Watch Out What You Wish For

My second oldest sister Juanita was such fun. She could play a piano by ear and she taught me one summer how to play the piano using the black keys and I still play that way even today.

She was full of life and love to have fun. She was such a happy person to be around. She loved an adventure and she was always thinking of things that we could do.

Even after she got married we had fun going to their house and doing things together.

She could stretch a pound of ground beef into four meals. She could make you laugh so hard that you would start to cry. If an accident was going to happen it would be with her somewhere around. Almost never happening to her but to the other person.

She could sing like a bird and loved to sing parts with my sister Lucy and cousin Louise W. and her younger sister Susan. She sang alto and Lucy sang soprano and Louise sang tenor. I loved to hear them sing as a group but looking back I wish i could just hear them one more time.

Juanita always said she wanted to be young and that she never wanted to be fifty because when you got fifty you were old. Well as you can guess to all young people fifty is old, but the older you get and the closer you get to that number the younger that number looks.

She had been in a car accident when she was younger and had a broken collarbone and a concussion. And then one time when she was on an airplane and sitting by the emergency exit the door wasn't closed properly and it affected her hearing in that ear that was closest to that door.

One day she went to her doctor for a checkup and they found a lump on her head and they said that it was a brain tumor. It was the size of a walnut when they found it but in a month it was about the size of an orange.
She had planned on going to Mexico for a Special treatment but the doctors told her that it was too late for that.

I often wondered how she felt when she heard that news, but never having been in a situation like her I never knew until last year when they induced me into a coma when I had pneumonia and I thought I was going to die. You are willing for whatever they can do to make it better and give you a little more time.

I talked with her on the phone and she reminded me about how she never wanted to get old and how she never wanted to be fifty. And now she wasn't going to she was getting just what she wished for.

It wasn't many days later when we got a call that she was on a ventilator and that they were going to take her off of it and that we should come before they took her off of life support.

This was one of the saddest days of my life. Words can't express the feelings of the thought of losing a sibling that you love and have share a part of your life with.

When we got to the hospital, I was hoping for a miracle, but there she was with her head shaved and not looking anything like Juanita the sister that I loved. As they took her off of life support her heart stopped and she was gone in the blink of an eye.

It has taken me many years to get that picture out of my mind of her with her head shaved and not looking like herself at all. She always had beautiful hair and always knew just how to wear it.

I can still hear today, "Watch out what you wish for because you just might get it."

Palmer Waters