Flattened tubes of toothpaste and opened bags of Twizzlers

On September 6, 2019 by Michelle Love

Cool title, huh? Not really.

Do flattened tubes of toothpaste and opened bags of those nasty red Twizzlers have anything in common? Well, yes. Yes, they do.

They are remnants of a life once lived. They are unassuming treasures for the ones still here. They are definitely not trash-can worthy, even though to anyone else, they would definitely end up in a landfill somewhere.

Not to my daughter.

We were recently working on a small project in her bathroom — the one she used to share with her big brother but is now all her own. Standing on the side of the bathtub, I saw an almost empty tube of toothpaste on the top of her wall cabinet and asked why it was there.

She quietly said, “That was BJ’s.”

I held it for a minute, and then laid it back down where I found it.

For 3 1/2 years now, it has had a place inside the cabinet until a few days prior, when she cleaned out the cabinet and organized it. She couldn’t throw it away, so she put it on top of the cabinet.

Somewhere in this house is also an opened bag of those nasty, waxy red Twizzlers candy, stored inside of a ziplock bag. It had been kept in a pocket of our refrigerator organizer so that if BJ wanted one, he only had to reach out from his wheelchair to get it.

My last memory of him eating one of those was when he was being transported on a stretcher out of the house by my friends at MEDIC, on the way to a clinic appointment. It was somewhere within the 15 days between him coming home under the care of Kid’s Path (kid’s Hospice) and the day he left us. The crew was wheeling him out and he quickly reached out and grabbed a piece. We all laughed. He laughed too, laid back, and stuck that horrible candy into his mouth.

There were only a few pieces missing, and although Carly shares her brother’s love for red Twizzlers, she didn’t finish them off. Instead, the bag is saved and contains just as many as the day he left.

It probably sounds pretty crazy to some, for us to keep these things. But they were HIS, and it is SO HARD to depart with ANYTHING that was his — even a flat tube of toothpaste and a half-eaten bag of candy.

This is Childhood Cancer.