Both Things Are True

My mom died peacefully the morning of Wednesday, May 17th at 6:45 AM. Within one month of her sister Donna. During ALS Awareness Month and the month right before summer, her least favorite season. She was 72. She had suffered from FTD and later ALS since around 2008.

She was my first love and favorite person. Many people are special, but no one has ever been quite like Judy. She was one-of-a-kind, soulful, adorable and hilarious. I wish the whole world could know her. She was warm, generous, intelligent and curious about people. Everyone wanted to be her friend. She had a wicked sense of humor and a silliness that she valued above all else. Her laugh made people turn their heads.

She was born on August 21st, 1952. The third child and first daughter to Lenore and John Ellis. At her birth, she needed lung surgery in order to survive. Her mother named her Judith after St. Jude, the patron saint of hope.

Judy grew up in Dearborn, Michigan with her four siblings, Robert, Keith, Donna and Joan. As a child, she was happy-go-lucky, curious, adventurous and loved animals, rescuing them off the street and bringing them home to her mother’s chagrin. She was especially proud of her pet guinea pig. She was left handed. She would spend more time with the neighborhood boys than the girls, playing kick-the-can until the sun went down. She was heavily involved in Beatles-mania. She could be very shy and demure but challenged herself to be more outgoing by sitting on a park bench and waiting for strangers to sit next to her to strike up conversation. She was always so timelessly beautiful and yet she hated her square face, big forehead and chin that stuck out. She always looked very young for her age and had no wrinkles up until her death.

She was extremely creative, multitalented and a genius with words and language.

She went to college at the University of New Mexico, majoring in journalism. While there, she participated heavily in hippy culture and experimented with spiritualism and psychedelics. After college she worked as an Au Pair in Italy with her sister Donna for a little girl named Simona. She did not speak a lick of Italian. She fell in love with Italy and always dreamed of returning, but never did. She moved to Los Angeles along with her whole family around 1975. She first worked for an Investment Advisor where she learned how to invest, a talent that came naturally to her. She then dabbled for a bit in real estate. For a while she worked for The ABC Entertainment Center Tennis Club as co-manager and bookkeeper. She briefly worked at LAX TSA where she nabbed a drug dealer with her incredible instinct. She became a freelance Journalist for community newspapers and eventually was hired as West Coast Special Correspondent for Life magazine. She interviewed dozens of celebrities including U2, the cast of Cheers, those involved in the LA riots, and Jerry Seinfeld, who was smitten with her.

She and my Dad met by chance at a party in 1984 and fell madly in love, getting married a year later. They always had dogs, mostly sheepdogs. They would call each other “Moo” and it became a running joke among friends and family, until they had garnered enough cow-themed gifts to last a lifetime. They traveled to Carmel, New York, Chicago, Paris, Perigord. They lived ten years together before she became pregnant with me.

In the 80’s she was commissioned to write a book about surviving cancer. Cancervive was published in the early 90’s. Her project during much of my childhood was research for a book about tomboys, taking from her own childhood, a book that never came to be. She expressed herself best through her writing, her words careful, irreverent, particular, and so very her.

She was multifaceted and gifted in so many ways. She had a shoe painting business. She handmade cards, crafting little faces out of buttons, beads and feathers. She drew Dr. Seuss-like comics of goofy characters. She practiced calligraphy. I deeply admired her art and would always attempt to copy it. Together, we would craft little angels out of seashells- one of the highlights of my childhood. She could play Joni Mitchell’s River on piano beautifully but never sang, shy about her voice.

I saw her wear a dress maybe three times in my life. She was self-conscious about her skinny legs and the scar on her back. She was always mistaken for Diane Keaton and looked just like Annie Hall in her trousers, long sleeved top, loafers and hat. Layers, always layers so she would never be too cold or too hot. She always wore a hat when leaving the house, usually of the bucket variety. She wore vintage gloves while driving to protect her hands from the sun and drank coffee with a straw so her teeth would stay white. She introduced me to the magic of thrift stores from a young age- she always found the best pieces and I marveled at her enormous vintage collection- especially her collection of white blouses and eclectic scarves. She wore makeup obsessively until a year before her death. She applied lipstick in a way that it always became a round bullet-shaped nub. I found that so satisfying.

She loved art, books, music, TV, movies and musicals. Favorites were Joni, Cat Stevens, Beethoven and Mozart, Coldplay, The Colbert Report, John Stewart, documentaries, Anchorman, There’s Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber, When Harry Met Sally, South Pacific, Sweeney Todd, Oklahoma, Carousel, Cabaret. She introduced me to Da Ali G. Show and her favorite character Borat when I was way too young, and it was one of our favorite things to enjoy together. We would quote the movie to each other and laugh and laugh. When I was in high school, I got her into South Park and she absolutely loved it. She deeply enjoyed the uncouth, irreverent satirical, goofy and bizarre. Along with comedy, she specifically loved horror movies. We would watch a different one on Chiller together every weekend during my middle and high school years.

She was raised Catholic but later rejected organized religion. She hated swimming and the beach. She hated rap music. She hated injustice and sobbed when Al Gore lost in 2000 and while watching documentaries about MLK Jr. and JFK. In college she was involved with Students for Democratic Society. She had a deep love for history- she collected antiques, devoured books about the Civil War and the history of Los Angeles and TV shows and movies like Frontier House, Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, Ken Burns documentaries, Kingdom of Heaven, Shakespeare in Love. She tolerated my teenage obsession with anime and video games but clearly was not a fan. Her anxious habit was picking her nails until they bled. She dyed her hair brown because she resented the idea of being a California blonde. She always deeply loved animals, especially her dog Poppy, who she took to the dog park ritualistically every day. After my parents divorced, she would drive us to a neighborhood with fancy houses and we would walk around with the dog for hours.

Multiple times a week you could find her splayed out over the Yoga ball, lifting weights while watching a movie. She took great care of her body. She was obsessed with eating healthy and was mostly vegetarian except for the occasional beef stew recipe passed down from her mother. She was always drinking watered down gatorade- people used to joke that she should have had an IV of it. Other favorite foods and snacks were kefir, stevia-flavored coffee, oatmeal with bee pollen, Kookooroo, the restaurant Lemonade, yellowtail collar at sushi restaurants. She would play a repeated joke on me where she would pretend to have something small and precious in her hands for me and then it was the skin of the kiwi she had eaten. She rarely drank but enjoyed the occasional red wine. She was always anxious about stomach ulcers, as her mother died from stomach cancer. Judy later went on to survive a cencerous cyst herself.

She had a lower voice than I do and a roaring laugh- her laugh was such a big part of her I can’t stop talking about it! She had certain sayings and phrases that I’ve gone onto adopt;

Well I’ll be darned!

You’re telling me!

You got that right!

I tell ya!

Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles!

(to me) Hey Kiddo!

Her feelings were always big- her highs were so high and her lows were so low. Her beloved mother died of stomach cancer shortly before I was conceived. Then her favorite sister and confidante, my aunt Joan, committed suicide when I was in utero. I was almost miscarried and survived, her miracle baby. She loved me more than anything. She suffered periods of great depression all throughout my childhood but always put on a smile for me.

Up until the very late stages of her disease, she had a way of being and a quality to her presence and voice that could make anyone smile. She was so animated and, although she suffered great losses and periods of depression in her life, always radiated joy and love. Loved and loved and loved with her whole self. Could enchant anyone she met. People were always falling in love with her. Just a shiny person.

Her love for me was fierce and radiant. She was my person and my confidante. I would tell her all of my secrets, my joys and my sorrows and she would laugh or cry with me. I had struggles in my childhood, but she would always approach me with deep empathy, holding me and saying “You’re sensitive, just like me. I love you.“ When I was sad or anxious as a child, she would put her cold hand on my forehead and say “put all those bad thoughts right here kiddo,” and then pretend to throw them away. We were extremely affectionate with each other. She would climb into bed with me to snuggle or read me ‘The Magic School Bus”, both of us laughing at the illustrations. After my parents divorced, she and I slept in a bed together. She was wild about my art, writing and singing. She always told me I reminded her of Joan. She was so proud of me. My anxiety as a child was centered around her dying. I would hold her hand in a death grip, hanging onto her, watching her, protecting her. I know find myself constantly reaching for the hands of those I love. My love for my mother unlike anything that I’ve had for anyone else.

Her illness caused her incredible trauma, pain and despair. There are many ways that C9orf72 can present, and I believe she endured one of the worst presentations. FTD and ALS are two of the most horrifying diseases you can imagine. And yet she held on- telling me “I’m not going anywhere Brookita!” As bad as things got, as much as she suffered, she loved life. In the late stages of her disease, she refused a DNR. She wanted to live.

I don’t know if I’ll ever really see her again. I hope I will. I believe I might. I hope I can squeeze her again. Until then, I see her in my dreams. The morning she died, I dreamt we talked on the phone. She said “Hi Brookie! They’re telling me I’m gonna die in a few days. What the fuck??” In my dreams she is whole and well, funny and so very much herself. I sat in a hot tub in my friend’s backyard the day after she left her tattered body. There were these gusts of wind- over again through the trees in the garden, hitting me in the face, making me gasp. The smell of gardenia… her favorite flower (besides pussy willows!) I believe it was her. “I’m not going anywhere! You’ll never get rid of me kiddo!”