Earrings for Effie: Courage and Laughter in the Face of Death

HER STORY: The last time I saw Effie, she wore her Lunch at the Ritz earrings, the ones we had ordered together. It certainly hadn't been a traditional therapy session the month before when the two of us hunched over my computer, pouring over the glitzy enameled creations on the internet.

She passed on the jungle beasts, dripping in Swarovski crystals; and I already owned the hot pink flamingos.

So Effie bought the whole world, the world she wouldn't live to see. The Eiffel tower dangled next to the Sphinx. The Brooklyn Bridge bumped up against the Taj Mahal. More than earrings, they were four-inch-long flights of imagination that shimmered under the fluorescent lights of my office, casting sparkles of laughter across her still ample bosom.

She was delighted to find something that would draw curious eyes away from her scalp, now smooth as a baby's bottom. Something to keep the stuttered well-meaning utterances of friends from gaining a foothold in her psyche.

"You're hair was so lovely", they would stammer. Too bad most of it's in the sink, they would think, and the rest on the barber's floor.

Those dangly, sparkling, outrageous earrings served her well. Her talisman to ward off the evil of the sorrowful looks. Their whimsy drew tentative smiles, then outright guffaws.

I didn't write about our shopping spree in her chart that day, just the usual note:

Coping well, depression mild, family supportive, no longer in remission, in good spirits by the end of the session. No, I didn't mention that the two of us were convulsed in downright hysterics over her idea about wearing them in her casket.
"So inappropriate!" her Aunt Gertrude would whisper to Uncle Albert, whose eyebrows would take a shocked ride skyward.

Effie was more than in good spirits that day. She was filled with giggles. A sunbeam shone in her eyes that no amount of toxic poisons, dripped into her ravaged body, could tarnish.

The shopping cure. The treatment they don't teach about in psychology graduate school. No...money cannot buy happiness and for Effie all the money in the world was not going to buy a cure. But that one hundred and thirty dollars plus tax and shipping could buy a momentary distraction from the inevitable.

She was too weak to make the ten-mile drive to my office again and soon after that beyond being able to talk on the phone. Her loving husband kept me posted by adding my name to the tenderly worded newsletter he sent out to family and friends.

In a few weeks, the end came as expected...yet unexpected. I was scheduled to be out of town the day of her services. I would never know if she was able to convey to her husband her wish to wear her outrageous earrings in her casket.

If I had come and found the earrings on her dresser and the casket closed, I would have shoved aside that burdensome lid, amidst a roar of shock and disapproval, and fastened them, lovingly, to her ears.

I had given her the notion that a pair of glittering, silly earrings could bring her a few precious seconds of joy.

But Effie gave me so much more. Effie gave me a glimpse of a soul that glittered and giggled in the face of death.