I lost a sister to lung cancer in September. She would have been 59 or 60. I found out yesterday from my daughter. A cousin on Facebook told her.
I found myself befuddled, confused, sad, anxious, unsettled and strangely vacant. We shared a father, this sister and I. But not a mother. Mine was short and dark headed, hers tall and blonde. She was the daughter of wife number one. My mother was wife number two.
My mother worked second shift through my childhood to pay child support for this first family of my father's past. And when my father died and I was 16, my mother kept the $50,000 in life insurance and whatever tentative connection there might have been to this other family was irretrievably broken. I always supposed they had expected her to share. But I think she figured she had done enough with those years of support payments. She never said. I think she might have sold the baby blue VW bug and kept that money, too. But maybe not.
It's one of the things about which we do not speak. It's one of so many things.