Without a doubt, Julie knows what she has given up to injury and disease. She told her mother once that she knows she will never marry or have children, something for which she longs. She joked that she might adopt, so they could have babies and she could become a grandmother one day.

But every Saturday, she has someone at the nursing home dial Lael's house so that Julie can sing, "Saturday is a special day, it's the day we get ready for Sunday."

Her life has been completing circles for a very long time.

Genetic testing not only showed that Julie had inherited the disease; her CAG repeats were so numerous that the neurologist believes now that she had the rare juvenile form of the disease. It would go a long way toward explaining what for more than a decade was a mystery to Lael Askew: Why is Julie like this?

When she looks back, Lael describes her middle daughter as a "needy child. She needed to be entertained constantly. Jane, just less than two years younger, was her main source of entertainment, and she about wore Jane out."

Jane liked to play by herself and was happiest when Julie was somewhere else so she could.

All three of the Askew girls were singers, the love of which they inherited from their father, John, who always had a beautiful singing voice. The younger pair were in singing groups as they were growing up.

Lael believes now that symptoms of the disease appeared when Julie was a teenager, even before her father was becoming ill. Her parents thought she had low self-esteem, so they enrolled her in classes for voice training, modeling — anything to make her feel better about herself.

They encouraged her as she joined the English hand-bell choir at Brighton High and as she sang in choirs and was in school plays. Nothing seemed to raise her self-esteem. She was running with a wild crowd. She had trouble making and keeping friends. Her grades bordered on being disastrous, though her mother was convinced she was as smart as the other children, if she'd just apply herself. Only in music classes did she pull down good grades.

She'd stay out all night, argue with her parents, drive the whole family nuts. "I did not like her at all back then," says big brother Scott. "Now it's a pleasure to be with her."

She had a tender side, even then. She loved animals, especially cats, but she was allergic to them. She still brought them home. Years later, Lael Askew learned that a couple of times Julie went to the pet store, bought the animal and then asked some guy to give it to her as it if were her birthday present so she'd be allowed to keep it. And she always was, though the cats had to stay outside because of her allergies.

Lael and John were worried sick that they'd one day get a call that something terrible had happened to Julie.