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"People should be politicised, people should be angry about a lot of things and the peace-and-love thing doesn't sit comfortably with me at all. I'm serious, it doesn't come easy." -- Bono, 2000 |
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"People should be politicised, people should be angry about a lot of things and the peace-and-love thing doesn't sit comfortably with me at all. I'm serious, it doesn't come easy." -- Bono, 2000 |
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Like a Song: Kite
@U2,
July 05, 2008
[Ed. note: This is the 22nd in a series of personal essays by the @U2 staff about songs and/or albums that have had great meaning or impact in our lives.]
 I'm the second oldest of 18 first cousins, just on my mother's side. My grandparents lived in our house, so on the weekends, many (if not all) of the aunts and uncles and cousins would show up at our house to visit. Everyone would march upstairs to be plied with cookies, espresso and (tiny) shots of vermouth, and a half hour later, high on sugar, caffeine and alcohol, the kids would come down and let loose in our backyard and in the alley behind our house. Mostly, I remember a large horde of very small people running around, screaming and touching all my stuff. Or maybe it was the parents screaming. Anyway, I must not have minded because I always looked forward to these visits.When we were younger, it was equal opportunity chaos, every kid for him/herself. The alliances were age-related, as is normally the case when you get a bunch of kids together. My younger brother and my cousin Teresa were especially close at this stage. When our families were together, they were never apart. The dynamics of the group changed as we got older; the girls got girlier, and the boys stayed, well, boys. As young teens, Teresa and I became close very quickly. Even though she was 3 and ½ years younger, we both loved music, which started early in our lives. Our family listened to opera (her father had trained to be a singer before coming to America) and she had old cassettes of episodes of The Monkees, taped straight from the television, that we couldn't get enough of. We were forever changed when we saw our future in all its Technicolor glory-that was the day when cable came to town. And having cable meant one thing: MTV. (For those of you who weren't born yet, in the early '80s MTV played exclusively music videos, 24 hours a day, with very little commercial interruption.) We were transformed, transfixed. The clothes! The hair! The bands! It was a language we both spoke and understood, and because local radio only played "Oldies," we discovered many of the bands we would love for the rest of our lives. Our love of MTV fueled our love of live music. We saw many concerts together, our first being a group of four short, hairy Irish guys who called themselves U2. I think I was 17, and she was 14. At one point during the show, a very young, very fit Bono climbed a stack of speakers on our side of the stage to sing towards our section of seats. We turned to each other and simultaneously screamed, "Oh my god, he looked at me!" Again, we were transfixed, and it was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with the band and their music for both of us. We saw every subsequent tour together. In 2001, I was nine months pregnant and suffering terribly with a pinched sciatic nerve, so I couldn't comfortably walk, stand or sit. We had tickets to our local Elevation show, and Teri was the only person who didn't say I should skip it. She drove me there, held my hand while we walked through the parking lot, and made sure I sat at the end of our row so I could move around as necessary to relieve the pain. That was my son's first concert, and I know he enjoyed it because he starting kicking me as soon as the music started and never let up until the very end. In 2003, we made our first foray into the world of U2 fandom when we went to the opening ceremonies of the U2 exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We both had husbands and small children at this point in our lives, and neither one of us had even had so much as a girls' night out without them. We were stoked. Teri's husband had always given us a hard time about our obsession, but this was proof that we weren't the only U2 freaks out there. For two days and nights we drank, danced, and sang our hearts out to the songs we had loved for so many years, with people from all over the world who didn't think it was odd or crazy. We left Sunday morning and rolled into town, straight to a baby shower for the youngest of the 18 cousins. Teri's sister answered the door, took one look at us and asked, "What the hell happened to you?" Our voices were shot, but even if we could have spoken, what could we possibly have said? Something is about to give/I can feel it coming/I think I know what it is In 2005, we were making plans to see U2 on their just-announced Vertigo tour. We were hoping to travel to some shows in cities close by, but we had to scratch most of our plans when Teresa was diagnosed with breast cancer in early summer, at the tender age of 37. This was after a long, hard year for her, struggling with other health issues and adjusting to her 9 year-old son's newly discovered Type 1 Diabetes. Her diagnosis came just as the tectonic plates beneath my own little world were shifting, causing irreparable damage to the landscape of my family life. Suddenly (but not surprisingly), I was a single mom with two kids to care for, alone. The storm had been brewing on the surface for a long time, so when it finally hit, I thought I'd be ready. I was wrong. I'm not afraid to die/I'm not afraid to live/And when I'm flat on my back/ I hope to feel like I did 'Cause hardness, it sets in/You need some protection/ The thinner the skin I wanted to be strong for my cousin because I felt like whatever I was going through was inconsequential to what she was dealing with. My pain was self-imposed; hers was something you wouldn't wish for your worst enemy. We cried together on the phone and hoped that others were luckier than we were. We wondered what karmic sins from our former lives we were paying back. I plucked clumps of hair from the back of her shirt, and we both laughed the first time I saw her in a skull cap and called her The Edge. She ended up being the one who saved my life, by being the person she always was; good-natured, funny, and unfailingly optimistic. We had no reason to believe she wouldn't beat the disease. She discovered it fairly early (six or eight weeks after a mammogram had come back clear), and it was responding well to the chemotherapy. Once the lumps and lymph nodes were removed, she did some radiation, and continued taking standard chemotherapy treatments every three weeks. She started working part-time and avoided crowds to stay healthy. Plus, the fact that she was young would work in her favor. Who's to say where the wind will take you/Who's to say what it is will break you I don't know which way the wind will blow We had tickets to our local Vertigo show, but Teri wasn't sure she'd be up to it. Her chemo was on Thursdays, and the show was on the Saturday right after a treatment. Those were horrible weekends for her, filled with debilitating nausea and bone-crushing pain. She wanted to give away her ticket (the concert was sold out, so everyone wanted it), but I talked her into waiting until the day of the show to decide. Even though we wouldn't be together -- she had seats while I took our GA tickets -- I wanted her to be there because I knew she would feel better once it started. I had secured rides in both directions for her, and she was sitting with another family member, so she wouldn't be alone and could leave at any time if she couldn't handle it. I was out in line in the driving rain all day with no cell phone, so I had no idea if she'd make it or not. Just before they opened the gates, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to find Teri standing there, like it was the most normal thing in the world. I hugged her tight ("Watch my hair!" she whispered, when I knocked her wig askew) and said, "I am so glad you're here!" "Me too," she replied. She had a wonderful time, but the week after the concert, she got pneumonia and stayed in the hospital for two weeks. I felt responsible for her illness, for making her come to a drafty arena on a miserable, freezing, damp day, and sit around for hours with 25,000 germ-infested organisms. It was the first of many setbacks, but we didn't know it then. We had been to our first U2 concert together; I never imagined this would be our last. In summer I can taste the salt in the sea/There's a kite blowing out of control on a breeze I wonder what's gonna happen to you/You wonder what has happened to me Things got progressively worse. It turns out that because she was so young, the cancer was particularly aggressive. There was a tiny spot on her liver, perhaps something that was missed during the surgery. A spot showed up on a lung x-ray, but that could have been from another bout of pneumonia. She had bad reactions to drugs: more fluid in her lungs; a spot on her brain, at the base of her spine; more surgery; more chemo. The only salt we tasted was in our tears as we watched her struggle again and again. The family took another hit when, about halfway through this ordeal, my mother was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the esophagus. She had already survived breast cancer twice, and after her initial shock and anger over her recent diagnosis, she bravely decided she had too much to live for and would fight it. But now, I could no longer take my kids to my mom's house so I could go visit my cousin, because she was starting treatments of her own and we couldn't risk infecting her. I wanted so badly to help, but it wasn't logistically possible as much as I would have liked. I'm a man, I'm not a child/A man who sees the shadow behind your eyes Children often feel helpless because they have no control over their circumstances. Parents make all the decisions, and compliance isn't a choice. We were all adults now, but we felt as helpless as children as we watched our cousin's body fail and we could do nothing to stop it. After Teri was diagnosed with a second tumor in her brain, I went to the hospital to see her, and had no choice but to take my children along. She didn't know I knew about the tumor, until she looked me in the eye. Up to that point, she had been tireless in her fight against the ravages of her disease. She never complained, she never gave up, and losing the battle was not an option. But in that fleeting moment, I saw a fear in her eyes that wasn't there before. We couldn't talk about it in front of the kids, but we didn't need to. We understood. I want you to know/ That you don't need me anymore I want you to know/You don't need anyone, anything at all Who's to know when the time has come around Don't wanna see you cry/I know this is not goodbye Teri spent more time in hospitals than out. The family made desperate moves to find new ways to help her. There was a clinic in Texas that would take her after she finished her last round of chemo. Her brother-in-law was a doctor, who called friends of friends who may or may not have helped the biggest band in the world get back on tour just months before. We called every health food store and organic grocery for anything we thought would help -- vitamins, herbs, frozen shark cartilage -- but there was no miracle drug we could find to save her. She went along with all of it, not wanting to leave her two young sons without their mother. All along, she kept up her sense of humor, and she only got upset if anyone cried around her. My aunt would sit, tears silently streaming down her face, and Teresa, facing the other direction with her eyes closed, would say, "Mummy, stop crying." Even in her own pain, she didn't want to cause any pain for us. On July 4, 2007, I sat in a darkened hospital room with Teri's immediate family. She had stopped eating days before and was no longer responsive. The cousins, aunts and uncles came and went, everyone in disbelief that it had come to this. This was normally a day of celebration for our family, one of the few holidays when all of the 18 cousins and aunts and uncles would gather with their kids and spouses at my parents' house to spend time and catch up and marvel at how much everyone had grown since the year before. Instead, we cried and prayed and held her hands, and waited. I couldn't stay any longer. My kids hadn't seen me for days, and I just couldn't stand the thought of being in the room when... I hugged her, and cupping her face in my hands, I whispered in her ear, "Go. We'll take care of the boys, I promise you. You need to go now. It's time. You know I love you." The next day, I was sitting at my desk at work, completely distracted. At one point, I happened to look out the big windows just as the sky opened up and the rain poured down. I called Teri's husband at that moment, and he must have recognized my number because all he said when he picked up was, "She's gone." "When?" I asked. "Just now." In summer I can taste the salt in the sea/There's a kite blowing out of control on a breeze I wonder what's gonna happen to you/You wonder what has happened to me As children, our families launch us with a good running start. Once we are aloft, we are tethered to this earth by precarious ties that can break at any time. Sometimes though, the wind picks up and unravels the string, and we are the ones left standing on the beach, empty spool in hand, watching as our love floats away from us, becoming smaller and smaller with each passing moment. Our memories become the invisible threads that keep us together. The songs that once gave us such joy are now the songs I turn to in my grief. My love for Teri is forever intertwined with those songs, and I can never hear them again without thinking of her. Although I can't see her, I know my cousin is where she's always been, hovering right there above me. © @U2/Maione, 2008.
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