Strength of Jane

“An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” -Charles Dickens

Whenever I have a headache, a bad day, or when things just aren’t going well, I think of her. She stands in the corner of my mind, a barely perceptible shadow silhouetted by bright and vivid memories unfamiliar to her eyes. From her dark vantage point she watches. But she has another job to do. I’m sure she didn’t realize it when she first took up residence in that quiet corner, unassuming and barely visible. She would be my guide. Her plain name would be passed down to me, her daughter’s daughter. Her ghostly presence would make an indelible impact upon my life even though we would never meet. This is the strength of Jane.

She died in the same city that I was born, three years apart. She fought for a decade through physical pain brought on by the disease that would take her life.

“How did you make it through each day?” I would ask her. “The days when your body wouldn’t move as you asked it to? ...The days when you had to ask for help from your teenaged children? The days when you wondered what would become of them when you were gone?”

She wore two pieces of jewelry on a regular basis: her Alpha Gamma Delta sorority pin and her heavy, gold wedding band. She had one strand of real pearls that her daughter inherited upon her death. Her daughter was only seventeen.

“What would you have done differently?” I wondered. “If your health had not been your main limitation? …Explored the world? Loved without ceasing? Broken connections? Chosen the less-traveled path?”

She provided maternal love and attention to her two younger sisters growing up – their lives were interwoven with her own. She trained in nursing then married a veteran returned from the second world war. She added two children to the baby boom generation. She left nursing behind to care for them. She responded to their needs at the expense of her own. She moved far from her home. She prayed for relief when her husband’s chronic pain from a war injury was drowned in alcohol. She held on tight. She let go.

Her stoic voice became the words etched on my page. Her monumental challenges became my map. Silently, she steers my life. I listen.