Monthly Archives: March 2025
Questions.
Early morning questions around my sister’s death are constant.
I keep wondering, did I miss something?
What you might not understand about my sister is that she was always almost dying. She had a host of mental illnesses, one of which was Munchausen’s. If you don’t know what that means, here is how the NHS of the UK defines it (source):
Munchausen syndrome is a psychological condition where someone pretends to be ill or deliberately produces symptoms of illness in themselves. Their main intention is to assume the “sick role” so that people care for them and they are the centre of attention. Any practical benefit in pretending to be sick – for example, claiming incapacity benefit – is not the reason for their behaviour.
I could go on about how this affected her life and the lives of those around her, but the point is, I heard my sister say “I almost died” so many times that it became a catch phrase associated with her in the family. It also meant that I was skeptical of many of her medical claims.
Did I dismiss something important?
Her cancer was an incontrovertible fact. I was there for her appointments, surgeries, follow-ups. She was impossible during the entire process, because her Munchausen’s desire to be ill hit right up against her desire to live, which was incredibly strong. The war between the two played out in a lot of bizarre conversations, in which good medical news was greeted with anger and disdain, as if she’d been deprived of something. I endured this strangeness, teeth gritted, because she was my sister and she needed me. And because she was ill.
But was there something I disregarded?
She was on an estrogen blocker after her breast cancer, and those are associated with heart failure. Estrogen is such a miraculous substance. It bathes every tissue of a woman’s body to prepare her to pass human beings out of her body and into the world. When menopause starts, women’s heart health goes down. An estrogen blocker takes away what little estrogen a post-menopausal woman has. She hated her estrogen blocker and what it did to her, but she was afraid of getting cancer again so she stayed on it.
Is that what did it?
She was weak. I knew that. She’d had COVID more times than I can count—like five or six. She masked continuously, diligently, but she rode public transit with a lot of people who did not mask, and who were often sick, and sometimes would cough on her face because they were also mentally ill and she’d get angry and offer them a mask and you can only guess how that went. Besides, masks can only do so much.
COVID is hard on your heart. Was that what did it?
I want to believe that she woke up, stood up, fell to the floor and died sitting beside her bed. I want it to have been instantaneous and hopefully painless. But her wallet was on the floor, and her Medicare card and ID were on the counter by her front door. Now, as often as my sister took an ambulance to the hospital, this might just have been something she did on the regular. I have been transported in an ambulance once in my life. My sister took one at least once a month, sometimes more. But that time, did she wake up, think something was wrong, put her cards by the door and drop her wallet on her way back to the bed?
Was she afraid?
My nephew and I were so hopeful that she would move into assisted living. There is a place near me, only four minutes away from my front door. Brother Steve’s person lives there now. I’ve visited her and it seems fine and she says it’s fine. They’d have gotten along great, two intelligent, sarcastic women with significant health problems and sharp senses of humor. But my sis loved her apartment, her things, her friends. She wasn’t ready to downsize and give up her more independent ways.
But if she had, would help have been easier to get? Would she still be here?
I think about so many painful things in the earliest hours of the morning. I think most about my sister. I ask questions that will never be answered. The medical examiner declined to autopsy. That’s fine, because whether it was a stroke or a heart attack, my sister is still gone. The name for what took her would be one answer. But it wouldn’t be the answer to even one of the questions I ask myself when I wake up in the dark and start to cry.
Siblings: Another Order of Magnitude
Truths
Losing your parents is one thing. As I told my friend Kim when her mother died suddenly in her sleep, “as terrible as this is, you will get through it. Because we are designed to outlive our parents.” I had other, more comforting things to say to Kim, I promise. But I believe my blunt assertion is true.
My grief at losing my mother was indescribable. I have since lost my dad and my birth father. Each death brought with it a load of pain, regret, and bafflement. When you lose a parent, you are forced to face the truth that you are flying solo in these matters, and that anything you need to work through where that parent is concerned, you’ll be doing the work on your own. They are not there to answer your questions or meet your emotions with apologies or explanations.
You realize, over time, that they were people too. They were also doing the best they could with the basic wiring and inadequate tools with which they were provided. Just as I am, as a parent. And man oh man, have I ever made mistakes.
Siblings
Siblings, though. Losing a sibling is another order of magnitude. Because you were in it together, a united front, somehow surviving your difficult childhoods together. Even if you were part of what made those childhoods difficult. Even if you drove each other away. Me and mine might have fought in whispers, but we still fought. There were fractures and fights and a general sense of hopelessness at times. We were all so weird.
But if anyone outside the sibling group had a bad thing to say about one of us, we circled the wagons. No one should dare. For everything a sibling ever did wrong, they did something right. We understood each other, our damage and genius and above all, our humor. Because that is how we made it through. By laughing.
Where to go from here?
On Sunday, as we sat in my sister’s apartment waiting for my nephew to arrive, my younger brother and I exchanged a deep look. “We have to do better,” I said. He agreed with a nod, because more words were not needed. We didn’t say, “because we’re what’s left.” We didn’t say, “because life is short.” No one had to say those words. We sensed them in the air and saw them in each other’s eyes. I felt it in the long hug from my sister-in-law, who is not much of a hugger but in that hug I felt all the love flow from her to me. We are what we have left.
My nephew and I keep calling each other to see if the other one is okay. We are both not okay, not at all, but we are actually okay in that we continue to draw breath, shower, run errands, eat food and the like. I think my husband might be getting tired of my big purple robe, but it’s been quite comforting to me, this big ugly purple robe with spots on the front. It’s like climbing inside Barney or Grimace, a big goofy purple monster hug. Yesterday when he came home, I had on two robes, a blue one with the purple one over it. Today I have on another comfort outfit, one in which I might be able to leave the house if needed.
Early mornings are difficult. I wake up and remember that my sister is gone, and then I lie there in the dark and turn things over. Yes, it was swift. But, she was alone. Still, she loved her independence and her home and her privacy. But, she died alone. And then the worse thoughts come. What if it wasn’t fast. What if she was in pain. What if she was afraid. What if she lingered there for a moment when she might have called for help. What if she died unsure that she mattered, that she was loved, that she’d be mourned.
I cry a little, then I either go back to sleep and have stupid dreams or I get up so I don’t disturb my husband. And I put on my big purple monster bathrobe, and come out here and sign into work, and try to distract myself with that.
And then there’s the trip.
My husband and I are leaving on Wednesday for a long, pre-planned, pre-paid vacation. No one has suggested we don’t go. We are going. But before we do, we are meeting with the family here on Sunday to discuss next steps, some kind of memorial. That will happen after we get back.
We also have to discuss the dismantling of an apartment that is so full, so arranged and curated and amazing and overwhelming that it is a small wonder. Every square inch holds a piece of art or a shelf, and every shelf is full, and single item on a shelf is interesting or beautiful or charming. This studio apartment is an expression of my sister, of her fine eye and acquisitive nature and deep-seated drive to glean the world for special things.
I made my daughters laugh the other night with my theory that if we still lived in a hunter/gatherer society, Cat and I would have been the most ferocious gatherers of all, ranging far and wide in our hunt to find sustenance. I mimed our ferocious triumph at unearthing a natural cache. I said we’d be working deep into the twilight, getting every last bit of it. They’d have had to send out people with torches to find us because we’d have been so engrossed in our hunt. But our people would have been provided for. They’d have lived through each and every winter.
This drive lives deep in our blood. But deeper in hers than mine. And somehow we have to help my nephew take this all down and find places for it.
What’s next.
The medical examiner is releasing my sister to the funeral home today. That’s a cold, bare fact. I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe that someone who took up this much space in my life, my heart, my past, my history, my future–that she could be gone.
Another order of magnitude.
My Missing Sister
I woke up this morning from a dream in which I somehow lost my sister in our neighborhood Mexican restaurant. We’d parked, and were getting ready to go in, but a friend from work was walking past and distracted me with a silly conversation. When I looked back, my sister was gone.
In the dream, I went into the restaurant and looked all over for her. The building grew, as buildings do in dreams. There were arcade games, a water slide, crowds of people milling around. I kept walking and walking and looking, unable to find her. Finally I left the restaurant, but looked through the windows of its tiny bar. No one was in there. And then I woke up, and remembered that my sister is gone.
I got up, made lunch for my grandson, helped him put on his rather elaborate basketball shoes because today is basketball club. He said, “I keep forgetting how old was she.”
“Auntie Cat?” I confirmed. “She was sixty-seven.” I finished up packing his lunch. “I know that sounds old. But it isn’t. Not really.”
My daughter came out, ready for work. I told her the Mazatlan dream and teared up. She hugged me, and then they were out the door, talking of school library books, additional Wimpy Kid titles, school pick-up, and so on. I made coffee and came to my “desk” and sat down, took up my phone to send my usual good morning text to my sister, and teared up again.
I wondered who to text instead. I wondered where to send this energy, this basic daily greeting of Good morning, sweet sissy. Because she is not there to get the texts. She will not be here for the two times a day I text her to confirm that she’s taken her meds, or the inevitable daily call to talk about nothing and everything. My sister is gone.
Just since Saturday, there is so much to tell her. I would have, for instance, told her about that dream in which she disappeared. She would have told me that of course she wasn’t in the bar, because she’d be fifteen years sober in October.
Yesterday, I would have told her in detail about phone calls with our relatives: our stepmom Jo, our cousin Amy in Walla Walla, Our cousin Amanda in South Carolina, our uncle David in Minnesota. But of course I made all these calls to tell them that my sister is gone. She is gone, and I can’t tell her about these calls.
I am exquisitely supported. My husband is a rock. My daughters are surrounding me. I have my brother and his wife, what remains of my family, and we are all trying to help my nephew, who is destroyed and still determined to do all the work and do it right.
I have wonderful friends who are sending love and showing up. I am lucky enough to have friends have known me for so many years that they’ve known my sister right alongside me, with all her struggles, and all my struggles with her. People who know the whole story are my balm. Over and over, I hear that my relationship with her is a miracle, and they wonder how it happened. Because it could have gone so differently.
My sister was nearly impossible, and she was also incredible. For the last thirteen years, I have had the sister that I always wanted. We shared the closeness we had as little girls, a bond that frayed in our teens because she had so, so much to hide. We had many years of conflict and estrangement. But we worked on it, and we fixed it.
I tell myself, at least you had that. Think of the regret you’d feel if you hadn’t done that, Karen. But the trouble is, that’s why it hurts so much now. She is so woven into my life that I feel ripped in half.
“The Story as I Understand It” by Leonora Speyer
I think that Eve first told the callow Tree of apples,
And taught the adolescent Serpent how to hiss
Its first wise word.
I think the Angel with the Flaming Sword
Followed her with hot holy eyes,
Remembering the red curve of her kiss
As she passed out of Paradise.
See, how the apple-boughs are twisted in their pain,
Weighed down with many a red-cheeked little Cain,
And how the serpent writhes away
From man to this far day.
An angel is a lovely lonely thing
Of boundless wing.
They are the banished ones that grieve;
Not Eve!
Not Eve, her body quick with coming pride,
Nor Adam walking there at her white side—
A little heavily perhaps,
Because of things scarce known,
As yet not named:
New tenderness for Eve, but not for Eve alone,
Fears not yet fears—
And out beyond, the world untamed
Of which to make
Their surer paradise of tears!
But in the Garden is a hallowed emptiness
Of laws, forgotten now,
Concerning fruit and flowers,
That none shall ever bless
Or break;
And in the Garden is the one plucked Bough
That blossoms whimpering
Through a divine monotony
Of Spring on spring.
This poem is in the public domain. I thought this poem was so beautiful and oddly contemporary, considering it was published in 1926. I’m putting it here so I always have it.
The Album
Hey!
After I posted this, I realized I have a new essay up at Herstry: Fully Grown. I wrote this for a memoir-writing class with the wonderful Martha Gies, and it’s about motherhood, dwarfism, and wrestling with my moral conscience. I hope you enjoy it!
AND NOW BACK TO MY REGULAR NOODLING…
My first record
I know the first record I ever bought was a 45–Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio”–but my sense of myself as a person with musical tastes was inextricably tied up with the 33, the LP, or the album.
From a young age, I loved the actual physical object of an album. I would scrutinize the cover art and the artist photos, read the liner notes, memorize the lyrics. Everything was a clue. I wanted to understand the inspiration and the personality, to know as much as I could of the people behind the songs. The album cover itself was talismanic, a physical map to the music it held, worthy of intense study. But I didn’t own any until I was 13.
My first Album
For my 13th birthday, my parents gave me a choice. I could have a new record player, or I could accept my sister’s avocado green one with the cube-shaped speakers as a hand-me-down, and receive 25.00 to spend on albums. I went for the records. They drove me to Bozeman. As a college town, Bozeman had a great little store off Main where all the albums were 5.00. Imagine, five LPs, all of my own. I only remember two of them; “For the Roses,” by Joni Mitchell, and George Carlin’s “Class Clown.” They were both revelations in their way.
When you opened up “For the Roses,” Joni stood naked on a rocky seashore. I was too young to understand the symbolism, how this was a visual representation of how confessional her music was becoming, the artist stripped bare. I did understand what self-possession it would have taken to pose nude, on purpose, of your own volition. As the possessor of a female frame, I wanted to ward off the unwelcome attentions and expectations it carried. I hadn’t felt like that when puberty first hit in Arkansas, but in Montana it was different, and I layered up and hid away. And there she was, relaxed and proud of her nakedness. Joni would hide nothing from us.
“Class Clown” was a different animal entirely. My sister and I had memorized Dad’s copy of “Live at the Roostertail,” and probably expected more of the same. Well, this was raunchy Carlin, unfettered Carlin. Gone was the 1962 haircut and the skinny tie, the skits and bits. Carlin was a rebel, given over to political and social analysis in the guise of humor. I learned the entire record by heart in order to shock my classmates with the Seven Words.
And then, tape. Yuck.
Times change, and so does media. But I held on. Albums gave way to 8tracks, which gave way to cassettes. The absolutely awful sound quality of tape didn’t work for me, but my van had a tape player, so tapes it was. I kept my three-foot row of albums around for decades. But then, society went through a time where it was nearly impossible to find new needles. And CDs were there, and they had wonderful sound quality. I began to buy those.
I kept the records long after I no longer had a turntable. And then one day, I asked my husband to take that row of records out of the bookshelf and set it on the coffee table. I told him I needed to go through it. I knew there were treasures in there, and I had to figure out what to save. How would I decide? By artistic merit, possible value, sentimental attachment? How do you rank twenty years worth of musical acquisition? I had no idea where to start. The stack of albums sat for a week. It sat for another week. I never touched it. Then I quietly asked him to take it to the Goodwill.
All of it, every last one.
For months afterwards, when we visited our local Goodwill, I was tormented by the display of my old records. “Live at the Roostertail,” for which they wanted 5.99. Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” for which they wanted 9.99. What bugged me the most was seeing Donovan’s “Gift from a Flower to a Garden.” I knew that, despite the battered edges of the box, it was in wonderful shape. All those lyric sheets were intact. I didn’t even check the price on that one.
As the months went on, I tried very hard to ignore the record section, but my old records haunted the edges of my vision. And then, they were gone.
CDs do not hold the same object importance of albums. They are simply the music. I might look at the art for a minute, occasionally squint through a ridiculously small set of lyrics out of curiosity. Now, most people don’t even own CDs. I’m holding on to mine. I have no idea what I’ll do when our cars no longer have players, but I have a few players in the house, and I’m keeping them. For now.
Eventually, I suppose these CDs will all end up at the Goodwill. I don’t think I’ll be the one to take them there. I don’t want them haunting the edges of my vision when I stop in, demanding to know why I let them go.
