As I was getting ready to send in the final draft of Grieving Room, I finally got to write a page I had long been thinking about: The Dedication. Of course, I always assumed I would simply dedicate the book to the memory of Roxanne, my sister whose lose taught me so much about grief. If you’d asked me ten years ago who I’d dedicate ANY book too, my answer would have been simple: To Roxanne. Who else?
But from the time that Roxanne died to the time I sent a book to a publisher, some things had changed. Loss didn’t end with my sister. In fact, four of my cousins died of cancer after my sister. FOUR. What is even more tragic is that three of them were from the same family.
You read that right. When you look at the dedication, you’ll see three women listed with the maiden name Caines. These were three of my cousins who were born to my mother’s sister Mona. Aunt Mona was just the BEST. She was the youngest of my mom’s four sisters in their large family of eleven and she was always the life of the party. Aunt Mona died of cancer a couple of years before my sister died. Our “Porter Parties” have never been quite the same.
Then a couple of years after Roxanne died, Aunt Mona’s youngest daughter, Andrea got breast cancer – and died. She was 34. Then, as I was finishing up the book and trying to find a publisher, Aunt Mona’s second daughter, Stephanie, died of breast cancer. She was in her mid forties and left four children. A year and half later, my book sold and I took a picture of the contract just the day after a long overdue family reunion where I saw Aunt Mona’s oldest daughter, Dana and her two teenaged children, for the first time in a couple of decades (she had moved across the country many years before). Just two months later, Dana died of breast cancer too. When I got the news of her death at work, I put my head into my arms and sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t believe Aunt Mona and all her children were gone.
We lost another cousin around that time as well, on my father’s side. Her name was Christine, and Christine had been a huge supporter of my writing. She also lived far from me, but one day I got a package in the mail from Christine. She sent me a beautiful journal, telling me to keep writing and to write about my sister. She shared that she loved my blog and felt I had a message to share with the world. How could I not dedicate this book to her? It felt so special to hear this from my cousin Christine.
I am going to be honest – I hadn’t been close to these cousins for many years. We were spread apart and our lives had gone in many different directions. But they were family, my beloved aunts’ children, my mother and father’s nieces. My cousins.
When I wrote the dedication, I thought of these five women of my family line: four cousins and my sister. We grew up together. I swam with the Caines girls in their swimming pool each summer. Christine was the lifeguard the day I got caught in a rope on the water slide at our local pool and she pulled me out of the water. These women were the familiar faces at the family potlucks, the brides at whose weddings I danced, the hugs shared at our grandparents funerals. They were the names in family updates from my mom and people I prayed for when they got sick.
Grief is funny. I didn’t feel entitled to too much grief when my cousins died. I often felt I had to preface telling people about their deaths by saying they lived far away, that we weren’t in touch a lot as adults, that my grief was for my extended family perhaps more than myself. But the grief was real, and grief needs room. I wanted to honour it.
My dedication is a small thing. But it is my way of saying that these women mattered to me. That cancer sucks. That I wish they had had more years and that I could have shared more time with them. To most they will just be strangers names on a page. But to me and the people who knew and loved them: they are missing pieces of our hearts.
You will have your own names. They won’t all get dedications in a book. But their lives matter no less. I hope this book will remind you that your memories of them, and the grief you carry for their loss, deserves room. This book goes out to all of them, and all the grievers who remember.
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Leanne Friesen 