My Sister Coco
Her legal name was Cozette, but we called her “Coco.” It was a privilege not a right, and outsiders who crossed the line got a swift but loving reprimand: “You can call me Cozette.”
Her nickname and her personality were a perfect match. Coco. There was something fun and whimsical and child-like about it, the way it bounced playfully off the tongue. But it was also exotic, sassy, stylish, a little kick-ass when she needed it. Think Coco Chanel, Coco Jones, Coco Ho.
If a single metaphor defined Coco’s life, I would call it escape. It started early. When Coco was two or three years old, she would climb out of her crib and toddle down the hall and out the front door to explore the neighborhood, sometimes wearing nothing but a diaper and other times wearing less than that. Call that Escape #1. From the very beginning, adventure was in her blood.
Of the seven children in our family, Coco’s face was the closest to our mother’s. If you compare their teenage photos, they could be twins except one is wearing pedal pushers and the other bellbottoms. But their connection was far more than cosmetic. The death of our mother in 1970 was devastating to all of us, but twelve-year-old Coco seemed to take it more deeply and personally, as if she’d lost not only a mother but a friend and soul mate. It was a loss she spent a lifetime trying to recover.
Ironically, at this point, Coco’s life became something of a fairy tale: the loving mother dies, the father hastily remarries, and enter the Wicked Step-Mother who tells Coco her mother’s gone, she’s never coming back, there’s a new sheriff in town, so get over it! Coco either couldn’t or simply wouldn’t.
Which led to Escape #2: Flight. As a teenager, Coco was bounced from home to home to home until she had none. After a decade of wandering—some of it fruitful (mission, college), some of it wayward—one dark and stormy night her younger brother Jon (the Knight in Shining Armor) rode to the rescue in a U-Haul truck, swooping her up from the fleshpots of L.A. and driving her to a safe haven in southern Arizona. Shortly after, Coco (who was still trying to acclimate to the mad clatter of cowboy boots at a shopping mall) struck gold—or, more precisely, she met her Handsome Prince, a young man named Jim Tenney, and the real fairy tale began. After ten years of detours and dead ends, Coco finally had a home of her own with the love of her lifeand three beautiful daughters on the horizon.
I’d like to say, and she lived happily ever after. . . and she very well may have if not for Escape #3.
Mental illness is a bitch. And the worst part is, you can fast and pray, read scriptures, pay your tithing, and check all of the other boxes for good spiritual health and still feel as if God has kicked you to the curb or, worse, forgotten you altogether: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Tragically, in addition to a glamorous face and a host of angelic virtues, Coco also inherited from her mother a chronic war within her head that pitted her joyful, fun-loving self against an uninvited guest who rudely and randomly crashed her perfectly planned party, saying things Coco normally wouldn’t say and doing things Coco normally wouldn’t do. At her best, Coco was generous, kind, compassionate, resourceful, creative, the stand-up comic who left us all in stiches. But her better angels always knew that that uninvited guest was lurking just around the corner. And when she struck, she struck without pity, making Coco’s life a roller coaster ride of ecstatic highs and dreadfully depressing lows. It’s a special kind of hell on earth: the highest flight, the longest fall, the loudest splat! And she suffered this for most of her adult life.
Coco’s life makes much more sense viewed through an eternal lens. The Apostle Paul called them “thorns in the flesh”—those mortal trials and afflictions we suffer to test our spiritual mettle and prepare us for greater challenges on the other side. In the eternities, we have bigger fish to fry. God knew Coco was kind, compassionate, patient, long-suffering, all of that; but He also knew she was tough; she was a fighter. You didn’t want to mess with her, even on a good day. Smooth sailing was for sissies, so God tossed Coco into the maelstrom.
So this is how I will remember Coco: the woman in shorts and a t-shirt throwing her head back and laughing along with the old Navajo women selling their wares on a Lake Powell overlook; the woman who takes her elderly neighbor by the arm and walks her around her neighborhood chatting away as if they’re dear old friends because they are; the woman who loves to buy you lunch, gas, clothes, whatever she thinks you need even if you don’t; the woman who doesn’t back down and refuses to be intimidated by your name or your title or your money or your clothes or your car.
I will remember her untrained but extraordinary artistic talent. With no formal training, she took up painting and developed a unique style that was deceptively child-like and one-dimensional yet could capture the soul of her subject in a way that completely eluded more polished painters.
I will remember the girl who on her sixteenth birthday asked our father if she could get a driver’s license. He said no, and Coco didn’t like that answer. But instead of moping in her room or scribbling her sorrows in her diary (this was in the pre-twitter, pre-Facebook, pre internet era), Coco retorted: “Hey, if I’m old enough to get pregnant, I’m old enough to drive a car.” Our father took Coco to the DMV that afternoon.
And I will never forget her raucous, gut-busting laugh. In a family where humor is like money and a good one-liner more precious than gold, Coco was by far the funniest. The rest of us are good for an occasional joke or witticism, but Coco could command an audience with side-splitting jokes and anecdotes for an entire evening. She could be in personal free-fall and still find a snappy one-liner before she crashed. For her, humor was levitation. She took her pain and made us laugh. The light in her eyes at her best was pure joy.
And I think this is where Coco shines the brightest. Most people who suffer these Jekyl–Hyde highs and lows simply give up. They end it, literally or figuratively. But Coco never surrendered. When she was a patient in rehab, she went around befriending and counseling the other patients (yes, without a license—you know Coco). This was her natural demeanor, her truer self: the helper; the advocate; the comforter; the healer. The doctors and nurses were so impressed they told her to become a real (as in “credentialed”) counselor. She was a natural. She was spiritually wired to help people, and yet much of the time she was the one needing help. And this was perhaps her greatest frustration.
We always want to remember our loved one’s triumphant public face. But our public face is an airbrushed face. We don’t like to show our zits and wrinkles (certainly not on Facebook!). And yet the Savior’s Easter jubilation—He is risen!—is intensified by the horrors of Gethsemane and Calvary. And Peter’s denial provides humanizing hope for all of us. So, yes, I want to remember Coco as the vivacious, stand-up comic but I never want to forget the dark road she often had to travel, and how she always kept her feet moving, trudging, smiling in spite of a pain most of us will never understand, knowing in her heart there was light—pure, unblemished light--somewhere at the end of it.
Coco’s spirit lives on in the world beyond where that uninvited guest has been permanently put out to pasture so that Coco’s joyful self can fully flourish. It took a release from this life to do it, but she’s finally finagled her last and greatest escape as our Savior greets her with loving arms and a wink and a smile: “Oh, Coco, have I got a job for you. . . ” I imagine she’s entertaining the troops in her unique Coco way and probably poking fun at whatever levels of bureaucracy prevail on the other side. And as she did on earth, she’s making life a little happier, a little better, and a helluva lot funnier for everyone.