The first thing I noticed when seeing my Aunts Joan and Janis at a family wedding last weekend was their hair.

Joan's hair, once thick lush silver, was cropped to half-inch spikes. Her scalp showed red beneath the thin bristles, and I worried that the hot July sun might burn her as she sat on a folding chair waiting for the bride to walk down the makeshift aisle at the outdoor ceremony.

Joan's dangly, gold earrings, the kind my 19-year-old daughter would wear, drew my eye away from the hair, though, and toward her face, which was vibrant like always.

My mother's younger sisters, Joan is 76 and Janis 71.

Janis' hair, long strands that followed the contours of her round face, also had thinned and turned wispy white. The younger of the two, Janis used to tease her sisters that her hair remained dark while theirs grayed early. Sitting in the sun next to Joan, though, Janis looked older. Perhaps it was her labored breathing, the result of recent surgery for cancer in which half her lungs were removed.

Sitting with them later in the shade of the large white tent, Janis explained that she was halfway through her yearlong treatment of radiation and chemotherapy. She owned a wig, she said, and then, in typical Janis fashion, exclaimed, "It's too damn hot to wear a wig." (Growing up, I remember how Janis was the only one of my mother's siblings who swore openly, a trait that ranked her as worldly in my youthful eyes. That, and the fact that she never married and lived as a single, working woman in the "big" city about 40 miles from the small western Ohio town where I grew up.)

Earlier this year, Joan underwent radiation and chemotherapy, too, following her breast cancer surgery. But, as she said at the wedding, "Breast cancer treatment is a breeze." What she didn't say was "compared to what my sister is going through."

Throughout my life, Janis and Joan — twice widowed, the first time when her 47-year-old husband died suddenly and she was left with five children to raise — have always been somewhat of a family fixture. The two show up at gatherings together, whether a family reunion or the wedding of a great-niece or nephew. When my mother lived in a nursing home for five years, the two came together for a visit.

They lived not far from each other in the same "big" city and jointly owned a vacation home in Florida. I imagine some of their closeness is the result of Joan's early widowhood, when Janis stepped in and helped with the children.

Now the two sisters are facing cancer together.

At the wedding, both talked openly of their prognosis and of what lies ahead: When her second husband died, Joan said, he was buried alongside his first wife. "And I'll be buried next to Sylvester," she said matter-of-factly, referring to her first husband who died almost 40 years ago.

There's a third burial plot on the lot, they told me, and that is where Janis will lie.

There are some things in life that seem perfect, and knowing that Joan and Janis will be side by side in death is one of them.

Linda K. Schmitmeyer is a freelance writer living in Middlesex Township. Her e-mail address is lks260@zoominternet.net.