My sister (born Deborah, self-christened Whims) died this week, an event prompting condolences from well-meaning friends and acquaintances, but no condolences are needed. All her death really evokes in me is a sense that something bad and wrong has come to an end.
It quickly became clear that I should have kept the news to myself. Because while I am genuinely grateful for the support and comfort of those around me, the only sadness I feel is for my sister’s son, a decent, bright and good-hearted guy who has suffered terrible confusion and probably a good deal of pain due to my sister’s activities and behaviour of the past few years. The plain truth of the matter is, and death shouldn’t make us afraid to be honest, my sister was a troubled person, a virulent racist, and she brought pain and discomfort to my family for most of the time she was alive.
Such a terrible thing to say. Such a terrible thing to feel you have to say. And yet there it is. My earliest memories are of late-night threats made over the phone, against my mother, by my sister. As a young child she filled me with fear. As an adult she usually filled me with disgust. For every kind, decent thing she did — such as assisting my wife and I with groceries once when we were very poor and newly living together — I could name you twenty that would tear your guts out.
The worst:
There were four of us kids that my mother raised. My oldest brother, my sister, me, and my younger brother. There’s more to the story than that, much more, but for the purposes of this reminiscence, that’s all you need to know. My oldest brother was adopted, but never knew it. My mother began demonstrating Alzheimer’s symptoms in the 1990s, and as the disease progressed, eventually my sister (a nurse) brought my mother (also a nurse, in better, stronger days) to live with her. Around 1994 my mother died, and my sister wrote the obituary that appeared in the newspaper.
That obituary was how I found out my mother had died, because my sister didn’t bother to tell me. That obituary was also how my older brother found out he was adopted. Can you imagine being a middle-aged man, never mind a troubled Vietnam veteran, being told for the first time that you were adopted, by reading it in the newspaper? “Nancy Doane is survived by her adopted son Robert…” began the paragraph that must have devastated him, as my sister intended. She was a vicious, spiteful person. After my mother’s death, my sister spent many months trying to seize control of some stocks that my mother had intended me to inherit. There’s no doubt of her intentions, because she told me herself, and added my name to the ownership of the stocks. When my sister finally gave up trying to get them turned over to her against the stated wishes of our mother, and turned them over to me, I cashed them in as quickly as I could. My wife and I were raising two very small children, and were making very little money. As a result of the stock sale there was enough money to buy ourselves wedding rings (we hadn’t had the money for them, or much else, at the time we got married), a new pair of sneakers, and exactly one nice meal out at a decent, but not extravagant restaurant. I hope her failed attempt to steal this minor amount of money from me as I was starting out my own family was worth the two decades of contempt I carried for her ever since.
There’s so much more. The time she knocked my then-preteen brother on his ass for impulsively saying something both innocent and true. The time she stole everything from a husband she married solely for what she could get out of him, waiting for him to go to work, then backing up the moving van and taking it all. More, more, more. But it finally took her racist rants on immigration to prompt me to unfriend and in fact block her on Facebook. I just didn’t want any more of her hatred and negativity in my life.
A few weeks back I received word that she seemed to be falling even further into dangerous behaviours and habits. There was talk of drug addiction and loaded handguns, mutterings of revenge for being fired, likely with good reason. I began to wonder how much longer she could live the way she was living. Now I have my answer. Not long. My wife told me today that my sister’s death was news she never expected to hear. I told her I’d been expecting it for weeks.
I don’t know yet how exactly she died, and honestly there’s a lot more about her that will remain forever unknown to me, forever a mystery. Late-in-life hints that there may have been so much more lies and deception on her part than I really had ever could have guessed, although actually I had wondered about some of it from time to time. But the truth is, the death of my sister is not painful for me, though I feel for those to whom it might cause pain. For me it’s mainly about closure, about the open wound that was her life, not so much healing as just finally coming to an inglorious and not-entirely-surprising end. The only lesson I could offer up from her long, destructive life and quick slide from madness into death, is that we all will be remembered not for what we wanted to be and wanted to do, but for who we actually are and what we actually do. I wish I could remember my sister fondly and with love, but unfortunately I remember her too well for that. All I can say is, goodbye, Whims, and thanks for the groceries.
