It was a tradition in the family that the extended clan met at Aunt Barbara’s in Melbourne for the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. For a number of years I attended these events until my wife released me on waivers, as they say in baseball, although I prefer the phrase, “My wife released me to my future.” They were lovely dinners and Barbara was always gracious, but after the divorce I didn’t make the trek.
“How was Thanksgiving at Aunt Barbara’s,” I remember asking Taylor when she came through the front door after her last such dinner. I don’t recall how she replied to my question, but later I read in her diary.
Filled with the comfort of chaos. Dysfunction ran abundant both in the car ride up and the actual Thanksgiving dinner. We are a family that puts the “fun” in dysfunction. It was a line Taylor often used and it implied a bit of obliviousness as well. She was actually much more concerned about another matter; she was more concerned about Jeff. That conversation I remember.
Jeff the boyfriend. Always Jeff the boyfriend. A seventeen-year-old girl could be obsessed with her boyfriend and I remember how self-conscious Taylor was because of her cancer. Well, I was certainly glad Jeff wasn’t Erik, a previous beau. Now there was a loser. “What’s up?” I asked her.
“Jeff’s acting weird,” she replied. “He left me on hold for at least ten minutes and hasn’t called me back since. I hung up and am debating whether to call him or not. But to call him would expose my weakness to him, wouldn’t it?”
I didn’t say anything. I don’t think she wanted me to.
I read in her diary her lament: And my hair is coming out in drastic amounts. I remember her adding that comment. That was so true. We had been warned about the side effects of the chemo and sure enough, clumps of hair were beginning to fall out of Taylor’s scalp. If it was unnerving to her father, I realized, it was terrifying to her. Taylor had a beautiful head of hair, worthy of a cover girl. To lose such a mark of beauty was devastating for a seventeen-year-old girl. She was surprisingly philosophical about it though. I remember reading an entry in her diary:
Maybe losing my hair is absolutely essential for me to reach a higher level or understanding and acceptance in this lesson God is trying to teach me, she wrote. Maybe I must be stripped of external beauty in order to really create inner beauty. I must remember this every time I walk past a mirror.
I think she wrote that to reassure herself. It was a form of acceptance I realized on rereading the passage; a spiritual transformation was beginning.
A week after that diary entry, Taylor surprised me with a totally bald head. “I shaved my head, Dad,” I remember her saying, stating the obvious. “I have a beautiful head, don’t I?” she added, preening before a hand-held mirror.
I agreed that she had a beautiful head as she mockingly preened in a mirror like a diva. Then she took my hand and playfully rubbed it across her skull and chuckled at my discomfort.
She wrote in her diary: It’s kind of empowering and humbling at the same time. It is definitely a unique experience. I’m just going to make the best of it, that’s my decision. Jeff is wonderful as ever…
So Jeff was out of her doghouse that day, although he would return to it now and then over the year. It was the mercurial feature of a teenage romance, on-again, off-again, on-again. I always thought if Shakespeare’s famous teenagers Romeo and Juliet hadn’t killed themselves they probably would have split sometime in the non-existent fourth act. I was a bit too cynical when it came to Jeff. He turned out to be a pretty good egg as I learned later from an entry in Taylor’s journal.
I can’t help but think it’s too good to be true. I mean how can an attractive eighteen-year-old guy stay faithful and emotionally committed to a girl who constantly has some distressing situation or another? I don’t know if I should let it just happen. I have tried to give him an out on a few separate occasions but he won’t even hear of it. Yesterday, I went over to his house and I got a bit emotional about my impending baldness. He made a remark about how I would still be beautiful and a river of tears came flooding out. He knew exactly what to do and say to comfort me. Maybe he came into my life just in time to help me through.
Maybe he did Taylor. And he left shortly thereafter.
Jeff would outlive Taylor, but only by a few months. In the spring of 2002 he was killed in a daylight automobile accident in North Carolina about two weeks after the 60 Minutes program aired. He never got a chance to live his dream and join the NASCAR circuit.
* * *
The chemotherapy caused Taylor’s long brown hair to fall out. First it was a few hairs, then it was a few strands and then it was clump after clump. It was only when she started losing clumps of her hair that she became despondent. Her hair, like so many teenage girls, was such a part of her. It was if her soul was being drained from her.
With the hair loss came a loss of self-confidence, a feeling that how could her boyfriend still love her? It seemed that all throughout her illness Taylor was more concerned about Jeff’s love than her own life. Here is a passage from her diary.