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.
This sister looms large in my fractured memories of childhood. She, like her mother, was tall and blonde. When I was six and she was 12 or so she came to spend a week in the summer. As I remember it, she taught me how to play cards, war, slap jack, gin rummy and a game of dual solitaire so complicated that anyone outside the family I've tried to teach has accused me of making up the rules as I went along.
To this day, I play online games with the same devoted passion I remember playing with her. I have a picture of all of us together from that time, my father's two families. I worshipped her with her lanky gait and crooked grin.
Three or four years later she arrived at our home in Europe for a school year and stayed a month. My mother told me once she was homesick, but we don't speak of it. It was before we got the phone installed, so the process was complicated and upsetting, but I was too young to understand exactly what was happening. All I knew what that we had specially wallpapered the room for her. My sister was there and then she left. Just like we were there and then we left before the end of the next school year. To this day I don't know why but suspect it had something to do with my father's drinking.
And at seventeen or eighteen, my sister descended on us again with a traveling companion in tow and a rose tattoo on her right breast, all six feet of her. She was so beautiful with her shiny blonde hair. The tattoo was fascinating. We saw it when we took her swimming. She regaled us with stories of hitchhiking. And then before she left, she took me aside to tell me that if I ever needed a place to go, I could go to her. I clung to that promise through my teenage years. It was the lifeline I never used but I kept it close and treasured it.
When I left home for college, I managed a weekend trip on a train to see her. She was a young mother, nursing twins. They had been born in September on her birthday. I can't remember if the trip itself was late fall or early spring. I can't quite picture the size of the babies. They really didn't mean much to me at the time. I'm not sure what I expected, but the sparkle wasn't there. She was tired. She didn't remember our conversation of so many years before. But she told me how my father died. It was a question I had not asked in the three years since his death until i asked it of her.
I suppose the telling was too hard. Or maybe it was the hearing. I certainly didn't have the resources to make a connection that would last. I had learned too well the lesson of not speaking, the art of not asking and of not knowing.
And then my life happened. It's over thirty years later, and those babies are grown women, and I haven't had another conversation with this sister who is now gone. She had been fighting cancer for two years before she gave in.
How do you explain this to your own child? How do you make sense of a family with so many silences? And why do you cry? What could you possibly be mourning? Perhaps it is vestigial pain, like that of a phantom limb. Cards, tattoos, promises, silences. These are the echoes of the sister I did not know.
According to my daughter, it was my half-brother who told my cousin about my sister's death. He would be over 60 now, perhaps 61 or 62. Perhaps I should track him down and give him a call. I met him once as an adult. He looked the spitting image of my father as a young man.