Remembering Ria
Tomorrow would have been my sister Maria’s 57th birthday. She was my big sister, the protector for me and for our younger sister. At first glance, you would see she was such a tiny person as the shortest of the three of us. It seems as my parents had the three of us girls that each subsequent daughter would be a bit taller in their adulthood than the next. Ria, as everyone called her, was just 5’2″ with eyes of such a brilliant blue. In retrospect she had my Daddy’s wonderful blue eyes. That old line of a song “Five foot two, eyes of blue…” would definitely describe her.
Maria had a laugh that could draw people to her. She never forgot a joke and was the life of any party or family get-together. Wherever the laughter and good times were occuring…she was in the middle of it all. She absolutely loved life and had fun living it. As she got older she loved to go on cruises, she visited Puerto Rico, and she loved to go to Orlando to play golf. She started her adult life at the early age of 17 when she married while still a high school senior…and spent the next twenty years of her life mostly raising her two kids. In fact, she went back to school, to college, to become a RN long after her high school years, when her children were older. She became a respected RN and her career spanned Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. She preferred nursing in Intensive Care and loved the night shifts. As a nurse, I often wonder if she knew or suspected the warning signs. Looking back, I can see one or two…but less than a year after the death of our mother, Maria was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005. Not only did she have lung cancer, but it had already gotten into her system and spread to the bones in her legs and tumors were wrapped around her heart and spine. The news was fast and devastating. We went from hearing she was going into the hospital to get checked out to learning phone call to phone call of each thing that was found. We were floored. Maria was the strong one, the big sister that was invincible and so successful and so wonderful. We needed her.
I could spend days writing her story…and some day I plan to write a memorial to her and to my mom (also a victim of cancer). But today I remember the fun times, the happy times, the times she spent here with all of us. She had a laugh that made you smile, she had a temper that could make a grown man cower, and she loved life with such spirit that we could not believe she’d be taken from us so young. But she was. She fought this foe with grace and with dignity…and for a while we were amazed at the way she still played golf as long as she could, she took care of her own needs at times for she lived away from our family and her husband was employed with an offshore drilling company, she loved her grandchildren and she never gave up the fight. She was incredibly close to my younger sister and I often admired the way they seemed so in tune to each other…and my little sister and I still miss our big sister….she was the embodiment of a person living life to its fullest.
She lived with that cancer almost a year, in October of 2006 she was taken from us….our angel on earth. She collected angels, and today I have a shelf in my den with some of her favorites…angels in snow globes, angels dressed in nursing outfits, angels looking over children…today she is an angel, with a laughing face and twinkling eyes and still (hopefully) watching over her family and her two little sisters.
We miss you and we love you Ria,
KW
I think she had a wonderful sister in you. I will remember her too now in my prayers. I lost my Dad to Cancer of the Heart and one of my beloved uncles to Lung Cancer. I think Scientists have had more than enough time to ivent all kinds of cures. What do you think? I wish I had known your family…It sounds like you come from a beautiful caring one.
Heidi
Heidi, thank you for such wonderful comments. From Sept 2004 to Jan 2008 we lost first my mom, then Maria then our dad. There were five in our family and today there are two. Really strange. She lives on in so many people…complete strangers have often stopped us on the street to relate how she cared for them in hospitals, she had friends across the continent and she had two children who have kids of their own. She had a chance to meet all but one of these grandchildren….the last was born in the past year. She attended the graduation of my nephew…even as she felt so bad…and was so loving with my own daughters. I am lucky…we came from a wonderful family, and we welcomed new friends all the time. You would have been welcomed too with open arms. Thanks for the beautiful comment, Karen PS Cancer is indeed scary…and needs more research, better treatment and cures! No one deserves what I’ve seen Ria and my mom and so many others have to live through.
Karen,
Your post about your sister is lovely. My father also died of cancer at the age of 56. His was in his liver and bowels. He passed within a year of being diagnosed and he too lived his life as long as he could as normally as possible. He loved to hunt, ride motorcycles, play with his grandchildren, and most of all he loved my mother dearly and she loved him just as much. The day he passed it was so hard, it took every ounce of strength I had to walk up the steps and see him. I did not want to remember him that way but as he had been. I knelt on the floor beside the bed crying and told him how much I loved him, he put his hand on my head and asked me why I was crying. I loved my father very much, and I could not understand why someone as good as he was, had to suffer so much. When he was laid out, an African-American man came into the funeral home. We had no idea who he was, turns out he used to help clean the garage my father and grandfather used to own, and apparently my father had taught him how to drive and helped him to get his license. We moved to California shortly after that and they never saw each other again. He came over to offer his condolences and told us who he was. He said he saw the obituary in the paper and he said he had to come because he felt he owed my father that much. This is the type of person my father was. He would help anybody at anytime for any reason. My father also passed away in October in 1989. Thank you for sharing this with me. I am honored to share the same birthday with such a special person.
Sherri Ruscitto