The Aftermath

I stood hunched over in the shower and watched the water swirling towards the drain but it shaped an undulating heart and I thought, “This is how I feel.” The whirling of emotions from moment to moment and the efforts of my body to keep moving, keep going, and feeling a bit of me being sucked away down some drain in that hole that is left where my sister’s physical presence resided.

I know she is still with me but she is gone. Her voice, her laughter, her crankiness, her obsession with Robert Smith and Tim Burton… those things are missing. I keep sitting in the living room and looking up, expecting her to turn the corner in the hallway coming from her bedroom.

I don’t even know how I will endure her wake. She didn’t want a big funeral. She wanted a party in celebration of her life, so that’s what we’re giving her but I don’t know how to hear everyone’s stories and their connections with her when I feel so intently that no one can understand how deep my pain goes and no one had that same connection. She was a part of every moment of my life for over 31 years. I know my mother has a different and special connection to her baby but for me, the blood I watched my sister shed in her last days was my blood. We were made of the same stuff; we originated from the same space and same bits of the universe. No connection will ever compare to that. She was my best friend even when I couldn’t stand her, even when she hurt me. I spent my life protecting her as much as I could, though she often pushed me away… just as she did as her last act before losing consciousness in her last days. She was trying to be independent and, as ever, I was trying to protect her from her own bad choices. Nothing could stop her though. She was a massive power in this world… now she is gone.

I learned last night that she railed at my father on my wedding day because he was leaving early. I’ve never had the strength to speak up for myself the way she could for anyone she loved. That doesn’t mean I never put myself between danger and my sister’s life… in fact, I did so often enough that at least once it almost cost me everything. I just always did so quietly and efficiently. She was my strong warrior though, demanding what she felt I deserved as loud as she could, whether she won or not.

Now it is my job to do for her children as she did for me and to teach them to take care of each other as did Chelsea and I.

I’m not sleeping well. My nightmares continue and I can’t save her there any more than I could save her from the cancer that stole her from me. I just wake up and bolt upright before trying to settle back down. It doesn’t help that the whole family appears to have caught a virus. It’s as if the Universe is giving us a little kick while we are down- taking away our bodily strength when our emotional strength is already taxed.

Appetite is generally elusive but when food is forced, it does its best to escape fast enough the way it went in. These days are facades of staying productive and busy while feeling like a phony on the inside… shouldn’t there be rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth? Isn’t that what you do? I’m not saying I’m not crying (read: completely breaking down sobbing to the point that breathing is difficult), but there are so many hours that appear “normal,” and it feels insincere that anything should be normal, no matter how normal an action death is.

The fact that all this feels unfair really doesn’t matter. The link there seems to be about right… what’s the basis for comparison to what’s fair and unfair? We all die. It’s just a matter of when.

Let’s face it: Cancer is a motherfucker!

So, for now I keep listening to music that makes me think of her. Right now, Mutemath’s The Fight seems about right, because I just have to figure out how to reconstruct the universe without her in it and that seems vaguely impossible right now.