I think of Claudia as my bookend sister because she is the oldest and I am the youngest, with Victoria and Nancy in between. Claudia and I are opposites in nearly every surface description, I the grasshopper; she the ant. But we are very much alike in our interests, our natures and our thought.
Claudia got lymphoma in her mid twenties. "They" told her to quit work, get social security and go off and be sick. Nonsense, she went to work every day, and to chemo and radiation on weekends. In pain all week and very sick on the weekends, she wouldn't and didn't quit, and in time the cancer went into remission.
Her determination and courage bought her the following decades to live and love and be an amazing person that I, walking in my own opposite path never suspected. I saw Claudia once, perhaps twice some, but by no means all years. I don't recall ever conversing with her on the telephone.
When the cancer came back it spread rapidly, and though she fought to live we lost Claudia at the still young age I have caught up with now. In her life Claudia lived by her own terms. She was an editor of academic books for a major University Press. She was an Opera lover, a folk dancer, a collector and a curator. She was much respected by her peers and admired by her friends and her tenant association for which she worked tirelessly. Claudia is much loved by her family, and sorely grieved by her parents who even now daily feel the pain of the loss of their child.
I didn't start this blog to cry for Claudia's sad end, but to celebrate her joyous life. In life I had a small idea of my sister's life, but after her death her legacy has altered and immeasurably changed my life. Thousands of objects belonging to Claudia have come to me and through them I have a sense of the sister I didn't know in life. The following posts will picture some of these; and you may know her by these objects left me from my bookend sister.
