Aunt Andy

Looking forward to my upcoming birthday is bittersweet this year because it will be the first time I do not share the birthday with my Aunt Andy, who recently passed away after fighting cancer as long as I can remember.  The influence she has had on my life would be impossible to calculate.  I haven't spent much time with her since I moved away from the west coast, but she was one of the few women I was around growing up who didn't fit the mold of stereotypical femininity and didn't care that she didn't.  I don't know if she would self identify as a feminist, but I count her among my earliest feminist influences because she had opinions, and she liked working, and she was a good mother to her boys, and she talked to me about the stuff I really liked even when it was nerdy and bookish.  She also gave me this outfit, which goes to show I have been sporting navy stripes, pattern mixing, and cuffing my pants since way back:

When I think about all the health complications my aunt endured for so many years, I am reminded of how angry it makes me when people say someone has "beaten cancer" or "won the battle against cancer."  I totally get that cancer remission is something to celebrate, but please call it "enduring the battle with cancer" or "surviving cancer," not "beating" it.  To position the living as the "winners" in the battle positions the dead as the "losers" by default, and I think that dishonors everyone who has experienced it.  My aunt, and dad, and grandpa did not "lose" a battle with cancer, even though it claimed their lives.  These are people who looked cancer in the face, handled the ways it destroyed their health with honor, persisted with the will to live despite the toll it took on them, and faced death with grace when they saw that the time was upon them.  They couldn't have "fought" any harder in order to "beat" cancer, and they were not "beaten" by it.  Hemingway gets it right when he says, "A man can be destroyed but not defeated." I am thankful to my Aunt Andy for helping to teach me that a woman can't be defeated, either.

That's my Aunt Andy in the gray t-shirt.  I'll think of her whenever my birthday approaches.  I'll think of her when I mix stripes with polka dots.  I'll think of her when I notice new gray hairs in my head because I can distinctly remember a conversation we had in which she told me dying your hair to cover them was lame.  I'm thankful she knitted a hat for the grandneice she never met and sorry Nora will not get to meet her.  And I know I'll think of her often as my nephew grows up and I try to figure out how to be the kind of aunt who makes him feel like who he is is good and right.

Rest easy, Aunt Andy.  Thanks for the life lessons and the kickass outfit.