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.