On My 54th Birthday, Poem To My Sister, Gone On Ahead

When you finally left, all that remained was this gaping hole dead center of my chest. The void was undeniable, but I resisted falling into its depths and almost always kept it covered. Afterall, for eight long years, I’d prepared myself as little bits of you fell away. I released you and I released you and I released you. Your ability to go a whole day without napping and, so, our ability to wander endlessly together…my freedom to tell you every intimate detail of my life (you were fighting to stay in your own life, so I felt selfish whining about mine)…plans luxuriously made into the future…one by one, let go.

You never asked for anything and you never complained about your illness which made me care even more carefully for you. I almost always answered the phone when you called, dropped everything and came to you mentally, emotionally or physically when, time and again, you stood at the precipice of nevermore.

You’d survived radical surgery when the ovarian cancer was discovered and got through 6 months of grueling chemo. So, when you had the blood clot (and then the brain bleed and then the coma and then the brain tumor and then the stroke), I reasoned with myself that you’d already outlived your prognosis…this was all just bonus time anyway. I read The Year of Magical Thinking so that I could practice processing grief. In the airport on my way to celebrate your final birthday with you, I Googled, “What is the evolutionary purpose of heartache?” And while I sat all alone in my house in a snowstorm, waiting for the news of your passing, I wrote your eulogy. With intellect and dedicated effort, I must have thought, I could control sorrow.

And so, when you finally did go on ahead, the wound of you leaving wasn’t the sharply aching ragged wound of an unexpected and abrupt departure. Rather, it was a hole, more ordinary and inevitable, like a long-abandoned burrow. And this was only the beginning of a series of losses, one quickly following the other. When all of the busyness of divorce and funerals and farewells was done and my weary body could, at last, be still and consider being hopeful again, a tidal wave of terror violently washed over me and allowed me little peace on any given day. Preparation be damned, Anxiety and Panic made of themselves uninvited guests, and they’d planned an indefinite stay.

I couldn’t have really known until I got here, how young you were when your life began its long end. Today, I am the age you were 12 years ago when you were given 12 months to live. The news was delivered the day before my birthday. Eight years later, just three days after my birthday and on the day of my then husband’s birthday, you died. We shared a dark thread of humor that ran through us, and I can’t help but think how masterfully you’ve ensured you would not be forgotten.

In this muddled mess of anniversaries, you have left me gifts. Because you came before me and were denied some of the things you most longed for in life, I always felt a sense of duty to learn from your experiences and to demand more from living. Since you’ve been gone, life has taken me to my knees, but I’ve gotten up again and again to defy betrayal and disappointment and rejection. I have chased down my demons and confronted those who thought they could get by with giving me way less than I dreamed of having or than I had to offer. The wonderful humans you created make up the nuclear family I did not create for myself. You asked me to take care of them, but I think you knew we would take care of each other.

Over the past four years, the hollowed-out place in my chest left by you and others has been filled with the compost of life to create a rich place for new growth to emerge. I have been falling more deeply in love with my Self. Now, I make choices to first feed my soul and then decide whether to share pieces of it with others. I have been able to do some of the things you never could bring to fruition. Though you’ve been gone in bits and pieces for so many years, you’ve never really left me. You, Sister, are beautiful stardust that swirls about me. Always.

And so, in this week of remembrances and sorrows and recognition of the strange cycles of life, Happy Birthday to me. I have, in fact, again become just a bit lighter.