Sister

I don’t remember our first meeting but if family lore is to be believed, I was so taken by her that I offered up my most prized possession at our first encounter. The blanket was softened from repeated washings. It was covered on one side in the bright pastel emotions of the Care Bears and on the other with a soft silky fabric, a texture and feeling so ingrained in me that I will likely seek it out as a comfort for the rest of life. I have a good reason for not remembering this encounter as I was not even two at the time and my memory is not great for even more recent and salient times. But the feeling I must have had, that I understand because it has been with me for all of my life.

I do not remember who I was before this moment, but after it, I am a sister and that piece of my identity becomes something integral to me. Not only am I a sister, but I am a big sister and that holds a special sense of responsibility that even my not yet two year old self understood as she handed over her most precious comfort object to the squirming creature in the bassinet. She would never know a life without me and I would be someone different from this moment forward. We are sisters now and that is sacred.  

I often curse my poor memory but the details of moments together creep up on me from time to time. More than these moments is the deep seated feeling that I have someone who knows me in a way no one else can or ever will. When I need someone to play with, she is there. We build with snow in the backyard, tiring after less than half of the snow-packed brick wall is built, then wrestle each other to the ground, grappling in our bulky suits. She would cry out that I had hurt her, only for me to stop so that she could get the upper hand. She knew how to accentuate my weakness for her even then. When our parents separated then divorced, we weather the changes, shuffling between houses on weekends. When we changed schools in middle school, we took on the new challenge together. When I moved away to college in Boston, she followed a year later.  

She was the bartender or waitress that handsome men and beautiful women left their phone numbers for. She was so beautiful that people assumed she couldn’t possibly be smart as well until she pulled some interesting book from her bag and left them slack jawed and even more intrigued. We could look at each other and know the other's thoughts, bursting into laughter without a shared word. She had a cackle and was the funniest person I knew, mostly because we were, in some crucial way, the same person through the experiences and blood we shared.  

The impulse to care for her, some kind of latent instinct toward motherhood, never dissipated but I wasn’t often called into service. Once in college, I received a late night phone call from a boyfriend who asked me to come over when she was too drunk, too stoned, too high on whatever it was she’d taken and I was racked with an impulse to throttle said boyfriend who had allowed this to happen. I was young too, perhaps too young to be much help, but the thought that I was someone who provided comfort gave me something too.  

We grew up. She moved to New York. I settled in Boston building a life amidst the chaotic years of your mid to late twenties when you are finally tasked with figuring your shit out in real time and everything feels both very exciting and very hard. She was doing the same, but in a bigger, cooler city, the continuation of our life-long dynamic. It therefore amounted to a one-two punch when I learned that I was pregnant and a few months later that my sister had cancer.  

She had been sick on and off in not very worrisome ways for months. Bronchitis. Pneumonia. It would pass, the doctors assured. When it didn’t, she went for tests which told very little. Then more tests which offered more clues. First it was leukemia. Treatable and more expected for her age and stage in life. A collective sigh of relief was breathed until more tests revealed the source of her chest and back pain. Stage four lung cancer.  

I coped with the diagnosis the way I think we all did and probably most would - shock and an unrelenting hope that statistics be damned, we would be different. She would be different. I traveled to New York for her treatments. Her friends went with her to the hospital too and supported her in the aftermath of nausea and fatigue. She fought and lived, doing yoga and writing and going on walks. My daughter was born. Both of us struggled in something new and frightening but my newness was tinged with the happiness of beginnings and the rightness of where life was supposed to take me while her struggle was one of foreboding and full of twists and turns that none of us wanted to follow.  

When the disease finally kept her from working, she had no means to pay rent and no way to receive insurance. She couldn’t stay in New York. There was only one feasible option in my mind. She would move in with us. My daughter was five or six months old at the time and I was a type A mess, holding myself together with “I’m fine’s” and plastered on smiles. There was joy too of course but the fear was overwhelming.  

She moved in in October and we had the worst winter in recent memory. So much snow fell that it reached up past the first floor windows in our triple decker building, covered the fencing around our postage stamp yard. It became comical after the third or fourth storm and, if my anxiety as a new mother hadn’t kept us in much of the winter, my fear of losing our on street parking spot to the snow did. We hunkered in and down, me with my new baby and her with this disease. She was depressed and anxious. I was in denial and afraid. We shoved our emotions down, smiling to avoid burdening the other with our selfish worries. We were together everyday which made things both so much better and so much worse. I had a front row seat to her decline and I will always feel like I watched it happen and did nothing to stop it. Maybe there was nothing I could do but caregivers like us always wonder.

She died on my daughter's first birthday. She had been in the hospital that week and the call came in in the early morning, so early that my rooster-crowing infant hadn’t even woken. I rushed to the hospital where my mother was sitting with her as the doctors and nurses rushed around in a panicked choreography. There was noise and tubes and last ditch efforts but the truth was that she was gone before I had even arrived. A blood clot to her lungs had taken her, quickly and quietly, and I was left with a relief that she wasn’t going to suffer any more and a deep, unsustainable shock that she was gone forever.  

I left the hospital without my sister. She never came home again and we were left with the life she left behind. What do you do with the belongings of the person who meant more to you than anyone? Each object was stupid and meaningless without her but also precious and important as the only link left to keeping her in the world. I wanted very few of her things, afraid that if I kept more, the urge would never stop. I ended up keeping only a few items that I could use in my day to day life - a pair of sneakers, a ring she wore regularly, a leather jacket that maybe my own daughter would be cool enough to wear someday. I want to remember her not in her things but in the way that I walk or the sound of my voice, almost identical to hers, our physicality linked through genetics and life experience.  

My second baby was born a year and a half later and giving my daughter a sister was the most precious thing I had ever hoped to offer her. I knew the burden and the blessing that it would provide. A friend who would know you in ways that no one else could. A caregiver and confidant who you could count on and who would count on you. The one person who will honestly tell you if that dress looks good on you.  

Sitting in the hospital bed, a baby in my arms and my daughter climbing up to hug her new sister, is a moment I will not forget. My daughters will not remember becoming sisters, just like I don’t remember becoming one, but I know what it felt like from that moment and every one moving forward. She is no longer here with me, but she will always be here with me because I am and will always be a sister.