Today was a day and night of tears. It is becoming more real each day that Chelsea is gone. My house is something of a shrine to her right now: her urn and Yuki in my bedroom and pictures throughout the house. However, part of this isn’t quite new: some people collect priceless pieces of art for their homes. I have chosen over the years instead to fill my home with pictures of those I love.
So now, there are more pictures of her than before. It’s the sound that is missing. I keep going over our last words and interactions. She was already confused by the time I arrived, so only a bit of those interactions made perfect sense. She didn’t want to die. She had wanted to meet my babies. She was angry that everyone got to live and she didn’t. She wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not.
Before she passed…before she slipped into her comatose state (I don’t know if it was an actual coma but she was medicated enough to stay asleep and comfortable), she had her “surge” where she pushed aside a number of people, including me, saying to me, “You are not mine.” She then forced her way into the hallway and all the way to the dining room across the house before finally allowing nurses to put her into a wheelchair. I offered to get her outside, as it appeared where she was trying to go but instead, she was then ready to go to bed. I never heard a word from her again.
Before that, her last words to me were, “I love you, ‘mana.” She never learned Spanish but she had started calling me “hermana” many years before and that eventually became shortened to ‘mana. “I love you, ‘mana.” That was it.
What more could I ask for? Why the regret? My sister was a very private person and hates pictures, much less video. I regret not forcing a camera, both still and video, in her face over the last two years. I regret not capturing those last words, any of them, to replay over and over. I regret respecting her wishes and fears so much that I denied her children, my mother, and myself her voice saying these things over and over. She wasn’t ready and I thought we had time to make those recordings… and now she’s gone and all I have is her voice in my head.
What I want is her loud, powerful voice telling me what’s right, telling me she loves me, making silly comments, commanding everyone around her as though she was royalty, and hearing the sound of her cuddling her children. I want more than pictures.
I want my sister back. I want all the little moments I never captured for posterity because I’m afraid of my own memory failing me. I want to live back in a time when she was alive and breathing and healthy.