It is 4.24 am and I have been awake for over an hour. I am sure you recognise those nights when your brain is fully functioning but your body just craves rest. My mind has roamed far and wide in the early hours of this morning, but this is where I have alighted.
I have two cousins of whom I am very fond. No names, because these are real people and it gets me into trouble when I give these out. But they are both girls – whoops, they were girls long ago and will be forever to me. They are the same age as me, and close when we were children because of that. Each are from different sides of my family, as different as can be, but similar in that to me they are larger than life characters.
The other similarity they share is that as we moved into young adulthood we grew apart. We were educated, gained our job skills, met partners and raised families, all without any real contact. I knew where they were, how they were, heard when children were born and relationships came apart. There was, as there always is, a family grapevine, although it was not always accurate beyond the broad facts of the matter. There was in each case a gap of over 35 years in the time we were apart. But in recent years, to my great joy, both are back in my life.
In the case of L, the fact that she is still alive for me to love is a miracle in itself.
L lives in Queensland now, on the coast north of Brisbane with her son, daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter. She is happy there, after an adult life lived in remote and exotic (to me) Darwin. A place so hot and humid she cautioned me about coming to visit anytime except the cool season. Recently she came to see me, taking advantage of the trans-Tasman bubble and fortunately not getting caught in its pause. We caught up about many things, not least of which is what she refers to as, “the cancer that cannot get enough of me”. L is recovering from her 4th bout of breast cancer. I have had one go-round, and the impact was minor. She has had four, and each one with major surgery, chemo, radiotherapy, on-going medication, and side effects way beyond anything I ever experienced. Along the way she lost her partner to cancer, and nursed him to the end. When she visited she was walking with a cane while awaiting hip surgery, but that had not stopped her visiting every living relative between Christchurch and Auckland and doing a fair bit of sight-seeing while she was at it.
But L is not defined by her illness. She is vibrant, beautiful and shines, with enthusiasm for her life, her children, and her grandchildren. She takes life at a tilt, full on now just as she was when we were kids. There were many cousins in our family but L and I spent the most time together, staying in each others homes and spending holidays playing and exploring. We were perpetually at war with her brother who she teased mercilessly, roamed freely wherever we chose in those less fearful days. We swam, ran, played, ate, bicycled, watched movies, listened to pop music, gossiped, schemed and lay in bed at night endlessly talking and seemingly never sleeping. She was the first person I ever shared a bed with, topping and tailing as toddlers, one’s feet in the other’s face. The first person I ever went into the city with without an adult. We tried on clothes we had no money to buy in Milne & Choice, sat on the wharf steps eating ham sandwiches for lunch with an older cousin who worked in town, and got lost trying to find the bus station to get home.
She awed me with her irrepressible energy, her ever present grin, her curls, and the amazing clothes her mother hand-made for her. I have no idea how we could have drifted apart, but that is what happened.
D is a different proposition entirely, but also a big influence as a child. She and I were, quite unknowingly as children, rivals. On my father’s side of the family we were the first grandchildren, although many followed. D is older than me by a few months, so technically the senior grand-child. Her family lived in newly developed Henderson, and mine in One Tree Hill then Otahuhu, so we mostly met at our grand-parents house. Every Friday night after shopping for most of my growing years, or at weekend visits or family events.
We were both acknowledged to be ‘clever’. That is to say we read books voraciously and raced through school ahead of the pack. Our mothers, both incapable of praising us for this or anything else, nevertheless reported our academic successes to each other and our grandparents in a manner that suggested it was due to their own genes and good parenting. It was not, dear reader. It was a genetic accident.
But to my mind, D had it all over me. Not only was she clearly the favourite by far of our kindly nana, she was taller than me, skinnier than me, a year ahead of me at school, and most important of all she could draw and paint. She was an artist! A skill I lacked entirely, although now I understand that my lack of innate drawing ability would not in a more enlightened climate have prevented the development of artistic skills. In those days though, it seemed to me that D had it all. Talent, beauty, lovability, and an age advantage. I liked her, admired her, was a little shy of her, and felt wholly inadequate in her presence.
Even so, we were girl cousins and we hung out together. There were younger siblings and cousins to lead and leave in our superior wake. There were family events and parties where the adults left us to our own devices and got drunk and silly. There were schools and new houses and endless family dramas to explore. D, it seemed, grew like a weed. I grew more like a pumpkin. We were both outliers from our family. Similar in more ways than we knew, but very different on the surface.
She left school to go to university at the end of the sixth form, and after that I hardly saw her. But oh, how I envied her early independence. D’s career was stratospheric. Off to London the moment she had her degree, writing for Vogue, television script writing, a published novelist. By the time she returned to live in NZ we knew each other only by repute. We had husbands and families, and met I think only at our grand parents funerals. I ran into her once at a friend’s party and had to introduce myself, so unknown were we to each other. By that time we both had successful and well-established careers, but I remained envious of her artistic flair and more creative life. I still am.
I cannot remember how it was that we came to reconnect some years ago. I know we had both been beaten up a bit by life. Her marriage had ended in divorce, mine in widowhood. We had picked up, put ourselves back together, and found new trajectories. I like to think we are wiser and less cocky, but others may beg to differ. Anyway, we now find our similarities, values and shared understanding of our family so much more compelling than our differences. It has been a joy to get to know D again without the barrier of competition for affection or glory. We are friends and family, and I find I value both a great deal.
The truly amazing thing about L and D and our relationships is the ease with which we fell back into synchronicity with so much time and living in between. The tone of voice, the cadence of speech, the laugh, the smile, the quirks that make up the cousins I knew as a toddler and child are still there. They fall into place as easily and naturally as rain falling on a tin roof. We know each other in ways that no one else does. We know things about each other, about our families, about what shaped us as adults that no one else – not our friends, not our children not our partners, or even our younger siblings – can ever understand or appreciate. And that is a priceless gift.
I am so grateful to have both of these women, my cousins, my friends, back in my life. One day I will have to get them together.