dear debbie (a letter to my dead sister)

i can't remember the last time i saw you and it was a good experience for me. i can't remember the last time i saw you and smiled. i actually can't remember any good times we had except for one. so i guess since you've passed i owe us both that much...to remember my one good memory of you.

i think i was about 6 or 7, which would have made you 19 or 20. i think you were still living at home with mom and "dad." although by that time i think dad was on his perpetual "business trip." i remember you were watching me with your friend kenny. we played mad libs on mom's bed, and we laughed and laughed and laughed...

the last time i saw you was in 1999. i actually didn't really see you in a conversational sense. you were sitting on mom's porch with your 5 children and all of your things. you were evicted from yet another place. i was staying with mom while i went back to grad school. mom told me when i moved in to never to let you in the house because you would never leave. so i drove up the driveway, parked my car at the top and went inside the back door. i didn't turn on any lights, i don't know why. perhaps not to rub it in that i was inside and you were outside. regardless, i called the police to have you and your children removed. that was the last time i saw you or your children in person.

now that you are dead, it makes me sad.

while you were alive there was always the possibility, albeit slim, that we could be civil to one another. that maybe you could meet my husband and my son, that i could see my nieces and nephew again. heck, that i would see my sister again. but that never happened. instead, you are gone, your children are a mess (much like you were) and for some reason it has effected me very deeply.

i spent my whole growing up years trying to be the opposite of you. i made all of my decisions reactively. i didn't want to get in trouble, i didn't want to make a scene, to be noticed, to have an opinion, to be loud, to be fat, to be anything like you... and now that i'm 30ish with a son, all of those decisions, all of that reaction to you is haunting me. you are haunting me.

i don't know how to think of myself without thinking of you. everything in me, everything i think of comes from some place that sounds like, "what would my sister do? better not do that." and now that you are dead you aren't doing anything. but you are, in a different way, and it's kicking my ass. your children are just like you: irresponsible, loud, addicted, lost, fat, abused, angry, lazy, manipulative... that haunts me.

who am i if you are dead? how do i think of myself? i have tried so hard to not be like you, to not have anything to do with you, that i melded myself to who you are, who i think you are. if i am not you and you are dead then all i am is alive. and, that's just not enough. do i try to sever myself from you? because i know that will be huge, herculean. not only to i identify as not you, but i parent as not you, i partner as not you. i still do everything as NOT you.

i'm sad for you that you are gone and i'm sad for me...for all that's lost, left unsaid, and for all that i have done to create myself as the antithesis of you. because, what i've come to understand since you died a year ago, is that i have to cut you out of me or i'll never survive. i'll destroy everything i touch just like you did. i'll just go about it the exact opposite way.

here's to you dying again sister...