A Parting Gift To My Sister

As I write this my sister lays dying; the third of my siblings to do so in less than three years. The cycle of emotions I have been feeling this time around are different. We have simultaneously had no relationship, yet a loaded one. Logic would dictate I feel nothing but it is not that simple.

When I was born, K was less than a month shy of her 19th birthday. There are photographs of K in her CNA uniform, at the hospital, bundling me for my ride home with our parents. I don’t ever recall living with her or being welcome in any home in which she resided.

I have mentioned K in other posts. She has never been kind to me but I am told that is just her way; she is not malicious but instead unfiltered. Often, intent makes little difference. When a company poisons the soil or groundwater in a neighborhood it hardly matters whether they did so with malice aforethought or through simple negligence. If you hope to live, you move elsewhere to try to escape the damage. That has been my primary coping strategy with K and our oldest brother but given that families are not real estate, my strategy has been only partially successful. I have occasionally been pulled back into the sister role to distract K during funerals or festivities where her unfiltered tendencies may have damaged others’ important lifetime memories.

Please do not think I never tried to have a relationship with K but now is not the time to rehash all those instances. There is much I don’t understand and will never know because of the years that separate us. I hoped as adults the rift would mend and our commonality would pull us together. Twenty years after the loss of our parents this had not happened and it seems likely it never would, even if cancer were not robbing her of the twenty more years she deserves.

I have spent these weeks of Ks illness replaying our past, wondering what to do or if there is anything I could do before circling back to emptiness. Years I have mulled over how my birth could so offend and whether I owe it to anyone to rectify my presence in life at this late date.

I have stayed away and hope this is the right decision. I stare at a family tree she penned for our Grandmother when I was in high school. I am not on it. I know I could care for her and help her be more physically comfortable but I can do nothing to cure her. I hope by at least pretending I don’t exist, this will give her comfort in her final days.