AWOL

August 29, 2013

Dear You

…

Dear Sister,

…

Dear Dumbass,

…

Even with just six words, you probably have a sense where this is going;  I’m mad at you.  Right pissed, in fact.  Have been for a while, now.

I know you know what this is about, in general terms.  You let me down.  Abdicated your sisterly responsibilities.  Buggered off. 

And I wonder about that.  It’s not like you to take a hike when the going gets tough.  You are one of the original tough cookies.  Maybe that’s the problem.  Have you gotten so self-sufficient that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to need help?  Last year, I needed help.  Lots of it.  And you weren’t there.  And I’m pissed.

I think it all started last January, when I spoke bluntly about how tiresome I found some of our conversations, how repetitive and frankly unhealthy they were.  I do not have the natural gift of tact—the tiny bit I have was learned the hard way in painful situations, over and over again.  It is a shallow well and I’m sure it ran dry early in our conversation.  I am sure the things I said hurt you.  I am also sure that they were true.  Which is not an excuse for saying hurtful things—kindness should almost always trump truth.  But I think it was past time for them to be said.  I believe that your thinking needed some shaking up.  I think your self-sufficiency and ‘I can do it myself’-ness had gotten in the way of some rational thought.  I wonder if you were cooking up your own personal Bay of Pigs. 

I do not regret the things I said in that conversation.  I believed them then and still do today.  I believed that you needed to grow up.  I believed that you needed to face your conflicts regarding our mother.  I believe that you were stuck, in some ways, at 15.  I’ve put all this in the past tense, as we haven’t really had a conversation in the past 20 months and I don’t know who you are anymore.  And frankly, I’m not sure that I want to know, anymore.

 

My bottom line:  I went through the hardest year of my life and you jumped ship.  From emails several times per week to nothing.  We disagreed on the value of a relationship with our mother.  Fair enough.  I was working hard at having an adult connection with her, to leave behind the disappointments of the past.  You had chosen a different path.  But when our mother started chemotherapy for her recurrence of cancer—you disappeared.  I was worried and scared and … alone.  Not in a broader sense—my wonderful partner was by my side almost every minute and our family was with me every step.  Our aunts, uncles and cousins were on my side, in my court, had my back…you get the picture.  But my sister was missing.

I felt your absence.  There was a hole in our ranks.  I looked at our mother’s sisters and our cousins in their sibling pairs and wondered where my sister was.  You and I grew up together, fought together, played together, laughed ourselves silly together.  We lived through massive losses and came out the other side.  We were not always the best of friends, or the best of influences on each other.  We did not practice a lot of kindness toward each other and tact was a language completely unspoken in our teen years.  But we stuck together, particularly in adulthood.  We filled in each other’s blanks and tried to make our past make sense.  I had always admired you;  in those years, I came to rely on you.

So when our mother got sick again, I missed you.  I missed your presence and reliability and resourcefulness.  I missed your humour and our shared language of history and reference points.  I missed your being, your body, your steadfastness.

And when our mother’s disease spread to her brain and it became clear that she was dying, I needed you.  I needed you to help me call her friends and tell them that she had not one, but three brain tumours.  I needed you to be there with me through the embarrassment and awkwardness of her incontinence.  I needed you to hear her flagging speech and when that was over, to help interpret her benign facial expressions.  And I needed you to help me call her friends back and tell them that she had died.

This, all of this, I did with other people.  My wife, our aunts, our cousins, nurses, strangers.  Not my sister.

And you may say, quite rightly, that I never asked for your help.  Not in so many words.  And truly, that never occurred to me.  My pain during that time was so massive, so all-encompassing, so dense and impenetrable that I never thought to ask for help.  The help that I received was there before I was.  The help was not offered—it showed up uninvited.  Phone-calls, emails, cards, messages arrived unbidden.  People reached out and touched base, offered a piece of advice or a remembered moment from their own losses.  Most of it touched me, some of it rolled off and a few things made me angry.  But it all helped me.  I knew I wasn’t alone, I knew that there were dozens of people out there who loved our mother and were willing to show up.  They loved me by proxy, just because I had shown up.  Even the lunkheads who said insensitive things in the guise of comfort were comforting.  Because they were there.

So, if you want it, there’s your Get Out of Jail Free card.  I didn’t ask for your help.  And you couldn’t possibly see the lack of sleep etched in my face, or the worry in my eyes for our mother’s sisters, her ailing husband and all her grandchildren.  Have you ever met our mother’s grandchildren?

Were you curious?  Did you wonder how things were going?  Did you worry that I may not have been eating well, able to sleep, driving distractedly?  Did you think of me at all? 

I thought of you, often.  I thought of you with concern, bewilderment, frustration and anger.  I spoke of you flippantly, rudely and harshly.  I thought how nice it must be to live across the country and feel exempt from the impossible work of watching someone die.  I wondered if anything disturbed your dreams, appetites and routines.  I wondered how you could amputate me so completely, and live with the phantom pain of my absent body.  Or did you escape that, too?

How’s that working for you?  Is your life good these days?  complete?  satisfying?  Do you realize that I lost the remainder of my family last year?  Our mother died.  Dad’s been dead more than twice as long as we knew him.  And you vanished.  (I have a client that counts her absent [dumbass] father among her list of dead.  I get that now.)  The math is depressing--once there were four of us--now there is just me.  I attend family functions and see the other branches of our family getting bigger;  thankfully, they are generous and welcoming.

So, if you’ve been wondering about my radio-silence, I hope this answers some of your questions.  It’s not a balanced account, by any means.  It’s just me being disappointed and picking myself back up.  It’s just me trying to balance my books.  It’s just me trying to understand.

Happy Birthday.

 

Love (and many other feelings),

Robin.