Since my 79-year-old sister Pat died over the weekend I’ve been flooded with memories of her and the long life we shared together. It’s amazing how present she has become now that she has made her transition. Pat slept in the twin bed next to me most every night for the first 18 years of my life, and the first 15 years of hers. Too often, according to our father, we’d keep one another awake past our bedtime. “Quiet down up there you girls” he’d yell up the stairs. In response we’d lower our voices to the barest whisper in the dark, but the conversation would always continue. In our enthusiasm, our voices would rise again, provoking another warning from our increasingly frustrated father, sometimes getting loud enough to wake our younger sister, Mary Jane asleep in her youth bed across the room.
I suspect Pat and I began our adventurous journeys together earlier than most kids. Our parents put us on a train in Chicago to travel alone to Detroit Michigan when we were 7 and 4 years old. We were met by Auntie and Aunt Dote, my mother’s sister and aunt. A favorite image from that daylong train ride is blond curly-headed Patty Jo, despite my many admonitions, standing at the train’s water fountain, filling yet another white cone shaped paper cup with cool water to bring back to her seat. Fortunately, she didn’t have to travel far since we sat very near that awesome water fountain.
After we each graduated high school, we went our separate ways, me to New York to dance and Pat to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, a first job for many young southern women high school graduates of that era. One of the stories that still survive in my memory was Pat’s response to the racist practices of her employers. The telephone company sales representatives, whose job it was to sell princess phones, (one for each room of the customer’s house, if possible), were told to mark an N on the record of negro customers so they could be easily identified. “I just marked an A on every card to stand for American,” she told me a few months before she quit to find a job more compatible with her own value system.
Instead of college Pat joined The Grail, a Catholic women’s lay organization, which at the time had 14,000 women participating in programs in 12 city centers around the country. She studied and lived at their center in Loveland Ohio near Cincinnati, working in the bakery and studying with Grail members who were pioneers in Catholic feminist theology, women in the arts, and the ecumenical and civil rights movements of the time. She was sent to a migrant camp in northern Michigan where she organized and directed a school for the children of the migrant farm workers. This led to her involvement in the Cursillo movement, and her recruiting me to join her in leading weekend retreats for women, most of whom where twice our age.
Pat’s life ended last Saturday morning in the ICU of a hospital in Boston, after being sent there with a medical emergency by the facility where she had lived bedridden, with late-stage dementia for a year. The hospital called me Friday morning as they were unable to reach her son. “The medical record says to do everything we would do for a 30-year-old, and I don’t think that’s appropriate,” the heart specialist said.” I agreed and pleaded with him to avoid taking dramatic measures until her son, who was the official guardian, would land at an airport and be able to communicate her wishes. Both the doctors and I urged my nephew to continue to Hawaii for his all-expense paid vacation with his wife. The doctors were sure there was nothing he could do for his mother if he returned, and I was sure, if she knew the situation she was say, “Don’t you dare come back here and give up that trip you won from your employer.”
With phone calls back and forth and kind and caring interns, we were able to reduce Pat’s suffering and secure for her a peaceful transition after this way too long disease and it’s way too long goodbye.
We don’t have a word for the loss of a sibling. Orphans are people whose parents are deceased. Widows have buried their husbands, widowers their wives. But the death of a sibling is often overlooked, or its importance minimized. Pat and I, like other siblings, were each other’s first best friend. We shared experiences and memories that lasted a lifetime. Yet, my sister’s memories didn’t last her entire lifetime. I remember her small voice coming from the back seat of the car as Rich drove us away from the Gerontology Center after some testing, “If I have what they say I have, I could lose myself.”
As her disease progressed and her memory faded, she did lose herself, but I found a way to give some of her life back to her. When we would visit in person, and later, on an iPad held by a gracious and generous healthcare worker, I would reminisce about things we’d done together. She’d smile and her eyes would sparkle like she was remembering and reliving, or maybe, she was experiencing it all for the first time
