My friend lost her sister last week. It was sudden and totally unexpected, from a brain aneurysm. I haven't talked with my friend yet, because I am afraid I will cry when I do. So far we've exchanged several emails and a sympathy card, and I will have to try again to reach her by phone. I know I will cry.
I wrote to her today that I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to lose my sister. My own sister is older by almost five years than I, but she takes far better care of her health than I have in recent years, and she hasn't had to tend classes of children who try to subdue her spirit. I believe she will far outlive me on this planet. That is my expectation, anyway. I'd bet that was the expectation of my friend who buried her younger sister last week, also.
I remember one time telling my three children, as they argued and exchanged swats with each other in the back seat, to "Stop right this minute, and take a good look at your brothers and sister! This very minute, LOOK WELL!"
I remember telling them that some day I would be gone, their dad would be gone, and there would be only themselves to be "family" for each other. They were going to NEED each other to save the memories of our family and their childhoods.
They became very silent, stared at each other with new eyes, then turned back to me as if I might be leaving them soon. (?)
Nobody else will remember you at the swim club in the summer, I went on. Nobody will remember Kelly, Daisy, or Sunny. Nobody will remember your being a real live angel in the Christmas pageant, or hooking up fifteen electric cords to get that TV to work inside the tent. No one will remember the day you broke your chin open on the pool table, the broken femur and the month in traction, the magical Underoos that might have let you fly, the nutso neighbor kid who stole Mr. Weaver's Playboy Magazines, the day we let the water monkeys "go free" in Yellow Creek, or that miserable teacher two of you had in elementary school. (Or the fact that your mother spared the third of you from a year of torture.)
Now that their brother is gone, I think they hold each other more dearly because the two left only have each other. They have lost their brother, and he will not be there to call them "Sissy" and "Stubbo."
The spat subsided, but I knew I had hit a nerve. I had actually read an article about this subject not long before this event, and it drove home this reality: The friends we make throughout our lives truly do not know all of the nitty gritty "stuff "that went into making us into who we are. Even our spouses only get the finished product after we've matured from our growing-up years.
My sister and I are four plus years apart. We are very very different people. We did not go to the same schools, and we were raised by two entirely different sets of parents, even though those parents had the same names and faces. My parents were far more liberal than hers. They had already had practice with raising HER. Now that our parents are both gone, we are the keepers of the past.
There is not a person on this earth, except for me, who can envision my sister climbing down from the rafters of an unfinished addition or swinging from a grapevine over a rocky ravine. No one else remembers her walking around on the top of the roof. She is the only one who recalls the night my toe got cut and I thought I would bleed to death. She alone remembers the slinky pink nighties and the jammies with feet and bottom drops. She has our dog somewhere in her heart, along with a stream of goldfish and a bird named Percy.
Who but she remembers riding dusty roads on bicycles named Buttermilk and Trigger, getting stuck in "quicksand" which was really deep mud, cowgirl suits, plastic snap guns, Sky King and Penny with Cheerios, the longest camping trip in the world, sewing buttons onto our toes, crinoline petticoats, mismatched clothes that didn't fit, coats with sleeves to our knees, our grandmama's fall off the back steps, or the neighbor's great dane attacking our little mutt, Copper? No one.
My friend must be wondering why I have not called her back since her machine answered once and I left a brief message. How do I say how sad I am for her? I hope she knows that I know she has lost someone who held her in her mind as she was when she was a child, and I know that not only is her sister lost to her, but somehow there is a very part of her that is lost also.......... a keeper of her past is gone.
I love my friend. I love my sister, also. They are so different, yet both are so very dear to me in many ways. I cry for my friend's loss, and for my children who have lost their brother. It is not easy getting older, is it? It's a sure thing we will bury our parents, fifty-fifty with our spouses. Siblings are a toss-up.........or a toss-down.
If my sister reads this: I love you. I love your screaming, "I will always wear crinoline petticoats!" I love your being the maid in the school play, making sure I got on the right bus when I was in the first grade, roasting marshmallows and hot dogs on the gas stove top (no parent in sight), trying to memorize "Friends, Romans, countrymen........." and letting me do it better than you did, for not deserting me in the "quicksand" but leaving my ugly yellow boots behind in it, and for being my big sister all these years. I want to be sure that you know that I love you............. just in case.
For my friend: I cannot tell you how deeply sorry I am about the death of your wonderful sister. But I am going to try to pick up the phone sometime today, and try to tell you.
copyright: K P Gillenwater
