Posts Tagged: grief
“Karen, you Have a hint about your mother!” No kidding, Ancestry.
Why does Ancestry send me hints about my mother?
No, seriously. Ancestry is clueless as far as I’m concerned. It shows me as married to my dead high school sweetheart, and I have zero idea how to change any of that. My super-intelligent cousins on my birth father’s side are whizzes at genealogy websites and could straighten me out in five minutes, but how stupid would I feel, asking them? They are all STEM geniuses and I only have a shaky grasp on multiplication at this point (and I still say “times tables” and “take away” and “carry”, which causes my daughter to shake her head in consternation when I try to help my grandson with his math homework, and do they even still call it math?).
Anyway.
Clearly I helped myself liberally to the other side of the gene pool, where calculators were a fact of life, and not those expensive programmable calculators used by my more intelligent classmates in my rare college physics classes. The free calculators you used to get at the bank.
But back to my mother.
I thought of Mom this morning for the funniest reason: a taste in my mouth. My memory is often jogged by tastes and smells, and today when I gulped down the handful of prescriptions (three) and supplements (seven) that I take to keep my heart beating and the like, the flavor of one brought back a spill of sense memory. I accidentally bought the chewable B12. When I add water to swallow down this mass of pills, most of which probably just give me expensive urine, I taste that chewable vitamin taste.
This brought me right back to being five or six years old and finding a brown bottle of chewable vitamins in my mother’s bathroom. I was into everything as a child. In her notes, Mom called me snoopy and I guess that’s fair, though I prefer to think of myself as curious. Anyway, I opened this bottle and started eating these vitamins, which had a flavor close enough to candy to keep me going.
I don’t know what type of vitamins these were, or how many I ate. I also told on myself. I took the bottle to Mom. She didn’t take me to get my stomach pumped or anything of the sort. She had me drink a few glasses of Kool-Aid made her way: one packet of Kool-Aid and half the recommended sugar. We drank this to mask the sulfur flavor of artesian well water. I drank some Kool-Aid and nothing happened and life went on.
That was how it was in South Dakota. We were Midwestern children in the sixties, a hardier breed with great teeth from all the naturally occurring fluoride. We survived.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I also wouldn’t want any other mother. Ancestry might have hints, but I doubt Ancestry quite appreciates the balance of my mother as I do. She could be impossible, but she was my favorite person in the universe until I had children of my own. She was mercurial, curious, fascinating, frustrating. I am baffled by how she let me down in my adolescence, but she always loved me, a big old furnace of love.
So here’s a hint about my mother, Ancestry. Mom had her first child at age seventeen. An emotional, intelligent young woman left college, which she started early because she graduated high school at age fifteen, to become a mother. I understand why she felt ripped off. Her adolescence ended with motherhood. I don’t think she was well-equipped to help me navigate mine. She put me on the pill and put me out at age fifteen to make it on my own, a weird remedy or echo or repetition of what happened to her.
I also understand why she grieved when I had my first child at 22. She saw my young motherhood as a curtain going down on my life. As she watched me, I know she felt sorrow, anger, helplessness. But she was resigned to it. She brushed her hands together, considered me done for, and moved any ambitions she had for me over to my childless siblings. There, hope for a meaningful life remained.
A slight sea change.
Over time, Mom realized that I hadn’t exactly shriveled up and died. I’d just reproduced. She also felt a little defensive. Why was I making motherhood look so easy? Why did I do it without complaint or anguish over what I’d given up? I didn’t explain to her that much of this was a facade. Motherhood is a monumental struggle, and my marriage was a lonely, lonely place. I survived with the help of fierce friends like Jennifer and Karen and Sue and Bob and Debi. These people provided the companionship and emotional support missing from my marriage.
But here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s a part of this of which I am not proud. I wanted Mom to think it was easy for me. As children, Mom let us know that motherhood had ruined her life. This was a steady drumbeat throughout my earliest years. “Never have children. They ruin your life.” “Parenthood is pouring from an empty pitcher. It uses you up.” “I could have had a life, if not for you kids. You took everything from me.” I heard this stuff all the time, and felt tremendous guilt until about age eleven.
That’s when it hit me that I hadn’t had any say in the matter. I began to smirk, roll my eyes, and yes, talk back. I actually said, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Which was terrifically snotty, and my brother and sister would look at me like, oh god shuttup Karen, you’re enraging her. But I figured out early that Mom’s truth should not have been spoken to us kids.
My petty revenge.
So when I was a mom, I wanted to shame my mother for how much she railed against motherhood when she was angry. I wanted to show her up. I wanted to glide and adjust and care for and laugh at the hard parts and make it look like a breeze. And I did, until my marriage fell apart. And I fell apart. And I needed help, and let me stress this, as a young woman with a high school diploma and three kids to raise, one of whom needed massive orthopedic surgery during the year a nasty divorce was unspooling, I needed so much help.
My then-husband had taken control of all our bank accounts. When I asked my parents for the funds to retain a divorce lawyer, I apologized. Mom said, “Honey, you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to write this check.” She happily dashed it off and sent it. This is one of the many times my mother helped me. Mom showed UP. Two decades of financial help and encouragement and emails and phone calls and laughter. All my visits up to Bainbridge with my girls, and her delight at seeing them. Each daughter has specific memories of a grandmother they loved, and who loved them with no reservation.
Was she perfect? Is anyone perfect? Of course not.
Perfection is not part of the human condition.
I’ve done a great deal of thinking and writing about my teen years. When we moved to Montana, I was twelve years old. My life went off track when I was sent out into the wide world at age thirteen to navigate a dangerous environment. My sister and I ran with a rough crowd. I’ve examined all that, not to understand Mom, but to understand myself. I asked hard questions to ascertain the damage done, and heal it enough to live a better life. It would have been so easy to find myself trapped in sadness and anger. My mother was supposed to guide me, help me. She didn’t.
But I had this amazing experience while taking a memoir class with my dear friend Katrina. I wrote a piece that still hasn’t found a home called “The Corner of Skidmore and Haight.” It is an unsparing look at beginning of my second marriage and birth of my first child. Because I took this class from the esteemed and brilliant Martha Gies, it’s full of journalist-level reporting on Portland of 1981-82. Martha made me research the details of North Portland, the arrival of gangs, police misbehavior. But that’s a backdrop for the real struggle, which was two young people, aged 22 and 24, trying to figure out how to be married parents.
In this piece of writing, I played much of it for laughs, because that’s how I handle pain. But the pain is there. Whenever things at the corner of Skidmore and Haight felt hopeless, we survived. How? It wasn’t clear to me until Katrina critiqued the piece. Ever-so-gently, she said, “What impresses me is how over and over again, your mom and dad showed up and helped.”
The proof is right there on the page. My parents might have foundered in my teens, but from my twenties on, they were right there, helping. Over and over again. And they continued to do that until they both finally died.
I don’t think I thanked them nearly enough.
I was in my early sixties when I took this class. I’d been doing quite a bit of examination of my history, trying to understand exactly who I am before I leave this world. Katrina’s words showed me that I had a choice to make. I could focus my attention on the chaotic decade of my young life when Mom had no idea what to do with me, and whatever I needed was lost in the turmoil of her own unhappy life. Or I could shift my focus and appreciate what she did for me after I left adolescence.
You know, it’s like I finally grew the hell up.
So here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s no good, no bad, no right, no wrong. There’s just Mom. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I miss you every single day. And thank you for all the days and ways you were there. There are no words for how much I love you.
A Year Without My Sister
I can’t believe it.
So yes, today it has been a year since Tony and I were leaving a restaurant after lunch, and I looked at my phone, and saw texts from my sister’s best friend telling me to call her. Right then, immediately. And I did, and she said, “I’m so sorry to tell you this. Cat is gone.”
“Gone?” I was so confused. Where could she have gone? And then it hit me. “You mean…she’s dead?”
“Yes. She’s dead.”
I was unable to make words. I handed off the phone to my husband, and we sat in that parking lot, and he finished the call with Steph, and then while I wailed I found the numbers, and he called my nephew, and my brother, and my oldest daughter, who would call her younger sisters.
And then he held me.
When the wailing stopped, we drove downtown to my sister’s apartment building. In the lobby, we sat down and waited. My sister had died alone, so the medical examiner was with her and we couldn’t go in. Steph came down with two volunteer traumatic death counselors or something like that. One was older, the leader. Steph asked if they could talk to us in the lobby, rather than in her studio apartment, which seemed like a good idea. So we sat there while this extremely earnest woman took us through a checklist of one kind or another, pointing to paragraphs in a large printed brochure. It was all I could do to be polite to this person, who meant so well, and who was talking to me in a plodding way about something so unthinkable, so unimaginable, which was the death of my sister. I wanted to push her out the glass doors of the building.
I am always so damn polite.
While we waited, people who lived in the building would walk in on high alert. This is a rent-subsidized building, people there have addictions and health troubles, and the tenants know what it means when the medical examiner’s van is parked outside. And they would come in, and ask, and be told it was Cat, and a hand would sweep over to where I sat with my husband and Steph and these counselors, and eyebrows would go up because everyone in that building knew my sister, my talkative, outspoken, engaging sister, and besides, as we aged the two of us looked enough alike to be mistaken for twins. And I would endure the “I’m sorrys” and so on.
I was waiting for my nephew, who was driving home from the beach with his girlfriend. I was waiting for my brother, who was on his way in from the eastside suburb where he lives. I was waiting to go upstairs and see my sister, who had somehow died without any warning, without telling me she was going to do so, without even saying goodbye. Impossible. And through it all this trauma volunteer counselor talked, as if a word of what she was saying could penetrate the bright, aching shield of my pain.
Finally, the police came down and told me I could go up.
I was met in the hallway by the medical examiner, a young woman holding an enormous baggie full of my sister’s medications. She wanted to talk about all the evidence of self-harm she found on my sister’s body. My sister’s arms, wrists, legs, ankles were extraordinarily marked with scars from years and years of cutting. It took a second for me to understand that the medical examiner was concerned that since she died alone, there was a possibility that my sister had killed herself.
I assured her that she had not. How to explain that despite all these scars, my sister was terrified of dying? That her recent cancer had shocked her with the possibility of actual death? That by my sister’s own admission, her suicide attempts were not meant to end her life, but to illustrate her anguish? How do you stand in the hallway outside a studio apartment that holds the body of your only sister and explain her fragile, volatile nature to a stranger holding a bag full of enough psych meds to kill an elephant?
I tried.
I just wanted to see her. And the examiner didn’t think I should. She’d died sitting on the floor beside her bed, her head hanging forward. This meant that blood had pooled in her face, and the effects of that can be upsetting. I insisted. How could it be real if I didn’t see her? So she went back into the apartment and did some arrangement. And I was finally able to go in and see my sister. It was upsetting. But her hair was arranged, her long, abundant, graying hair of which she was so justifiably vain. I could stroke that. And her hand was out, her right hand, where arthritis and years of coloring with pencils in her treasured coloring books had left a bend at the top joint of her middle finger. I could hold that.
My brother and his wife had arrived, and I went out to the hallway to talk to him. I told him he might not want to see her, but of course he wanted to. I went in with him and watched his reaction, and we agreed that it would be very hard for her son to see her like this. We didn’t know what to do. But the decision was made by the medical examiner, who wanted to take my sister way in the van, to wherever they take a person who is now a body while they decide whether or not an autopsy is needed.
And that’s what they did.
So I sat in my sister’s apartment with my husband, my brother, my sister-in-law, and Steph. My nephew and his girlfriend finally got there, thank god, because he’d had to drive the entire way knowing his mother was gone. I put the remains of her last snack (coffee and jelly toast) in her kitchen sink. My nephew made up her bed. And we all just sat there in my sister’s house, surrounded by the dizzying array of her possessions.
As long as we were all there, in the home she loved so dearly, it felt like she was still with us.
It’s a year later, today.
Yesterday in the garage, while I was getting into the car so we could go to the symphony, I saw two boxes on the floor that had been sitting on a different shelf for twenty years. These were full of Mom’s things that Dad brought to me after Mom’s death. They’ve just sat in the garage collecting dust because I haven’t been able to bear going through them.
I thought, Cat and I should go through those boxes together. And then I shook my head. Because it’s only been a year, and in so many ways, she is still right here with me.
Lilith Fair, and a Visit from Brother Steve
Missing my Brother
It’s been a hard month around here for a couple of reasons, but a large part of it has been missing my Brother Steve. I always called him that when I wrote about him and the name has stuck. He died at the beginning of December eight years ago. The month brings an overhanging melancholy, a longing for my brother that sits right behind my sternum. I guess it’s in my heart. It sits there, an aching, along with this sense that wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I could burst into tears in a heartbeat.
Not very joyful, for December.
So last night we had friends over to watch Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery.
This is a beautiful piece of documentary filmmaking. It is celebratory and elegiac and it fills you heart and then it breaks it. I’d gone twice, my husband once, but the couple we had over had never gone. I felt an overwhelming need to share this movie with them. It takes juggling to get four busy people to sit down together in front of a TV, but we managed it. 10/10, please find a way to watch it. If you were lucky enough to go, it will take you back, and if you were not, well, you’ll have a fuller understanding of just what an incredible experience it was.
My Lilith Fairs
The first time I went, Brother Steve and I took my daughters. So perhaps that’s why I woke up from a longer dream that started out with driving down Davis Street in Portland’s Old Town and realizing that a train had derailed and broken up and there was a train car headed down the street toward us (I was with a friend in my old minivan). Miraculously, I got us out of the way, but it was a huge emergency, “Here comes the caboose!” I called, as I steered us into a parking lot to safety. More cars kept sailing past and helicopters soared overhead, carrying away important pieces of the train, I guess.
We’d been on our way to see this friend’s son, so after various stupid dream-type setbacks we finally arrived at his apartment building. There was the usual dream nonsense, but eventually we were standing in a hallway waiting for this son to arrive, and an annoying man was explaining something to us. I think it was about music.
And who walked up but my Brother Steve, my own personal musical expert, smiling and happy and we hugged so hard. Then he continued on the conversation with this man in the way that only Steve could, with sharp wit and engagement and a mind that moved fluidly from topic to topic, making connections and demonstrating expertise without ever making you feel talked down to. And his wonderful seal bark of a laugh rang out, and his smile lit up his whole face, especially his blue eyes. It was a wonderful, wonderful dream. I woke up smiling.
And of course now I’m crying, but these are joyful tears.
It was like A Christmas Carol visit from Brother Steve to remind me of joy. Steve took so much joy in life, even as his health failed. I’m lucky enough to be healthy. I need to make sure I do the same. You have to understand that my brother always showed up when I needed him. He came down from Seattle all the time: when my marriage ended, he showed me how to get through the day-to-day, and he helped during the year one of my daughters was bed-bound with a surgical procedure and I had to go back to work. He helped financially when I went back to school. He was the world’s finest uncle to my daughters, here for every holiday and so overjoyed to celebrate. He was always sharing concerts with me in Portland and Seattle, more than I can count. And last night it felt like he could tell I’ve been struggling and he showed up again. Because that’s the kind of man he was.
It has been so hard to lose him but I was so fortunate to have him.
If you’d like to read about that trip to Lilith Fair with Brother Steve, here it is.
Always missing you, Brother Steve.
October is Over, and Coins
Dividing the Jewelry
My sister wanted to divide my mother’s jewelry on the day Mom died. I mean, the actual evening of the very day, October 30, 2004. I was furious with her for even suggesting it, but she’d first started asking about it on the way up to see Mom. As far as we knew, we were just going up to see our mother in the hospital. We were unaware that this would be the last day of Mom’s life.
On the drive, my sister let me know that she wanted a diamond and emerald ring Mom won in a contest. I wanted to lash out, to shame and excoriate her for even talking about something like that. But I stayed calm.
This was an opportunity, I decided. I could freak out, or I could actually take a moment to calm down and consider what I wanted of my mother’s. After a beat, I said that was fine, if I could have Mom’s wedding set. And that evening, I took it, along with Mom’s watch and a couple of bracelets. I didn’t want them. I wanted Mom, but I knew if I didn’t take what I wanted, my sister would take it all and sell it.
I was right. I had my mother’s diamond put into a new setting, and I wear it every day. The contest ring is gone.
More Division
My dad was anxious to clear Mom’s stuff, but he didn’t want to do it. The rest of this painful dividing up fell to us, and happened after the funeral. We all went back to the house and go to work on the clothing. Once we finished with that, my sister started sniffing around the kitchen, looking for a specific plate that had either flies or bees around the edge, something Mom won at a farm auction in South Dakota in the 1960s.
Dad told us that our younger brother had taken it. “He took that and her rolling pin and the coin collection.”
My sister’s eyes flashed. “I don’t know,” she said in a prim, warning voice. “There were some valuable coins in that collection.”
I shrugged. “Good. I’m happy that he has something of value.” My sister pressed her lips together and said nothing more. This was probably a good thing because I’d have let her have it. I was furious. But that was nothing new. I was furious with my sister around Mom’s death, and it’s true that she could be impossible, but it is also true that I needed to be furious with someone and my sister was an easy target. My brothers and I were so stunned with grief that we could barely function. My sister was not. She was strangely gleeful, and I couldn’t stand it.
Hence, furious.
Other Divisions
But back to the coin collection. Mom had saved coins her entire life, but I sincerely doubt that there was anything valuable in there. If Mom had coins of actual value–those old silver coins with Lady Liberty on them–she’d pawned them. But she still saved coins of perceived value, even if the only perception was her own.
There was something special about going through my change, looking for something Mom would want. I saved half dollars, old nickels and wheat pennies in a special place and took them to her on my frequent visits. Mom accepted with a gleam in her eye, then squirrelled away the coins. I found this delightful.
Mom also saved coins from wherever she went in Europe. Most of those coins weren’t worth much more than face value, but they meant something to Mom. Value and worth are two different things, aren’t they? She liked the acquisition, and I liked the giving. And that was definitely worth something.
October Coins
Mom died 21 years ago. Things were so much different with my sister for more than half of those years. I gave up being furious with her, and she gave up resenting me for being born. There was a new generosity in her heart once her meds were balanced and she was sober. I loved it.
We gave to each other. I gave her money quite often, and gift cards, and rides. I took her thrifting and to lunch and I even took her to Bonnie Raitt a few months before she died. She gave me small things almost every time I saw her. And she gave me the greatest gift she ever could, which was her sobriety. It was what I wanted most from her.
After forty-five years of drinking, my sister would have celebrated fifteen years of sobriety on October 1st of this year. I told her that I’d like to go to a meeting with her to see her get her fifteen-year coin. Now, that would have been a coin of real value. She was so excited to share this with me.
Sweet sister, sweet mother. Two of the most difficult women who ever lived, and also two of the most delightful. I am thinking of them both, and missing them terribly.
On Not Writing
Who is not writing? Me.
When a writer is not writing, it’s generally because she’s doing Other Things. I’ve been not writing. It’s awful. But yes, I’ve been doing other things.
- Taking a long weekend with Sue by the lake. Sue’s husband was out of town seeing his grandkids, so I motored up to see her. We spent the weekend thrifting, bingeing two series (The Essex Serpent, Department Q), eating good food and drinking good coffee, watching her work her fabric artistry, and enjoying the lake from her gorgeous deck. Sue and I had a blast. I also got to have lunch in person with Adrienne, who I haven’t seen in something like nine years. She’s as wonderful as ever.
- Having two weekends in Medford and Ashland to see plays at the Shakespeare Festival. My husband I and stayed in Medford, visited April and Lewis, and saw “Into the Woods”, “Jitney”, and “Quixote Nuevo”. Then, a month later, I went back and stayed with April and Lewis, and April and I went to see “Shane” and “Merry Wives of Windsor”. You will note that of all those five plays, only one is Shakespeare. I can’t account for it, but loved the shows I saw so much that I have no complaints.
- Helping my daughter and grandson move into their new apartment, which is wonderful for them, in part because my grandson is able to join a pack of apartment complex kids after school. My own kids did that until we moved here, to this house that sits in a child drought for some reason. He’s having a blast. I miss them both and see them oh, every day, more or less.
- Returning my guest room to guest room status so I can have people stay here.
- Settling in my office after about twenty years of wishing I could. If you come over to my house and I allow you to see this room (I might not), please have compassion for the introverted girl who moved constantly throughout her childhood and as a result, held onto every scrap of everything she ever owned, every book and bear and doodad and doll, and as she aged still kept these things and thought, “Someday I’ll put that in my office,” and after she stopped moving, she still accumulated things with the thought of putting them “in my office,” and whenever a shelf of doodads got too full, packed it away, to put “in my office.” What I mean is that there is a LOT of stuff in here, and I am as embarrassed by it as I am pleased with it. So be kind.
- Integrating into my home (and office!) the things I took from my sister’s apartment. I thought I was choosy and sparing. I guess I was, but it’s still an enormous amount of stuff to figure out. Right now I am attempting to restore a tiny beanbag kitten she had for her entire life, having gotten it wet, not realizing that in 1957 the beans were made of compressed sawdust instead of plastic, so I had to open a tiny seam and empty out clods of sixty-eight year-old wet sawdust, but I did it and now the dingy, tattered fabric shell of this kitten is soaking in a coffee cup by the sink. This is a tremendous waste of time and effort, but she had it her entire life, through all her moves and losses, and I can’t let it go.
- Watching “Too Much” and finding it moving and beautiful and hilarious.
- Handling enormous feelings of grief and loneliness for my brother and sister, triggered by all the items I have been unpacking and handling. My brother’s only finished novel (it’s in drafts, on paper) is by my desk (I finally get to read it), as are his ashes (I still need to deal with those). My nephew came over and went through the last of what my sister had stored in my garage and took it all away.
- Missing my parents. Mom would have turned 89 this year, so I am finally accepting that she wouldn’t be here even if the cancer hadn’t taken her 21 years ago. Dad would have so much to say about today’s America. I miss them both, and I miss my birth father, who would have had some piercing insights on what this is doing to farmers, especially those who raise soybeans. I miss them and need them and they are not here.
- Cleaning stuff. Sorting stuff. Planning trips with my husband. Seeing local friends.
- Laying down rugs for the first time in a minute. One in the dining room, one in the TV room. We watched my oldest daughter’s dog for a few days so she and her husband could get away for their anniversary, and they warned me that he might mark the rugs. I am proud to announce that he did NOT. What a fine little guy he is.
- Wondering when I’ll start writing again. I miss it.
Posted on Dad’s 83rd birthday, an old post about his 65th birthday
ON OLD POST (from a defunct blog) (can I make this any more clear)
I found an old blog post from August, 2007, about a day when the family traveled to the coast to celebrate my dad’s 65th birthday in Astoria. Eighteen years ago! The baby in this post turned 18 this spring. I’m reposting it because I loved this day, and I miss my dad on his 83rd birthday, and I miss a couple of other people who are in this post. But not T. T is right here. T and I are MARRIED now.
Old blog post begins NOW
Yesterday was the day my family converged on Astoria to celebrate my dad’s 65th birthday. The theme was ”You’d better retire,” which of course my dad retired many years ago, so that was, like, a joke. Brother Steve drove down on Friday, and Younger Brother, Sis-In-Law, and their Baby came down yesterday AM. I drove over with T, my sister, and Oldest, because my other two had to work.
This is the first time I’ve seen my dad’s new digs. I love his home, which is very near the Goonies house, if any of you remember the movie or know the Oregon coast. So his view is spectacular, especially from the second floor. The house was built in 1885, and has fabulously slanting wooden floors, crooked eaves and 11-foot ceilings. I admire the amount of entry and walkway space, something that seems sadly lacking in homes built from the fifities on. Dad’s house is not large (though it was, I’m sure, in 1885) and it is all about the transitions, it has an entry and hallways and alcoves, and it has a narrow but looooong front porch that looks over the shipyard and mountains.
Dad cooked a porkroast on the grill and Younger Brother grilled steaks. We brought baked beans and seven-layer bars, and there were store-bought salads and some great bread for sopping up the juice from these mammoth steaks. The steak was so very good that I just wanted a private corner to be alone with it. And there was the ugliest bakery cake I’d ever seen, and presents, and I think Dad really had a great time.
The highlight was of course my lovely little niece. She’s grown up so much since I last saw her (at age two weeks) and she’s lost her funny little monkey face and she’s so very pretty. I kept saying that over and over again as she’d smile and kick and reach and grizz and fuss and flex and roll and do so many miraculous baby things, I’d say, ”She’s so pretty. She’s so darling. She’s so cute.” and wriggle with it. But at some point, Oldest and I realized that we were just praising her looks, so we launched into a murmured description of her other qualities that went something like this:
She also has a beautiful and intact self-esteem.
She’s athletic and capable and interested in team sports.
She’ll have many hobbies and interests, some of them to do with math and science.
She’ll never be paid less than a man for equal work.
She clearly thinks too well of herself to ever settle for less than the best a man can offer.
And so on. Sis-in-law was laughing so hard.
The way the day worked was, the baby would be awake, so we would all look at her, make conversation with her, exclaim over her, listen to her (she makes the most adorable coos and growls), hold her and take photos of her. Then she’d sleep or nurse, so then we’d all talk to each other. Then her little brown eyes would pop back into view and we’d start again with the baby adoration.
We followed the progress of a long-awaited full diaper with much speculation and encouragement. ”Sounds like she’s really going to town, now, listen to that little grunting.” ”Yup, I think she’s getting serious for sure.” ”Definitely going to happen.” ”Oh you bet.”
She had a cool folding crib/playpen/changing table thing that was extremely handy because while she was in it, we could group around her and all have a really good view of her actions. She would lie on her back in it and kick her feet and try to reach for toys that we would hold out, which is really cute right now because her hands come slowly together right at the length of her reach. Her fingers make a small ”O” and if the toy isn’t grasped by this slow and careful motion (like a claw machine), she sometimes gets distracted by her hands. ”Hey, look at these, these are cool, too.” She seems to have inherited the prehensile toes of her aunts. She immediately forgets anything that falls out of her sight, so peek-a-boo is currently out of the question, though I imagine she’ll be absolutely brilliant at it.
At one point, my sister, Sis in law, Oldest and I had been standing there watching her try to reach for the dinosour and the rattle and commenting on the perfection of her chubby little feet and the adorable shapes her mouth makes and my younger brother said, ”You know, I think if I ever wanted to make a woman trap, I’d put a little baby in the middle of it.”
There really were other people in the room, and Sherman the Great Dane, and Dad’s dogs, and the eating and the seeing of the house and all, but yeah. Then there was That Baby. And oh, did we enjoy seeing her.
My sister was sober and calm. She says she’s trying this new thing, a brand new thing in her life, which is, she just doesn’t lie. She’s not promising she won’t lie ever again. My sister learned to lie at a very early age and she’s done it her whole life to feel safe and occasionally powerful, so it’s not like she can surrender it forever. It was her coping and survival mechanism long before she discovered eating disorders, drugs, cutting herself, boys, shoplifting, compulsive shopping, drinking, or Munchausen’s and Munchausen’s by proxy. But the last time she entered rehab, she decided to give not lying a try and it’s been going all right so she’s continuing with it.
It makes her so much less tiring to be around. For reasons I don’t understand, her lying always made me tired, so tired that I’d want to lie down and sleep in the middle of a crowded room. It’s so nice not to have to listen to it. As a result, I really enjoyed her company. I really, really, really enjoyed her company the whole day. She rode behind me on the way up and on the way down, and we talked and talked and talked. It’s the best time I can remember having with my sister in 20 years.
I was tired when we got home, and for reasons to do with a lost house key, my ex-husband was here watching the game and keeping the dogs company when we got home. We talked with him for a bit, and then he left, and T went home, and Oldest and I fell into bed.
I’m in a good mood today.
The Old Blog Post is NOW Over
So that was the old blog post. My sister relapsed after this. It was a bad one. It took a few years for her to be in a place where we could be close again. But she got there. It’s hard that my older brother and sister and my dad are all gone. But it’s beautiful to read a day when they were all with me, and the ocean was shining, and we were celebrating.
When a day is perfect.
Finally saying Good-bye.
On Saturday, after more than two months, the family finally got together for our version of a memorial for my sister Cat. It was weighing on me. There is meaning behind whatever rituals we construct around death, but while alive (in passing, as neither of us thought we could actually die) my sister said repeatedly that she didn’t want a memorial service of any kind. This is akin to my fear around letting the company throw a retirement party for me. It is based on a fear that no one will come.
Well, we all came, of course, along with her very best friend, Stephanie. We gathered for a family farewell at Cat’s favorite restaurant, The Old Spaghetti Factory down on the Willamette River. Me, my husband, my girls and their families, my brother and his family, and of course my nephew and his girlfriend–we all came. One of my daughters had arranged with the restaurant to set up a table for us in the rotunda on the second floor. We had privacy and a devoted server who kept our party of 16 well taken care of, running up and down a flight of stairs to do so.
My nephew and his girlfriend had made photo buttons of my sis through the years. We pinned them on, so everywhere we looked we saw her smile. And some of us had the Italian sodas with the trolley car glass you get to take home. I made a toast to my wonderful, maddening, beautiful sister, and those glasses were lifted. And there was dip, and bread, and much discussion of what my sis liked to order (what used to be called “Homer’s Special,” and is now called “Mizithra Cheese and Browned Butter”).
We made much of a new soup offering because nothing really ever changes at The Old Spaghetti Factory, so when something does, it’s kind of a big deal. A new entree name, a new soup, square croutons instead of the old circular flat croutons–I’m telling you, these are radical changes at The Old Spaghetti Factory.
And we all got our entrees. We all dug in. The kids ate their various noodles and cheesy breads and clambered around and under the table. They went to the windows and watched the boats on the river.
Did I mention that the weather was spectacular? And we had this area all to ourselves? And all the time in the world to eat and laugh and be together? The only thing that could have made it better would have been to have my sister there. But maybe she was, I don’t believe in the woo-woo but hell, who knows, maybe she was.
And then it was time to leave.
My daughter-in-law rounded up the three grandkids and took them off to a Lego dinosaur exhibit at OMSI. The rest of us disbanded to our cars to meet up at the Southeast Goodwill at 6th and Mill. This was truly my sister’s happy place, where she found the majority of the vast amount of possessions she had so carefully amassed and curated and displayed in her little downtown studio apartment. They knew her by name and by face at this Goodwill.
So we all went in on a mission to find and buy something in honor of Cat, whose smile we had pinned over our hearts. I love to thrift, but I’m usually just with my husband. Imagine how fun it was to keep encountering the people I love in the aisles, to experience that burst of heartfelt delight at seeing this face, then that face.
Of course, we kept showing each other what we were considering. I was also pointing out things that reminded me of my sister. A redware cat figurine from Mexico. An ironwood ibex from Africa. A tall wooden Buddha from Bali. I’d have bought her every single one, if only she could have been there with us. But hell. Who knows…
I carried around an ironwood hippo for a while. It was something she would have wanted, and I kept thinking of how charmed she would have been by its tiny size. But then I saw something better.
I have a stack of blue Swedish plates for “Jul” and “Mors Dag.” Mom liked them. Mom was difficult to buy for, so I found her a few over the course of her life, and they came to me when she died. I’ve since added a few of my own. They sit in a stack in my hutch, waiting for the day when I figure out how to display them. I’m picky about buying them secondhand because there are so very many available. But there on the shelf was a cat on a windowsill, looking at a “Christmas Star” plant.
Since her nickname was Cat, and her birthday was Dec 23rd, it felt perfect.
Perfect.
On the way home, Stephanie pronounced the whole day “perfect.” “It was perfect. She would have loved it. It was perfect.” I’ll take perfect. There’s not much perfect around lately. But this day, with the sunshine and sharing and love, it really was perfect.
Something else that was perfect – my middle daughter stepping up to organize us all to find a workable date, make the reservation and arrangements, and quietly pick up the entire dinner tab (my brother and I were planning to split it). There is something to be said for passing the torch, but there is also something to be said for children who are old enough to understand that I have been so very stunned by this particular grief that the work of arrangements was beyond me. All three of my girls have gently helped me along, as has my husband. I am fortunate.
Driving I5 n the way home, I quietly told my husband I want my service at Nordia House. He said that’s just what he’d have done, and I said, “Because you pay attention.” And then I told him if he went first I’d have it at the Tualatin Heritage Center, and he said, “And that’s because you pay attention.” And we held hands in the sunshine.
Mortality is all around me these days. But so is love. One is bearable because of the other.
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.
