Sister Lessons

It's been over three years since my sister Kim passed away. I still find myself thinking about her, not necessarily out of sadness; although there are definitely days that affect me more than others. I think. I reminisce. I wonder what might have been. I know that's natural. I think about her all the time, but I hardly ever verbalize this to anyone. It's strange. Towards the end of her life, I would spend my time actively "not" thinking about her, which is actually just a euphemism for "ignore."

I ignored my sister the last few months of her life. In her words, in her mind, I abandoned her. And the truth is: I did.

I had to. Middle-aged life, work and family became my primary concerns. There was no room in my life for the relationship she wanted. Kim stubbornly refused to gracefully accept this new reality. So I walked away.

This is my pattern. This is what I do whenever someone emotionally demands from me more than I'm prepared to give. I shut that person out. I move on. The more I look back on my life, the more I see it filled with past relationships that I left to wither and die. The people I leave behind have become vague shadows. Instead of a being a deeply connected and hard felt memory, that person is more than forgotten; it's almost like they never existed.

Case in point: a mini, informal high school "reunion" I attended last month. Although moments of that event were definitely pleasant, I left with the troubling impression that I had no connection to those people as a whole. Incidents and stories were brought up that were intended to remind us of the bonds we once shared, but for the life of me, my mind just drew a blank. That realization disturbed me for weeks afterward. These were people who invited me in their homes, welcomed me into their families, supported and cared for me. In the end, immaturity twisted our relationships and expectations and I walked away.

That day of the "reunion" I found myself vainly trying to reconnect with strangers.

If Kim was still alive, there's a possibility we would have felt the same way about each other. A bond that was so close, that breaking it would prove traumatic and damaging to both parties. Something neither one of us would ever recover from.

But Kim's passing has ensured that I can never ignore her again. Kim, in a very strange and morbid way, has regained her former place in my life. I find myself reconciling my image of Kim as "just" my sister against the multitude of very different memories and viewpoints of the other lives she touched. So in reevaluating and slowly assembling the larger picture of her life, I'm forced to admit that Kim was, and always will be, more than I could ever imagine. She was more determined, more beautiful, more intelligent, more brave, more crazy, more sensitive, more caring, more empathetic, more neurotic, more capricious, more unstable . . . more full of life than I ever gave her credit for. She was more than just my sister. She is simply "more."

I will always be thinking about her. I will never stop thinking about her. I miss her. I miss what she was. I miss what she could have been. I miss everything about her. I just miss her.