Memento Mori

My sister is dead.

Sometimes this fact hits me like a bullet to the brain, other times it feels more like the shattering of a glass I didn’t expect would break once I dropped it. My sister was almost 5 years older than me. She had and still has the capacity to stir up a paradox of emotions within me, both good and bad, though mostly guilt-ridden and sad.

Ever since she died I have been filled with this fear as if death is looming over me like some kind of ominous specter.

If the cat sits on me and cuddles up to me just a moment too long, I wonder if its because I am dying or if the cat is dying.

If my kids school bus is just ten minutes too late in ferrying them home, I fear they have been in a horrendous accident and perished.

If I don’t hear from my husband after he’s driven or flown somewhere, I fear he has been in a crash where he’s nothing but ash after the flaming fireball has consumed him whole.

If my brother says he’s worried about his blood pressure, I fear him having a massive stroke and ending up a drooling mess.

If my aging father takes a trip abroad on his own, I fear him falling down, dropping dead surrounded by strangers while carrying no form of identification on his person.

If my aging mother takes a trip abroad on her own, I fear her slipping and falling in a bathroom alone, no one finding her body until she has been rendered a feast for blowfly larvae and the stench of decomposition has alerted the neighbors of ill tidings.

If the cat has one soft shit I fear she’s got feline immunodeficiency virus and is dying without a complaint.

If I cough too much, I fear its because I have cancer or a heart condition. If I have a headache, I fear its an inoperable brain tumor. If I feel frustrated and angry, I fear my liver is riddled with cysts and lesions. If I get a small cut, I fear it will get a bacterial infection and sepsis will set in, causing my blood to get poisoned and kill me.

My kids ride the bus to school. My husband flies planes for a living. My brother is the CEO of his company, he lives, breathes and sweats stress for a living. My father, a year shy of eighty, still flies off to far flung places as he travels alone. My septuagenarian mother, who always packs heavy bags, still flies to destinations on her own. My cats still sit in my lap for scarily extended periods of time and shit the occasional too-soft turd. Peri-menopause continues to make me angry, frustrated and sad. No one is dying and yet, everyone is dying. That is the crux of the situation, that death is part of the journey of living, its just that we are on a slow, but inevitable march towards Valhalla, together and yet alone in that journey. I get that. I know I am dying, I just don’t know the when of it all. This is the hell of grief and coming to terms with loss of someone you have loved.

This is the painful grasping for meaning in the face of ones own mortality.

My sister is dead.

My sister died of a heart attack that was preceded by another heart attack. She died from massive internal bleeding. She died from her liver giving up on her. She died from the complications brought on by alcoholism and a broken heart. She died from the disappointment and the disillusionment with all the little pieces that made up the whole of her life.

My once vibrant, effusive, vivacious and tenacious sister died just a month short of her fifty-first birthday, on the 6th of March, 2023, her body frail and uncared for, skin that was once milky white rendered the color of a faded citron. As my mother and I washed her lifeless body, we noted the graying roots of her hair, her nails grown too-long left untrimmed and her face puffy and resting in eternal sleep. It was such an incredibly traumatic experience to know that my sister no longer resided in her body. In some ways, the relief that washed over us, like the warm petaled water we poured over the husk of her body, that she was finally free of her prison that was the life she’d endured, was but an isolated comfort we could find solace in at that moment.

My relationship with my sister was complicated by struggles with a mind unwell. I loved my sister and I also hated my sister. I looked up to my sister and I also looked down on her. I laughed with my sister and also fought with my sister. She was my big sister and I was often hers. I cared deeply for my sister and also fearfully pushed her away, as if her madness could somehow be contagious, infect me in my moments of happiness. I feared her confusion creating cracks in the life I had so painstakingly constructed to protect my own children from being burdened with the cycle of abuse. My carefully constructed reality akin to the houses we would build in our front yard when we were kids, from broken tree branches and bamboo, discarded string and fallen jacaranda leaves, resplendent in an aura of fragility and unabashed impermanence.

My relationship with my sister was complicated by trauma – individual, shared, and often inflicted on the self and each other. Sometimes I couldn’t understand why I continued to forgive time and again, my sister seemed to almost despise me in her darkest hours, it still hurts to think about some of the things she’s said and done.

Before she died, we were estranged. I had stopped speaking to her nearly eight months prior to her sudden death.

Her friend mentioned that my sister had confided in her, teary-eyed, that she had said things to me that simply couldn’t be taken back, that somehow she didn’t know how she could find a way back to me and she was truly filled with regret. This friend had assured her that I would be forgiving as only family could be, but my sister just shook her head sadly and said, “I just don’t know how to make it right….I don’t know how to come back from where I am.”

This realization brings tears to my eyes. I struggled with the anger, the sorrow and the confusion. Angry at her, angry at myself. I felt the burning guilt of her abandonment and the shame of my abandoning her. I blamed myself, I blamed her husband, I blamed my parents, and most of all I blamed myself for not caring if she lived or died. How could she give up on her kids the way she did? How could she persist in drinking herself to death after the doctor told her not to drink anymore? How could she have let herself die? As if it were somehow a preventable inevitable.

It doesn’t end there.

I felt the pain her children were going through. I felt my mother’s pain. I felt my father’s pain. I felt my brother’s pain…I felt the pain all who loved her or had ever loved her felt because somehow it was easier to feel than dealing with my own pain. I was a tangled mess of contradictory emotions. I wish my sister had known I loved her, even when it hurt so much, I wish I could have forgiven her one more time. I wish I could have been the bigger person one more time, even at the expense of my own wellbeing. I wish I could have been selfless so I wouldn’t have to feel so helplessly selfish right now…I wish so much that she was still alive so I could just say it would all be alright again, that I would make it right.

A year after my sister died, as I continued to work through my anger and guilt, I made the decision to go back to therapy again. It had been many years since my last attempt to wrestle with cognitive-behavioral therapy and this time I finally found myself a therapist who could help me work through everything in my past that persisted in holding me back. I found a trauma-informed therapist who could help me work through the shame, the guilt, the grief, the self-flagellation, the anger, and the abandonment…barely skimming the surface of my childhood and the understanding of the all the things my sister, my brother and I had in common.

I fear my brother dying if he drinks too much. I fear my brother dying if he works too much. I fear my brother dying if he works out too much. I fear my brother dying if he thinks too much.

I fear my brother dying.

I don’t want my brother to die. He’s all I have left of what was my sister and I.

I didn’t want my sister to die.

And yet…

My sister is dead.