20 January 1958 – 17 February 2024
My baby sister died early this morning, the only person I have ever known for an entire life span, from beginning to end. Her diagnosis of stage 4 cancer last year on 1 April 2023, her and her husband Richard’s 28th anniversary, seemed a cruel April Fool’s joke, but her prognosis then proved accurate: she did not survive a full year longer.
But not for lack of trying. Through all the surgery, chemo, radiation, hospitalizations, and finally hospice, she stayed ferociously strong, even managing with Richard’s and son Daniel’s help to go straight from the hospital to a Judy Collins concert on 18 January, celebrate her 66th birthday on 20 January, and attend Richard’s retirement party on 25 January, only three weeks before her passing.
(photo by Jane Lupi)
Generous to a fault, even as she returned to the hospital on 2 February, just two weeks from her last night in this dimension, she insisted that rather than cancel my trip to visit friends in Miami, I should carry on with long-made plans. She even made sure, with Richard’s help, that I had some glamorous new clothes to wear to parties over my long South Beach weekend, in colors she selected to complement a Miami Beach palette. She often said I needed to wear more color.
And now she’s gone. And I can hardly believe it. And I wish I had gone to her side while I still had the chance. Our last exchange was a text, a week ago today. I asked her to save me a place, and she answered “Yes I !”
When I left home for college and the beginning of my adult life in the fall of 1970, Jane was 12, and perhaps for that reason, she exists simultaneously in my memory as both the preternaturally adorable Baby Jane, who hated going to the grocery store with my mother because “the old ladies there bump my head!” and the striking young woman, wife, and mother she became: passionate, perceptive, fiercely loyal, a talented artist with an astounding memory for detail and always a fashionable flair.
Grief moves unpredictably through the mind and body, and though every new loss recalls others past, each is unique. I always thought—hoped—this big sister would be the first to leave. I am not bereaved. I am bereft. Deprived. Lacking. I am now the sole keeper of our family romance.
Our mother Virginia taught us that the dead are never gone so long as we remember them. So now, that’s the job.
Rest in peace, my dearest sister Jane.
(makeup and photograph by Georgeann with her first Minolta camera)
Georgeann Murphy 
Leave a comment