The cards for this one: wig, and a person born in the wrong time period.

It’s choppy and could probably be reworked/lengthened to make more sense and flow better. But childhood cancer is not really a fun subject so I’m kinda glad to be done with it.

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Hannah could still remember her older sister Judith vividly. Judith had chestnut colored hair that fell in luxurious curls midway down her back and bright green eyes and freckles. Hannah remembered the games of tag, the shouting matches over pink Starbursts, and cuddling together under the blankets with a flashlight when Judith would read to her before she could read for herself. When she had been small, Judith had been the center of her whole world.

Judith used to say she was born at the wrong time. She loved the Little House on the Prairie books and Anne of Green Gables. She was obsessed with the Oregon Trail game. Hannah could remember the first time Judith had finished Anne of Green Gables, she had walked around the house fussing over wanting a dress with puffed sleeves. When their mother had pushed back, trying to convince Judith she’d be happier with more modern styles of dress, there had been a full on meltdown, with Judith flinging herself dramatically to the floor and crying. It had been both incomprehensible and fascinating to Hannah at the time, but despite her lack of understanding, she had also cried full blast with Judith. She could remember the flabbergasted look on their mother’s face, staring down at them on the floor.

She could remember when Judith got sick. The times spent at the hospital, ignored by their parents, who were devoting all their time and energy to Judith. She knew it was wrong to feel resentful of all the attention Judith was getting, and she felt sad that Judith felt so awful. She was often shunted into the care of aunts or her grandfather, or the neighbors in an emergency. There were a lot of emergencies. Still, a part of her was convinced that things were going to be fine.

Hannah had watched as Judith’s hair had fallen out from the treatment. She could remember Judith being fitted with a wig, her face quite grey and drawn at the time as she glared at her reflection in the mirror. And Hannah had sympathized – the wig, while good, was nowhere near as beautiful as Judith’s long chestnut curls had been. “It’ll be okay, Judy,” their mother had said, adjusting the wig. “You’ll get better and your hair will grow back.” And Hannah had been completely reassured of that truth, and chimed in that their mother was right.

It had been devastating to Hannah to lose her sister, because she had been so sure that Judith would get better one day. Hannah grew up, getting older than Judith had been when she died. All too fast, she was older than her sister would ever be. She spoke very rarely of Judith, and some of her closest friends didn’t even know she had ever had a sister. But there were times when she missed Judith quite a lot. She missed her the year that Judith would have graduated high school, and she missed her presence at her own graduation.

She learned at some point that Judith’s particular cancer was difficult to treat and few recovered or survived. She resented her mother’s false optimism, and stopped talking to her so much once she moved out. There was one day, partway through her first semester of college, that Hannah had read an article that brought Judith to mind immediately. It declared that they had made breakthroughs in treating Judith’s particular cancer – that the prognosis was now very positive for patients. She ran her fingertips across the screen of the phone, and thought of Judith’s childhood declarations of being born in the wrong time. And suddenly, she found she agreed.

Judith had been born too soon.