought it, gone into remission -- some for a longer time than others -- and then it came back. 

They still fought, but they all died within a relatively short time frame. I remember seeing Larry at Jon's funeral, and thinking that he must have known he was next, and how do you deal with that?

My dramatic conclusion from this was that if I ever got cancer there wasn't going to be any chemotherapy or radiation or amputation, because clearly none of it worked.

That's been about twenty years, I think. It wasn't something that I thought about all of the time, but the thought was still there.

Over these past few years of care giving, I did think about death a lot. Sometimes I was longing for it, but more often I was trying to be prepared for my mother's death. That seemed like the only possible end, and I just wanted to be able to handle it as well as possible.

Then -- when things changed in a way better than I could have expected, but also there was that brief possibility that I might have cancer -- I did start having some thoughts again.

There was some reading that helped me. I will spend more time on that, but also, from watching Sharon Jones, I think I have a better understanding of the fight, because she bought time.

It wasn't even very much time, from one perspective. The initial cancer was announced in 2013, she was treated and cleared in the course of the documentary, and then the return was announced in 2015 with her dying in November 2016. (His fault.)

From another perspective, it was enough time to tour, and release new music and to share love with friends.

Those three people from before all died, but they all got more time with the people they did not want to leave. As much pain as their departures cost, they probably still would have chosen to fight for more time, even knowing in advance.

That is the one guarantee: we all die. 

We can exert some control over when and how. 

There are still a lot of unknowns, but we should be able to derive some clarity from that.