gone

I don't know why, but the past week or so I've been thinking about my Godmother Janice. It's been almost 15 years since she died and I've never exactly forgotten her, but lately my mind has dwelling quite a lot on memories of her house in Illinois and it's all very bittersweet.

The first few years of my life my mother was on her own with two kids and working two jobs. My older sister and I spent so much time at our babysitter Janice's house, and she took such a liking to us that she became like a grandmother. And it wasn't just Janice that became our family, but her husband and children and eventually grandchildren. The other kids she babysat became our childhood friends. My family was always reserved about praise and affection, but not Janice. She would tell me how smart, how kind, how funny I was. She told me I was wonderful and deserved wonderful things to happen to me. She could never think anything bad of me and she absolutely spoiled me.

When we moved to Texas it was decided that my sister and I would visit her for a month every summer. And we did. We would swim, go to the movies, walk to the nearby bowling alley to play, visit the Chicago museums, stay up late at night watching T.V., play cards after dinner, sit outside in the evening talking until the mosquitoes descended, and play with the children Janice babysat at her home.

I was 15 when I opened one of her letters and as soon as I saw that it was typed instead of handwritten, I knew something was wrong. She was recovering from heart surgery and her husband, my Godfather, had died. Three months later and she was gone too. I went to the funeral and that was the last time I saw any of her family or friends. I wonder if that is what's been bothering me so much lately: I never kept up contact with anyone. Janice was my link to them while I was in Texas, and when she died, I never tried to strike up a correspondence with anyone else. But I don't know. Maybe that's not it. Gone is gone. Even if I had kept in touch, nothing fills that void, you know. And it still seems frightening that someone that meant so much to me, influenced my life so much, could just vanish. And that is what it seemed like to me: she just disappeared. One summer she was healthy and happy and a few fall letters later, she was too weak to write and then gone. Gone and all I have for proof of her existence is a bundle of cards and letters and a 25 year old plush dog.