When I think of my cousin Jamie, I always see her the same way, the way she walked up to me when she was living: her chin is slightly down, her eyes shine, and she’s smiling already, pre-emptively delighted at whatever cousin nonsense we’re about to get up to. I’m sure we must have approached each other in different ways over 35 years, but this is what I remember: Jamie open and loving and so alive. And it always ignited something in me: a feeling of belonging, a deep sigh in my soul that recognized: if Jamie is here, I must be home.
When Jamie was dying, there was no way to have any final conversations with her. All of her updates were sent through Steph, to our aunts, and to me and all our cousins. When we got the next-to-last text – the one telling us that modern medicine had done all it could for her – I read it, but I couldn’t understand it. I handed my phone to Adam, and when I was finally feeling strong enough to hear it, or worn out enough to not fight it, I let him explain: it was time to say goodbye.
By the time Jamie died, I had been saying goodbye to her for weeks, moving through the stages of grief every day, every hour, sometimes every minute. But when I knew the time had finally come, I closed my eyes and tried so hard to reach her, and it felt like I almost got there, like I could hold her hand and relive a lifetime of memories while our lifetimes still overlapped. The memories came thick and fast, keeping time with the tears on my face, and this is what I remembered about Jamie: that she loved fiercely, that she was kind, that she was more thoughtful than anyone I’ve ever met, and that for 35 years, we were almost inseparable.
When I think of how close we were – and in quiet moments early in the morning or late at night, it feels like we still are – I think of my favorite picture of the two of us. We’re 17, and it’s Christmas Eve at Grandma’s house. Jamie and I are dressed almost identically – something we did frequently but unintentionally in our teens. This time, we’re in black and red, and we’re sharing a chair. Jamie is sitting on the edge of the chair, with her leg crossed over her knee. Her elbow is propped up on the armrest, and her chin is in her hand, and she’s smiling a little. She’s looking away from the camera, clearly listening to someone outside of the shot. I’m draped across the the chair behind her, my right arm behind my head against the arm, and I’m looking in the same direction as Jamie. The chair isn’t really big enough for both of us, which is clear from the way our bodies were smooshed together. But we didn’t share the chair because there was no other space – we shared the chair because we always wanted to be close to each other. There are few pictures that Jamie and I are in together that don’t show us standing next to each other. If you wanted to find me, you only needed to find Jamie. Our birthdays are exactly six weeks apart, a fact we repeated to each other, and anyone who would listen, so frequently that it almost made me believe that she and Stan and I really were triplets. Until she died, I didn’t realize how much of me was made up by being Jamie’s cousin. Once she was gone, and the hole she left gaped like a wound, I figured it out. And since then, I’ve felt so lost.
Sometimes, though, in a memory, I find her, and I find myself. They move across my mind like a slide show, and grief and joy going thundering through my veins together: I think of middle school and color guard and swimming and sleepovers when we couldn’t shut up or sleep for giggling. I think of Christmas Eves, the two of us sitting with the rest of our cousins on the chest freezer in Grandma’s basement. I think about the band we formed, and how we never performed a single song, but created our own fan art. When I think about music, I think about how well Jamie could sing, a fact that she was shy about. I think about how we sang a Savage Garden song together at our 8th grade chorus concert, and she created her own harmony line that was so good it was hard to believe it wasn’t part of the original song.
Jamie moved to California to live with her dad after we finished 8th grade, but she came back for our senior year, and we graduated from Fordson – with Stan – together. And so to the memories of our most formative years, I add memories of the swim team, and prom, and being 18 and everything feeling possible. I think about the day her dad died, and how we drove to her house, and I couldn’t get through the front door and to her fast enough.
When I got married, it was a given that Jamie would be one of my bridesmaids. Jamie was there for everything I needed, and then some. She told me I was beautiful in every single wedding dress I tried on, even when it wasn’t true. She called me a few weeks before the wedding to make sure I was happy with the plans for my bachelorette party, and the night before my wedding, she spent hours with my best friend, trying to figure out how to bustle my wedding dress while I held the dress over my head. I don’t remember how long it took, or how hard it was, or how much my arms hurt by the end, but I remember so much laughter, and being so calm 24 hours before my wedding because I knew Jamie was there by my side.
I remember, so clearly that it feels like physical pain, when Jamie walked into Aunt Thea’s house one Christmas Eve, and before I could stand to show her the shirt announcing it, she looked straight at me and said, “you’re pregnant, aren’t you?” I was. She knew already. She was one of the first people to hold my daughter, and I remember us staring at each other in disbelief and awe that one of us was a mom. She and Jenny surrounded me, and I could feel them giving to my daughter all of the love we’d ever given each other. I think of her walking toward me, smiling, her chin down, her shoulders up near her ears because her body couldn’t contain her excitement, ready to be included and thrilled, as I was every day I could call her my cousin and friend.
Our family is well-acquainted – perhaps better acquainted than most – with grief. Our experience with grief has created a kind of rhythm to our experience of death: getting the news, coming together, sharing grief and tears and laughter in equal measure. Jamie’s death demolished those rhythms for me, and I feel the grief with my whole body. I’ll turn 36 without Jamie. 35 is the last age we’ll share. I’ll spend the rest of my life seeing her everywhere – in mini tubes of M&Ms, in the smell and taste of bottled Frappucinos, in the resurgence of Y2K fashion that I can’t believe I won’t be able to tell her is being billed as “vintage”. I see her in my daughter’s face.
My cousins and I have always been proud – to the point of obnoxiousness – of how close we are, of being related to each other. With Jamie gone, a link in our chain is gone.
There’s a quote from the TV show Wandavision that seeped into popular culture after the episode it was in aired. I’ve never seen the show, but I heard and saw it everywhere for a while. It wasn’t until Jamie died that I understood it. It asks a question: what is grief but love persevering? I know that the depth of my grief – and the depth of the grief of everyone here – is equal to how much I loved and love Jamie. I know that, because I will love her the rest of my life, I will grieve her the rest of my life.
Having to say goodbye to Jamie makes me angry and sad in equal measure, so I’m doing my best, when I think of her, to allow myself to feel love in equal measure, too. When I was writing this, I tried twenty different endings, but none of them felt right, because saying goodbye doesn’t feel right. So for now, I’ll sign off the same way Jamie and I signed every note, every card, every letter, for 20 years: Best Cousins Forever, Jamie. I love you.
Nothing Down the Drain 