Easter in the church of my living angels

I know a boy who has the best sister.

On Easter mornings, in their pyjamas, outside if it was warm enough (Easter is, as they say, a movable feast; it can come in April or March, in a snowstorm or when the moon hits your eye). If it was warm enough and they were outside, they would turn over every stone, because Easter's about stones turning over - to find chocolate eggs.

If they saw one at the same time, racing to it, she would win because she was bigger and faster and when she had it in her hand she would look at her little brother, pause, then hold out the egg to him.

He'd say no, you got it, fair and square. He might not have been so fair-minded with anyone else. But this is Andrea. It's yours, he'd say. But she would nod her head and smile and keep her arm held out. Until he took it.

When they watched something scary on TV, like real scary, not David Cronenberg or CGI scary as now, but Vincent Price's little head on the body of a fly, with that shrieking fly voice, the two of them would dive behind the sofa together and peek over the top intermittently to check if the horror had passed.

She made him less scared. I think he made her a bit less scared too. Damn, I hope he did. I hope he does now. They would laugh their heads off at their own ridiculous behaviour, but of course only once they weren't scared any more. Their parents, weary of this, would say you two are never watching scary shows again. But they did.

That boy has the best sister. Holding out that egg - her eyes as hazel as mercy, dancing with colour, like something painted beautifully for Easter and embedded in golden straw.

She helped make it so that the boy grew up to be hardly scared at all, at least not of imaginary horrors.

That boy still lives, somewhere inside a grown man, and that brave girl, in the temple of a woman who is a mother of six. We weren't quite Irish twins. A year and a half apart. Yes, six, she has - three girls, three boys. And nine grandchildren. Sorry, am I losing my place?

All that life from that temple, into which something unwelcome has now come, but it is not imaginary. And just a week before Easter, as things were improving, some news got worse. A shadow on an MRI.

Now that boy is scared again. The man even more than the boy. The boy knows what it is to hope, to believe innocently, knows what it is to lose a race and have the winner hold out the prize and share it.

The man knows also what it is to hope. But he has to learn it over and over again. The boy knows it better, deeper.

So I and the boy that I was/am flew 1,200 miles to see Andrea, that woman and the girl that she was/is, and we played cribbage and listened to The Beatles. Her kids came over. We laughed. We reminisced. We watched The Last Of Us" and almost hid behind the couch. I was there to visit the best sister in the world after her rounds of chemo. But for something else too.

Her youngest of the six, daughter Julia, was getting married, in March, early spring, to beat the worst of the Florida heat. That's where Andrea has lived since 1996. At the wedding Andrea was - I was going to say radiant because she was. So beautiful. Her hazel eyes. But she had just been through radiation. Wrong word? No, she was radiant.

Easter, pagan spring, Passover - they make no promises. Still, they do bend toward hope. The soil has morning sickness with the awakening of new life, and the branches are heavy with fledglings. But this Easter, the anniversary of my brother-in-law Guy's death, Andrea's beloved husband, brings a fresh setback. Just as her hair is starting to grow back in, they find the shadow was a new tumour.

We go on. Lent is over. No giving up.

On Easter, having membership in no other club, I will go to the church of my living, this-world angels, via Zoom, phone calls, internet. Andrea and my sisters Irene, Donna and Carol Ann (locked in a four-way tie for best), and best brother Burke. We will talk, we will love. We will cry and hope. We will win, whatever form that takes. Together, six orphans.

Being so close (thank you, mom and dad), this is about the hardest thing any of us has ever known.

But we, so blessed, have each other (the sadness of the world is that too many do this alone). It is spring. Love is strong. We are scared. But yesterday, for the first time in almost a year, Andrea drove out to the beach and took a picture of the ocean sunrise to email to us, a glorious, gorgeous sunrise, peeking over the couch.

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com