There's nothing like a death to shake things up. And the dance that ensues between the guilt and the relief can be exhausting.
My sister, Jenny, died in the quiet, early morning hours of June 18, 2017. As I write this post, it has only been two months since her passing but I feel like a lifetime as passed. And in sense, one has.
I keep thinking, how could this have happened? Although the two of us were so far away from being close, we were still family. Now I wonder about the mothering her two daughters will now need.
Jenny struggled in her early years. Our mother lacked healthy parenting skills and coupled with an undiagnosed mental illness, she couldn't be the mother that any of us needed, let alone for her youngest child who started to struggle with her own mental health issues.
I have vague memories of that tumultuous time when our mom pretty much stopped parenting any of us. I was almost an adult but Jenny was just entering her teens. All of us kids were figuring out ways to make it to the other side and although we joined together to navigate surviving our mom's second abusive marriage, we were now splintered entering our own worlds of figuring things out on the eve of our individual adulthood.
Jenny was left alone.
I sit and reread that sentence and feel the acute heaviness in my heart because I know it to be true. She shared as much in her book, Crooked Tales: The Short Stories. She wrote her first and only book and published it in 2015. It took me until her death to purchase and start reading it. In it, her loneliness fills so many pages.
We were so different from one another and with a five year age gap felt more like decades. We had different fathers. We looked different from one another. We had different temperaments. The only thing we had in common was living in a dysfunctional home riddled with so much lack and poverty, laced with abuse.
I have very little recollection of those early days as they have long been buried under years of weathering later in life wars. My own inward focus on trying to figure out who I was to be in the world continues in my present day. So many layers. I left the house - well, I was kicked out because I was the only working adult in the household and refused to continue underwriting everyone's financial needs. It was the best thing that could have happened at the time but not without the emotional bruises to carry with me. I became even more disconnected from my siblings as I tried to figure out where to land. One of those pursuits was getting married, very young. My mother and I had a falling out a couple of weeks before the wedding, and all of my siblings were forbidden to attend.
Later, Jenny and I reconnected when she became a mother. I was freshly divorced and Hell bent on adding more of those 'layers' to keep me as distant from the real stuff of 'being'. Admittedly, the last thing on my mind was how to be a supportive older sister to Jenny as she was a teen mom when she had her first child.
Eventually, I made a life that was not only physically distant but emotionally miles away by moving from Pennsylvania to Oregon. I didn't keep in touch with my siblings very much. My brother, Michael, continued to battle his own mental health demons and I lost track of him. I loosely kept in touch with Jenny and my other brother, Steve, but that was when I came back East to visit.
Our mother died unexpectedly on February 12, 2002 - two week shy of her 59th birthday. I came to discover a few years after her passing that she battled her mental health demons around bulimia. For years, that disease destroyed her body and spirit until she couldn't take it any longer. A cold stumbled into pneumonia and that Beast took her in a matter of days.
I flew home within days of her passing and a beautiful thing happened: our family united to support one another, emotionally. All the 'crap' in our collective history disappeared as we mourned the loss of the only mother we ever knew. Four years later, we once again rallied to one another's side when our brother, Michael, died from an overdose.
I was once baffled that we had the capacity to be there for one another but while writing this reflection it occurred to me that we had good practice in our early childhood dealing with poverty and abuse. We knew how to hold each other up because we learned how to do that so early in our lives.
In subsequent years, I kept in touch with Jenny and when I came to visit on another occasion, she had become a mom for a second time and things seem to be settling down a bit for her. Once Facebook came into all of our lives, that was how we kept up to date on each other, albeit sporadically.
Recently, I came across our thread of connection I had with Jenny on Facebook and it was heartbreaking and illuminating. A total reframing of what I recall we spoke about. I clearly had blinders on when it came to my sister and as I read those exchanges as I also read her book, I paused and asked her to forgive me for not knowing, not realizing what she was sharing with me was truly who she was. Not the intense posts that she was sharing on social media. Had I paid more attention...well, who knows what could have come of that conversation with her. But I learned something deep and meaningful about Jenny in those moments. She was heartbreakingly alone and yet was doing everything she could to remain connected to the world she lived in. Her daughters and later, her grandkids were her saving grace in so many ways. She could love them as fiercely as she wanted to and nothing could take that away from her. Even cancer.
