Remembering the big sister that wasn’t

David Sherman

No one helped us through the grief. The adults were flattened by their own misery. Grieving kids just another burden. No one explained death. You listened to rabbis. Rote for them. It’s God’s fault and who knows why he does what he does. We don’t get a say in the matter. You’re suffering? It’s God will.

Perhaps words are but hot air. Maybe grief’s never extricated.

Disappointing my parents was a never-ending tale. But I would never have disappointed her. She treated me like I had a brain. And, so, I would try to use it.

We sat on the sofa while my parents did what they did. Making coffee. Squabbling? Whatever it was, was irrelevant. The memory is of us discussing time. Me and my cousin, mother of three, who made time for the tall white envelope of bones that was me at 12. We chatted. The conventional definition of time and its applications and the concept, its imperial essence, infinity.

We were talking not about wasting butter, leaving lights on or equally errant behaviours but ideas. A novel practice in my home. We sat side by side until my parents intervened, they wanted time with their niece, but she had lit a fuse, a curiosity, opened the lens wider.

There was so much the hungry brain wanted. And sharing was part of the appetite. Trade insights. Verbal dialectics. This was not the routine, “Stop talking and eat your dinner.” This was, “I’m interested in what you have to say.”

She had her own troubled, frantic life. Divorced, three kids, university courses, summer job running a camp, but she knew I needed what my parents, my older brother, were incapable of providing. They weren’t the fertilizing type. There was a vacuum in my life she took it upon herself to fill.

This was in our new suburban wilderness. She thought it important I feel comfortable in these walls scented fresh paint, and, as my parents emptied boxes and organized, she helped arrange my room.

“Would you like the dresser here or …”

I remember her flapping the sheets open and helping me make my bed. Maybe make the bed. I probably witnessed. Life was unspooling at a healthy pace. One part incredulity of our new home surrounded by … nothing.

She discovered I was afraid of water, so she decided I had to learn to swim.

She began to pick me up at school and take me to a pool at the Y. I found myself in the deep end of an empty pool floating with aid of a thick rope around my waist, manned by some guy in white pants and a polo shirt. She would be beside him. He would instruct and tug, surety against death by swallowing a pool. Breathe in, blow out. Lift arms like this, hold hands like this. A pool just for me. What magic did she employ to pull that off? I didn’t ask. I just tried not to gag. If she wanted this for me, so did I. I couldn’t disappoint her.

Took 20 or 30 years for it to become a passion and habit. I love the lakes and pools. Laps in chlorinated water. Summer dawns paddling in a cool lake, moon white and cloudy, sun soft and pale. The fish and flies and I. She would be proud.

When she asked me how school was on a day for a swim lesson, I said the girls had been called to an assembly. Boys not invited. We sat in the car and talked.

I was introduced to the mysteries of a girl or woman’s menstrual cycle. Ovulation. Tampons. Twenty-eight days. Fertility. Soon after she brought me a book about sexuality. My parents and her whispered about it when I took it in my room to examine. Later we talked about it. … Really?

Maybe she was before her time. She was divorced when it was not the part of life it is today. Unlike the seams splitting on just about everyone in the family, she balanced gracefully on the high wire. Took no shit. Did no wrong. Smile seemed perpetual. Framed by red lips. She wore a pony tail and zipped around in an American convertible, the car she died in. At 27.

When the call came, the instant on a Sunday afternoon that changes your life, grief of the children was not explored or made place for. If there were lessons to be drawn, there was no artist to sketch them. The person who would’ve sat down with me, in the car or on the sofa, talked about death and life after loss, was gone. There was no one to make sense of it. I was in the deep end, no rope around my belly to keep me afloat.

She made it unthinkable to be sexist in the grand scheme. To think women are lesser or should be subservient has no standing.

In all these years, I’ve mourned this loss. No closure but maybe closure is a myth. I’ll seal the door and move on. No. But maybe I can make more room for what she gave me.

What we could’ve had is an illusion. What I do have left of the big sister that wasn’t is bedrock.