Ice-Cream Pies

Aunt Janice

The type of woman who created traditions and barbecued them annually.
The first person to take me aside and say, "Jodi, I think Jordan may not be able to hear."
As we debated cochlear implants, she sent me magazine and newspaper clippings from Baltimore to Italy.
Every birthday and anniversary, her card came faithfully in the mail.
We always had Thanksgiving at her house growing up, and she made the best damn merengues with chocolate chips-ate so many I traditionally threw up every Thanksgiving night.
She always bought a new version of a Toyota, always Toyota- cleanest car I've yet to see.
She kept a calendar of dinner dates, grandkids' parties, and special events.
Her job was helping people, and she helped many.
Uncle Marty had a stroke when I was young, she never left his side.
She said that the kind of man you want to marry is not the one who buys you flowers or takes you to expensive restaurants, but the man who brings you tea when you don't have the strength to get out of bed.
She had the best tan from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
She could have sold a boatload of Oil of Olay.
10 rounds of chemo-therapy,
6 years of ovarian cancer,
she did not complain, she listened to the cancer and what it had to say to her.
It told her to love her grandkids even more, to appreciate her time with her husband and children.
I know that I will never meet another person the rest of my life who will so completely teach me the meaning of the word DIGNITY.
Before she died, she wrote letters to her family, and she left a small white box wrapped in a silk ribbon for her granddaughter. She wrote, "This is my gift to you. Carry it with you always, but never open it..because inside it is all my love for you."
And I will miss her so much, her and her chocolate fudge, caramel ice-cream pies.