In this episode, I talk about my cousin Jenny, a childhood memory I’ve carried for more than fifty years, and the way grief can return through laughter before it ever knows what to do with itself. I’m reflecting on family distance, ovarian cancer, chronic illness, and what it feels like when my body keeps me far from a goodbye I wish I could attend. It’s about cousins, memory, regret, love, and the strange little details that keep people alive inside us.
This podcast is narrated using an AI voice. The words, reflections, and lived experience are my own.
More info about Sarcoidosis and to donate toward research: The Foundation For Sarcoidosis Research
A quick note before this episode begins. I talk about grief, cancer, death, and later in the episode, I repeat a childhood quote with adult language in it. This one may not be suited to young children, tiny innocent ears, or anyone currently responsible for explaining vocabulary at the dinner table. The news came through family, the way news like that often does. Not dramatically, not with music swelling in the background. Just words moving from one person to another until they reached me and changed the shape of the day. Jenny died this weekend. She had ovarian cancer. Welcome to A Body Rebels, a chronic illness podcast. I'm Tate. Before I go any further, this podcast is based on my personal experience, not medical advice. Please don't diagnose yourself, treat yourself, start medication, stop medication, change medication, adjust oxygen, change your diet, change your treatment, or make medical decisions because I said something. While trying to make sense of life, death, memory, and one unforgettable cousin. For medical decisions, talk to your own doctor or a qualified medical professional, preferably someone with your chart, and not just my emotional support microphone. I also choose to have an AI voice narrate these episodes because my own voice gets tired easily, and when it fades, it starts sounding like a tired screen door trying to explain taxes. The writing, memories, feelings, perspective, and lived experience are mine. The AI Voice helps keep the show accessible, consistent, and easier to listen to. Today I'm talking about my cousin Jenny, the childhood memory that kept her close, and what grief feels like when chronic illness keeps my body far from the goodbye. When I was a boy, my favorite cousin was Alison. She was about 20 years older than me, which, when you're a child, feels enormous. Twenty years might as well be ancient history with earrings. But Alison never felt distant or stiff. She had a bright, easy energy around children. She was grown, yes, but not in the way that made childhood feel like a room where you were supposed to sit still and behave until your knees went numb. She made things feel bigger, louder, and more alive. And Jenny had that same current running through her. Alison had three children around my age, and I played with them often. Jenny was the middle child, about five years younger than me, and she was Alison's daughter in the most obvious possible way. Same spark, same mischief, same sense that if she walked into a room, the room had better prepare itself. At that age, five years is a lot. It should have made her annoying to me by law. She was younger, she was loud, she was funny, and she had no interest in whatever rules children invent about who counts as acceptable company. But we got along. Jenny had presence. Even as a small child, she arrived fully formed, not politely, not gently. Jenny entered a room like she had already read the script and planned to improve it. And she had a pet monkey. I do need to pause there because that's not a sentence most people can drop into childhood memory without explanation. A pet monkey was not a normal thing, even then. It wasn't like saying she had a goldfish or a stubborn cat or a dog that stole food from the table. Jenny had a monkey. And from what I remember, that monkey had exactly the amount of chaos the sentence deserves. It suited her. Of course, Jenny would have a monkey. Of course it would feel less like a pet and more like a tiny accomplice. Of course, at the time, it all seemed completely reasonable. Because childhood can accept absurdity without asking for paperwork. Nobody taps you on the shoulder when you're young and says, pay attention, you'll need this more than 50 years from now. I was just playing, running around, making up games, living inside the kind of afternoon that feels ordinary until decades later. I wasn't thinking about memory. I wasn't thinking about death. I definitely wasn't thinking about what my body would become, or how travel would one day require planning, oxygen, medication, energy calculations, and a realistic conversation with my own limits. I was just a boy with cousins nearby and adults talking somewhere in the background. The children turned air, furniture, stray objects, and whatever nonsense we invented into entertainment. That's the part I keep returning to when I think about Jenny. Not a formal family portrait. Not a grand event. Just childhood noise. And her face. The memory I carried most clearly was the story. Jenny begged me to tell her one, and I was about eleven, which meant I was old enough to feel important when a little kid asked me for entertainment. So I made something up. I wish I remembered the plot. I don't. It could have had monsters, it could have had treasure, it could have had danger, magic, a villain, a dramatic escape, or whatever an eleven-year-old boy thinks qualifies as gripping literature. I remember the ending only because Jenny supplied the review. When I finished, she went quiet. Not impressed, quiet, not moved quiet. This was a silence with legal consequences. She looked straight at me with no smile, no hesitation, and the total authority of a six-year-old who had discovered fraud in progress. And then she said it. You lie, you lie, you stinking bitch. I laughed so hard. I had told her a made-up story because she asked me for a story. That was the arrangement. She requested fiction. I delivered fiction. And somehow in her courtroom, I had violated the terms of the agreement. The wording was outrageous. Her face made it better. That little serious mouth, those eyes, the complete conviction. She wasn't joking. She had reached a verdict, and I was guilty. I never forgot it. For years after that, whenever I knew someone wasn't telling me the truth, Jenny's voice would pop into my head. You lie, you lie, you stinking bitch. And I'd smile. Not because of the lie. Because of her. Because a six-year-old cousin with a wild little spirit had accidentally handed me a private phrase I carried into adulthood. It became a little password between childhood and the present. A ridiculous alarm bell for nonsense. A sentence that belonged to Jenny. Even when I was the only one hearing it. Memory doesn't always save the scenes that look important from the outside. It doesn't always save the birthday cake, the family photo, the carefully arranged gathering, the moment everyone else would recognize as meaningful. Sometimes memory saves the insult. Sometimes it saves the shape of a child's face. Sometimes it saves the way laughter jumps out of you before you can decide whether laughing is appropriate. After childhood, life stretched. The teenage years came. People grew up. Families moved in different directions. You saw each other less. Then less became almost never. There was no dramatic break, no slammed door, no big family wound that split everyone into sides. Jenny and I simply moved into separate lives. We didn't call each other. We didn't write. Later, when everyone seemed to be online, we still didn't really keep up there either. But we asked about each other through family. That has its own kind of meaning. You're not involved in someone's daily life, but their name still has a place in you. Someone mentions them and your attention turns. You ask how they are. You hear a little update. You picture the child you knew, even though the child is gone and the adult has been living a whole life outside your view. You assume there will be time. I did. Over fifty years pass between that childhood memory and the news of her death. Over fifty years is a heavy distance. It doesn't sound like a gap, it sounds like a whole lifetime standing between two people, holding its hands out as if to say, No, you can't simply walk back through. People become adults, parents age, children are born, bodies change. Families scatter across miles, choices, obligations, illnesses, recoveries, losses, and ordinary days. And bodies do change. Mine certainly did. I've lived with sarcoidosis for 20 years, which is both a medical fact and a sentence that still sounds rude when I hear it out loud. Chronic illness has changed the way I move through the world. It has changed what I can say yes to. It has changed how far I can go, how much energy I can spend, and how carefully I have to think before I make a plan that other people might make without a second thought. So when Jenny died, the grief did not arrive by itself. It arrived with geography. It arrived with my body. It arrived at the knowledge that her funeral was happening 3,000 miles away, and I could not simply get up, pack a bag, and go. There are people who hear about a funeral and start looking for flights. I hear about a funeral and start calculating what my body will allow. Oxygen, fatigue, medication, immunity, travel distance. Airports I can't casually move through. The kind of exhaustion that doesn't politely leave when the event is over. Grief asks for presence. Chronic illness asks for negotiation. And sometimes negotiation wins. That's a very specific kind of sadness. Not only losing someone, but knowing I can't stand in the room or other people are saying goodbye. I can't sit with the family. I can't hear the stories people tell afterward. When the formal part is done and everyone starts remembering the person in smaller, more human pieces. I picture Jenny's funeral without me there. People gathering. Someone speaking her name. Someone crying. Someone remembering a version of Jenny I never got to know because time moved us apart. That's the ache I didn't expect. I don't only miss the funeral. I miss the years before it. I wonder what she was like as an adult. I wonder if she kept that sharp humor. I wonder if the spark stayed. I wonder who got to hear her laugh in the decades I wasn't around. And I hope someone else has a Jenny sentence. Some ridiculous line. Some facial expression. Some memory that would make no sense on a sympathy card, but explains everything to the person who remembers it. Because that's what she gave me. Not a speech. Not a dramatic goodbye. Not a perfectly polished message about life and love. She gave me a childhood moment so alive that I've carried it for more than fifty years without needing anyone else to understand why. I can still hear her. You lie, you lie, you stinking bitch. I know. It is not traditional memorial language. Nobody is embroidering that on a pillow unless the family is extremely brave and has no fear of guests. But for me, that line is love. It's Jenny being Jenny. It's a little girl calling out nonsense with complete conviction. It's why grief can feel so mixed up. I'm sad and I'm smiling. I'm missing someone I hadn't seen in over fifty years, and yet her six-year-old voice is clear enough to make me laugh right now. Chronic illness has made me familiar with a certain kind of absence. I miss things. I miss gatherings. I miss easy yeses. I miss being able to assume my body will come along quietly if my heart wants to go somewhere. And grief has a way of pointing directly at those absences. It doesn't only say she's gone, it also says you weren't there. You couldn't go. You miss the years. You miss the goodbye. That can be a hard conversation to have with yourself, because the mind likes to pretend all absence is a choice. But illness complicates that. Distance complicates that. Time complicates that. Life gets built out of limitations as much as intentions. I wish I had seen Jenny again. I wish we had sat together as adults and laughed about that line. I wish I could have asked if she remembered saying it. She probably wouldn't have, which would have made it funnier. I would have had to explain that a sentence she threw at me when she was six had become part of my private vocabulary for spotting nonsense in the world. I can picture her laughing. I hope she would have laughed. So, Jenny, even though we didn't keep in touch, you were never fully gone from my thoughts. You lived in that memory. You lived in that line. You lived in the smile that crossed my face whenever someone was lying, and your little voice gave the verdict. I'm sorry I wasn't there in person to say goodbye. I'm sorry for the years. I'm grateful for the memory. And I love you. Be at rest, my cousin, my friend. This is how I choose to remember her. Funny, fierce, completely unreasonable about fiction, and alive in one sentence, I'll probably hear for the rest of my life. I'm Tate, and this has been A Body Rebels, a chronic illness podcast. I'm grateful you spent this time with me and with Jenny's memory. You can visit AbodyRebels.com to leave a review, send me a message, or leave a voicemail for the show. I do read what comes in, but I'm not able to respond to solicitations, sales offers, guest pitches, or promotional outreach. Personal stories, chronic illness thoughts, and memories are welcome. The marketing side door is closed. If this episode made you think of someone from your own early life, someone you haven't seen in years but still carry somewhere, share the show with someone who'd understand that feeling. Please follow A Body Rebels, a Chronic Illness Podcast, share it, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday. And if you'd like to support work that helps people living with sarcoidosis, please consider donating to the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research, also known as FSR, at stopsarchoidosis.org. I'll put the link in the show notes. Research can feel far away until it reaches the person who needs one better answer, one better treatment, one better chance. Before I go, a small pronunciation favor from someone who's lived with this disease for 20 years. The word is sarcoidosis, not sarcoidosis. Think sarkoidosis, like koi fish, except the koi got replaced by lab work and insurance forms. I know it's not a friendly looking word, but after two decades, the mispronunciation has become a pet peeve with its own little chair in the corner. And remember, sarcoidosis is only rare until you're the one living with it.
