LOIS GREENE STONE - NON - FICTION

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​Smiles are upside-down frowns

Did she teach me how to die, or how to live?    
    The cancerous invaders in my sister Carole’s stomach were surgically removed.  Signet Ring Carcinoma. Sounded ominous, especially coming soon after heart by-pass surgery.  Well, she was diabetic and her heart, therefore, aged quicker, right? I’d pushed aside that our father died from a heart attack at age 45, and our mother’s line didn’t fare too well with her first of several heart attacks at 50, then heart by-pass surgery years later.  But what made Carole, who lived alone, gutsy enough to go through chemo and radiation for nine months? How did she manage? I wondered, from my house 3,000 miles away, what she must have been thinking as solution dripped into her body and beams blasted tissue? Then cancer returned to what was left of her stomach anyway.  Was she bitter? Why not?
    I began to write down childhood happenings, almost as if doing, at the time, would keep her alive.  Our wet wool snowsuits used to smell awful, and we wore Breton hats with grosgrain streamers or very large satin hair bows hand-made by our mother.  Our bicycles had balloon tires and no-speeds. No. Too general. I began again. At 16, she was part of a summer-stock professional group in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; I couldn’t believe her talent for acting, singing, dancing.  There she was onstage with people I’d seen in movies, and she was actually part of their cast! I’d write about that. Would that make her sad as she didn’t pursue it but became a wife and stay-at-home mother, so common for the time to either have a career or motherhood?  Might be too unpleasant. I began again. Oh, hearing about her long braids being stuck in an inkwell in elementary school might be funny. The awful boy in the desk behind would take her thick hair and dab the braids’ ends in ink. My short, silky, thin blonde strands could never even be braided!  Maybe, instead, I’ll think about how I felt back then.
    I was sarcastic when she was bossy.  I pretended to dislike her. I wondered why she bit her nails.   I never complimented her incredible aqua color eyes. Sometimes, to just assert myself, I walked a completely separate avenue from the regular route to elementary school, just so I wouldn’t be with her.  Even when we took our radium-covered jewelry into dark closets, during World War II, I remarked that mine had a brighter glow. Listening to The Battle of the Baritones on the radio, if she liked Crosby’s voice, then I picked Sinatra’s, or vice versa.  And when we played the game of ‘Rather’, if she said she’d rather have cancer than polio (the always-used question in that game) because at least she’d be dead and not in an iron lung, I picked the opposite. Dead. Not in an iron lung. But she now has cancer!  I began again, as it seemed I wasn’t remembering what we shared but rather the stupid sibling situation so common in families.  Competition.  I thought I was strong, she weak.  Little did I realize she’d become a hero with strength almost unbelievable to me now.
    As adults we didn’t communicate for a very long time.  Why? What had been so serious to separate us? So silly as neither of us even remembered the trigger.  But we always, even then, had a common denominator: snapshots of our parents in our individual wallets.
    None of this was what I wanted to really write November 2004; here’s another ‘smokescreen’ and I’m running out of time to be ‘real’.  I knew she was wheelchair bound, survived yet another cancer surgery then heart failure, then pulmonary emboli. How? My husband and older son are internists, our daughter is a registered nurse; I know that weakened patients with heart sections closing, even though by-passed and not able to be stented, do not generally survive failure nor emboli.  How did she? With her optimism, she told me, through the phone lines, that she loves life, has had no choice as to what was handed her and only what to do with it.  Frail, extremely thin from disease, her body and her spirits were incompatible.  I used to pretend I could conquer anything playing out my self-assurance often at her expense, but she is the strong one.  She is the role model. I went back to my pen and paper.
    What would I want to tell her, if this were to be our last conversation?  That’s what I ought to write: how her hand felt when she took mine to cross a wide boulevard each day for kindergarten,  how she looked as a bride in satin and and lace, when she let me actually hold her firstborn not afraid I’d drop the infant, and the big-sister way she touched my just-turned-twenty year old face at our father’s gravesite.  I’d say how much I really loved her and silently mouthed it as I wound 16 sugar cubes on a thin pink satin ribbon to make her Sweet Sixteen ‘corsage’. I liked her next to me when we pulled the radishes we planted in our Victory Garden.  Her zest for living was there as a child when she’d take the sled to a higher hill; I’d only do that on a dare. She did it to better see her surroundings. She’s gone through life this same way, and still does, I said aloud to myself in early December 2004.  I put the pen down. Tears were staining the paper. 
     It’s hard to sort out what to omit or present to anyone.  She was always looking forward. Even, December 2004, when the permanent feeding tube was surgically implanted in what was left of her stomach, weeks after another operation to search for more cancer hiding within, she merely mentioned that she’d miss eating. 
    Maybe I’ll just appreciate that philosophy and write what she’s offering all who know her, won’t pry about tears she suppresses or fears she must have in the silence of night, and let her know she’s an amazing woman to accept the ravages of her afflictions and still find humor with each.   
    I telephoned her after a 500 mile car trip in constant rain and some dense fog.  My husband and I had just returned from spending New Years with my daughter and her family, and I wanted to let my sister know of my safe arrival.  Pneumonia and infection were ravaging her fragile body, but her clear words to me, on January 3, 2005, were “Thankfully, you’re home safely. I love you.”
    Comfort Measures Only were initiated that night, with a drip to keep her hydrated, medicines administered to control pain, and an oxygen mask.  “Hearing is the last to go” my daughter, a nurse who once worked in pediatric oncology, had told me during New Years. I telephoned my niece to put the phone to my sister’s ear.  I continued the life-oriented charade and said I hadn’t spoken to her that day and wanted to update her on the family’s goings-on. She was conscious and responded, but with the oxygen mask, I could not make out specific words.  No matter, over the next few days, how many times she seemed to be unconscious from heavy medication to quiet her brain’s intact thoughts of life, she was alert when a phone was placed to her ear.  
    The oxygen mask was removed after a full week of only ‘Comfort Care’ and still she was alive but seemed to finally be in a deep sleep, my niece said.  My younger son, David, flew the 3000 miles to California on January 10th, 2005.  When she heard his voice, she awoke and called his name, thanking him for making the trip, asking about his children.   Emaciated, anti-biotic resistant infections on her, concealed cancer controlling her insides, she continued to respond with interest in others before lapsing again into quiet breathing.  By the 20th, to the oncologists’ astonishment, she still clung to life, although was no longer able to be roused, and died on January 23rd, 2005.
    But her last strong-voiced sentences to my ears were for Me.  My safety. The Almighty’s thanks for getting my husband and me through the limited visibility of fog and difficulty driving in rain.   
    What kept her going after Comfort Care Only was initiated and expectations of only a day or two left?  No physicians had answers. Spunk, courage, life being a gift too good to let go of it? She reminded us of that by not talking illness and just celebrating living.

http://www.thejewishpress.com©2005 The Jewish Press
re-published in an anthology book, April 2009, The Ultimate Teacher, HCI Books ©2009 Health Communications

 A Night at the Opera
​

    I pushed the seat from its upward position, and sat.  Blinking lights from cell phones were still active, and a person next to me was drinking a glass of soda from a plastic cup that had no lid.  We viewers, mostly dressed in sneakers, comfortable slacks, winter waist-length jackets, put the Playbills on our laps. When the announcement came to turn off digital devices, we knew the curtain was about to rise.
    My very first opera, during my New York childhood, was at the Met sitting in a reserved box.  I can still remember... 
    I ran into my older sister's room, jumped on top of the chenille bedspread, then pulled out a magazine. " Look!  I've got a libetto."
    Scanning the grey cover, Carole corrected, "Libretto.  It's libretto."
    I scowled at the corrected pronunciation.  "Look! I went to the opera." 
    "Hansel and Gretel, sung in English,"  Carole read the cover. "Did you like it?"
    "I don't know."  I dropped into a seated position.  Cotton fluffs puffed upwards creating more linty fibers.
    "I hate that spread, too," Carole smiled. 
    "Let me tell you something,"  I whispered, sharing a confidence.  "Hansel was really a girl dressed up pretending to be a boy."
    "Really?"  Carole feigned amazement.  She crossed her legs, spreading the pleated skirt over wool knee socks. 
    "Says right there.  Under cast. Part of Hansel was played by, see," I pointed, "it's a girl's name.  Besides, no boy could sing so high."
    "Metropolitan Opera House Grand Opera,"  Carole read the cover out loud. "Wow. This book's expensive.  Thirty-five cents. And look at the way the title of the opera is spelled:  Haensel Und Gretel."
    "I didn't notice."  I looked.
    "It says this is the original Italian, French, or German libretto with correct English translation.  Oh, also says it's a fairy opera in three acts. Let's see, first copyright 1905 F. Rullman, and then again in 1925.  Really-really old book!"
    "Don't you want to know what was best?  Don't you?"
    "Sure."
    "Ermine."  
    Carole got off the bed and unsuccessfully tried to brush lint from her skirt by pulling it outwards and shaking it.  "Ermine?"  
    "Ermine.  Some ladies in the orchestra had on white ermine capes.  Gorgeous. I could see them from the box with real chairs that Mom and I were sitting in.  We were stuck on sides of the big theatre seeing the stage sideways. Ermine ladies were downstairs sitting forward but didn't have moving chairs like Mom 'n me."
    "What about music?  Acting?"
    "Oh I couldn't understand anything they were singing.  It didn't sound like English. And no one ever spoke." I stood up on the bed.  The mattress indented and I wobbled in an attempt to stay steady. In a fake, high-pitched voice, I sang, "I am going down the lane to see you."  Then, I began to jump on the bed as if it were a trampoline. My hair went up each time I was coming down from a jump. Then I sang, "Gretel, my Gretel, jump on this bed."
    Carole just smiled.
    "The theatre was beautiful.  Lot's of gold everywhere. And big.  And outside, right on the street, carpenters carried sets that stuck out on the sidewalk."
    "They're stagehands, not carpenters.  Someday there'll be a theatre like that on piece of land big enough so that the street doesn't have to have scenery,"  Carole stated as if she already knew.
    "Well, anyway.  Little lights were behind orchestra seats and people turned them on then read spots in the libretto.  I liked watching that. The music was stupid with all the high singing, and Hansel and Gretel didn't look like I wanted them to, so I stared at people below."
    "Tell me why you said ermine."
    "During intermission," I related this with excitement, "we went downstairs.  Some ladies' ermine capes just swished when they came out of doors. One lady, who smelled from perfume, saw I was looking at her cape and she came over and let me touch it.  Then she did the most wonderful thing: she put it around me and it trailed on the floor. I felt like a real princess. All I needed was a crown and no one would have believed I wasn't."
    Carole embraced me.
    "Only the singing was annoying.  Other than that, I loved going to the opera."
    Now, 2019, I love the music, but part of the 'special' feeling of going to the theatre was also being in 'special' clothing.  Just as eating is different from dining, so is attending live theatre from movies. Environmentalists would never allow ermine capes without some crusade, and we’ve supertitles/subtitles rather than librettos.  I do don the expected ‘comfortable’ clothing, and navigate snow-covered icy streets in shoe boots. While the performances are still good, the glitter experience has vanished.

published Op-Ed Page Gannett Times-Union newspaper January 5, 1996
reprinted 2016   Front Porch   (I updated in 2019)