Denise, December 2001
All of December of that year, I was waiting for my sister to die. We had visited her in November when the brain tumor has begun to grow again, making a slight bulge in the side of her temple. I cried all the way home at the thought of my funny, sharp, witty sister reduced to an over-aged child who hardly knew us and would ask, “Did you bring me candy?”
In December, the doctors said it would be any time, and I became idiotically obsessed with whether I should get her a Christmas present or not. To get one and then have her die before I could give it to her was unbearable. To not get one because she wouldn’t live long enough to see it seemed cruel. I couldn’t think of anything else all month. Finally on the twenty-first, I sent flowers. On the third of January she died.
The day of the funeral, my nephew Eric, his wife, Cheryl, and John and I gathered in the anteroom of the funeral home to await the service. We began to talk about how funny and clever and nutsy she was and the adventures she and I had gotten into in the last five years. Despite the 20-year difference in our ages, we had become close, after she was widowed at the age of fifty. We talked about how she and I had set off for Eric’s graduation at the University of Connecticut, and, both of us being notoriously bad drivers with no sense of direction, had ended up in Rhode Island and missed almost the entire ceremony. We had then tried to pretend that we had been there, intently discussing the speakers and inventing opinions of the ceremony. We were quickly caught in our lies and had to tell the whole story of being lost and driving for eight miles on a flat tire, saying to each other, “What is that noise?”
I told about how she and I had once had too many wine spritzers for lunch and then went shopping; and I got sleepy and fell off the little velvet chair in Bloomingdale’s dressing room.
And the four of us began to laugh loudly and so hard that we staggered around nudging each other with our elbows. And then we stopped suddenly, horrified at our undignified behavior. “Wait,” I said, “If she was here, she would be every bit as bad.” And for a moment I had my funny, sharp, sister back.