Sister, Sister
You thought you’d know love, that you would recognize it.
You recognize your middle sister, though not seen since your wedding when she was twenty-seven and you thirty-one. She’s aged. And now you know why, though not the details—she has unremitting MS.
When you’re both young and lived at home, you didn’t dwell on differences. Even sharing a bedroom, an arm’s reach across the divide, each in your own twin bed. But you’re blue; she’s purple. You climb your tree fort you built with the neighbor boys; she plays with Barbie’s. She’s an athlete, though, and you admire that. You’re clumsy in spite of your fearlessness to try anything.
You at nineteen, explain to her, and your baby sister, and to your parents when you leave town for good. “I’m evolving. Growing up! Got to get away." You don’t know to where; even college one hundred miles away seems too close, so you go farther.
After a few years in California in your early twenties, trying your life on, picking strawberries, sorting onions, exchanging canned goods back to the store for cigarettes as the month ends, dabbling in community college classes, waitressing in between, finding friends, you feel bad for being gone from home so long. So you go back to small town Washington, easing into family, without giving reasons why it took so long to return. Three years seems longer to them.
Your youngest sister home from college says to you, ‘It’s been long enough.’ On seeing her you throw your arms up in exclamation. ‘Too long,’ you say and call her ‘pumpkin,’ making her smile without wincing at that silly pet name, her eyes so blue, you think you are looking into the sky. You miss her, not realizing until then, how much.
After dinner, an event heralding your return, sitting on the same sofa with your sisters and brother, with aunts and grandmothers—how quick those images of earlier times, Thanksgivings, snow on the ground, no outdoor football—all of you inside crammed together on the saggy couch, squeezing in to immortalize the moment, blonde wood paneling in the background, nailing down that family room. Every photo an imprint of your past. Hey, it says, we are family. What it doesn’t show almost makes you want to leave again.
But you stay in Washington; go to nursing school, graduate, something that makes them proud, and you, the first in your family. Then you move to Seattle, just far enough away from them, grateful for your unattached life.
Your hospital schedule is 12 on 12 off. When you marry a wonderful man, your family comes to the wedding. Your sister, diagnosed with MS at twenty-three and married to her high school sweetheart four years by then, is unsteady but still walking. Only her eyes follow after her two young children. Her husband does all the scrambling, to keep them out of mischief.
You’re immersed in your own joy, and move to Ohio for your husband’s residency, and your own nursing work, have babies and then back to Washington again, busy with that good life.
Until something happens. Your sister’s husband is leaving her. She and her husband have managed fine for so long, you thought that would go on forever.
But forever ends. After he moves out, you dip your toe in—you visit her in the house where she raises her children, who first really knew she was sick when they were early teenagers. The yelling, the screaming, curfew breaking, everyone trying so hard to be normal when nothing was normal. Usual teenage antics. One kid or another home from soccer practice or baseball, finds her on the floor, crawling to get back into her wheel chair and have a cigarette. Her one self-anointed pleasure no one asks her to give up.
It weighs heavy on your sister, to want to do the right thing by her kids. She longs to see them play sports—they share her athleticism—and she goes to their games, but they are embarrassed, she tells you, so she goes to fewer. She says it’s too much trouble. She would have to be pushed onto the sidelines, leaving her motor chair behind. You can tell she’s boxed in, her body giving out, even in her motorized wheel chair. Her heart remains strong, but her GI tract, her eyesight, her muscular intentions, going, going gone before thirty.
The kids go too, one to college out of state, and the other, the military, a posting in Bosnia.
Her husband left her, she says, because the State can care for her without taking all their money. Taking care in the way states do—the paper work is confusing, the funding inadequate, and you find those who assess her needs, falsely cheerful, grim beneath the banter.
You try to step in once he’s gone from the house, thinking you can help. Though your own kids are small—you quit nursing to raise them—your legs work, so does your voice, you can help. You make her a week’s worth of salad and say you’ll be back before the week is gone. And you are. Take her for spins in the car, stopping at a park to look out at the Puget Sound, the pewter sky of winter above a flat gray expanse of seawater ruffling over the gravel beach. In the fall, you leave the car door open with her seatbelt holding her in, so she doesn’t tip out. Or if it’s winter, just the window’s open. You both hear the shush of water from there; she’s nearly blind so you describe the evergreen outlines of Whidbey Island on the horizon and then you begin to draw pictures with your words of your shared childhood; memories that you think will matter to her. You’re surprised she wants none of it, as if it’s only the moment she can count on, the tang of the saltwater air on the brisk breeze. She’d rather talk about the Mariners, the local baseball team, on a winning streak.
What she likes is the blueberry smoothie; the wrap that you buy to eat over the paper spread on her lap. You are picnicking, until she finally gives up trying to take a bite after the shivery jerk of her hand to mouth sends most of its fillings to the paper and the floor of your car. So you feed her, too. You feel her humiliation like the smell of garlic.
You tuck her in for her nap, shoes on because it’s too hard to put them back on once you leave; you get her mail. Do her laundry, except the folding part, she does that. It looks like a heap to you, but it’s folded, she says. You take her to appointments where cures seem impossible. It’s 1989 and cures are impossible. Though they try—chemo, radiation, and immune suppressive drugs. Nothing stops her MS from progressing. Not progressing—degrading, demeaning her body, her spirits, her gumption.
You agree to be her guardian, between her and the state, even though you are swamped with raising kids and graduate school. She’s family and you have so much more.
She is fierce and handles most things herself, pressing her face to her magnified computer screen, peering through one eye, she pays her own bills with a program that prints the checks. She stamps her signature. On the phone and in person, she is good at indignant.
She tries having a live-in. A woman, younger than her daughter. The woman seems polite when you meet her. She tells you that she’s from the Ukraine.
But the live-in help doesn’t load the dishwasher right, your sister tells you. She can hear talking through the walls and at night; your sister can’t sleep. The girl stays in her daughter’s room. "That girl’s too messy, messier than my own daughter!” Dishes on the floor, clothes everywhere. She roars into the room, top speed, and the motor on the wheel chair growling as she plows through clothes on the floor, showing you the mess. You nod and pick up clothes, throwing them on the mattress so your sister can get back out. A quick right angle clipping the corner, and she shoots down the hall. You hold your tongue, smooth the nick to the doorjamb and follow. You’ve brought a ripe honeydew and cut it up and smile when she, grabbing a hunk of it to eat, says it’s the best one she’s tasted.
Finally, she tells you she’s moving out of her house, into a nursing home —her enthusiasm overflows. “I can do this!” She tells you someone else will keep the place clean, rescue her from the floor—and without saying it—from the messes in the bed, or on her lap. And not you.
After the first move out, she never again says, “I can do this.” Reality is harsh, even with her own room. She is not even 40, and around her, women twice her age. She has no patience for age. Aging is a luxury.
She feels ancient, she complains. Except as we all do, she sees herself as forever 21. For her, twenty-one is skiing black diamonds, snorkeling in Jamaica, hiking, camping with her toddlers. You let her talk about her happy marriage, before, when it wasn’t overwhelmed by her illness.
Then you listen when she shrieks at you through the phone—she has to get out of there, whatever nursing home she's currently in—even though your own kids are the sweet ages of six and eight, and no shrieking, yet—you listen to her, again.
Moving, again. Leaving more of her things behind, each time. At the first place, you give her your mother-in-law’s rosewood dresser to put her clothes in. She gives it back to you when she moves. Pretty soon everything she takes with her fits in one cardboard box and a suitcase full of sweat suits and nightgowns.
You, too, begin to feel trapped and unhelpful, even though you continue to visit, wherever she is, take her to lunch with realistic expectations, walking beside her motorized wheel chair to the nearby Thai place for something different, eating eggs rolls because she can manage those. Feeding her forkfuls of Pad Thai because she can’t and she loves Pad Thai. You bring her whatever she needs—new sweatshirt in her favorite green to bring out her emerald eyes—you sit on the edge of a picnic table in winter, shivering while she smokes her cigarette in the smoking area with the others, the younger ones in wheel chairs, too. She likes to tell you how much worse they are than she is, listing her positives—she has family, you, a husband, grownup kids, one married, neighbors who come to visit. The nursing home like middle school, with a pecking order and no graduation. Or she tells you how snotty they are to the staff; though you have seen her needlessly scream at an aide for picking out the wrong bra to put on after her shower.
Her kids move far away in their early twenties. They come to visit on occasion, while you take a breather.
Sooner than you expect, you reach your limit, too. You have been telling yourself—she has so much to deal with, why can’t you just deal, too? You are no saint. You’re losing your sense of humor. Darkness overwhelms even your daytime dreams. Gloom seeps into your time with your daughter and your son and your ever-patient husband. He understands, without saying, the original impulse to do for her, but is grateful when you say it has to change.
You tell her that you can’t do the guardianship anymore, and she agrees though doesn’t say—too much drama, expectations too high, the yelling, her life bleeding into yours.
She makes the transfer over the phone. The state appoints a professional guardian.
You relinquish obligation, feeling both better and worse. You continue the easier part, the visiting, the bringing things, listening, taking her food from your garden, and her to lunch on a whim, just to see her. But you are no longer responsible. You can’t bring her happiness.
And then time skips by, at least for you, raising elementary age children so full of life and glee that the shadow over your heart brightens.
You get a call from your ex brother-in-law, who lives thirty miles away, telling you the ER she's been taken to is walking distance from your house. You get in the car, knowing nothing, only that she is there. When you arrive you realize you haven’t seen her in a month—though you talked on the phone three days before. Her skin wasn’t gray a month ago when you saw her; her face not convoluted in pain, not like this, not ever.
She knows you at least. Char, she calls you now, your childhood name, short for Charlene. She calls Char, again.
You reach for her. She takes your hand and squeezes, as if she could squeeze your life from it. Oh, how you wish you could give her a corner of your life, right then.
Your nursing days, tending to others in pain, worry and hope, sweep over you. This is your sister. Your younger sister you fought and played with, slept in twin beds in the same room an arm’s length away, your whole childhood. It is both overwhelming and centering.
What can I do, you say. What can I do?
You listen to the ER resident and the dreaded news, a gallstone in her pancreatic duct. ‘Now we see necrotic pancreas. The stone’s been lodged there awhile,’ the Doctor says.
Necrotic pancreas echoes in your medical memory, the worst, the absolute worst pain. In your last conversation with your sister three days before, there was no mention of pain.
I want to die, she says to you, her green eyes so full of tears they are glassy windows of misery.
Let me die. Please. She is begging. As if you are the one keeping her alive.
You don’t let go of her hand, while you ask the resident to please please give her more for pain. And when the nurse gives her more IV drugs, you wet your sister’s lips, wipe the sweat from her ash colored forehead with a cloth, murmuring words of love you haven’t said in a while, waiting, waiting for something. At the very least, relief from her pain.
The panic on her face finally ends after enough morphine, and she closes her eyes, only to open them one more time when the love of her life, her ex, walks in to be by her side. You step away.
Still the question—what you had done, what you hadn’t. Like the tug of a healing scar.