August 6, 2010

There is only one August sixth a year, and I’m glad this one has past.

For the most part I live my life. I have moved on, as some obliviously cheerful people put it and yet on the evening of August 5th I still have to reach out to hear my parents’ voices. I consistently miss Mother’s Day, but if I do not call my mother by evening on August 6th we would both feel empty. August 6th  is the measure by which I gauge how far I have come or not come in grieving my sister.

1:20 am on August 6, 2007 my sister Sarah, age 34, passed. Funny euphemism, passed. It’s what you say when you can’t say died. The truth is, she had glioblastoma multiforme brain cancer. She died from it.

You don’t hear about this often enough. People die. It is part of the that cycle: your body ceases to function and goes on to (possibly) become nutrients for plants and the animals that eat them. Humans in turn eat the animals and suddenly there is a food chain. The general is easy enough: people die.

But the specific? There is a term that begins to name the specific, “actively dying.” That means the body is shutting down. When a person dies in this specific way, of this specific cancer, the brain shuts down the body in a haphazard fashion. Body fluids flood the chest and lungs producing a breathing sound that makes the living quake. The death rattle—the doctors say it is painless, but it doesn’t sound painless. Recognition, higher brain functions, movement are gone. The heart is beating at 150, and still the blood barely circulates. All that is left is the inert body and crackling breath, slower and slower, then a sigh, and … over.

Too much? Yes, probably.  

A different specificity: Sarah did not die alone. My parents, an aunt, an uncle and I were in the house taking turns by her bedside. It turned out, my uncle was on watch when it happened; he held her hand, smoothed her hair and told her she was beautiful (that is the way I imagine it). Rattling went to whisper. She stopped actively dying and simply died.

It’s still not clear to me what you do when a person that defined your life leaves forever, a sister, someone you expect to be with you the rest of your life, someone you fight with, compete with and still cheer on.

I thought that perhaps this August 6th would be different. It was, but not in the way I had hoped: I wanted to be able to tell funny stories, give a toast, honor her by having adventures with friends someplace new. Instead I cried until it became an unsettling sob. Christian and our friends held me and comforted me, each in their own way. This August 6th is different only because grief hit me in the evening instead of the morning. That’s not much, but it’s still a little different from last year.

I ache for my sister; I wonder where she is now; I wish I had been a better person when she knew me; I wish she could see the turns my life has taken. I wish she knew Christian.

I wish, I wish, I wish.