A Tribute to My Sister: Metabolizing Grief, Mourning Loss
We have all been or will be touched by the death of someone close to us, someone we identify with — or someone we admire from a distance. Death is dreaded, denied, sanitized, and at times, softened with euphemisms.
In a world where contemporary thinking offers a narrative of death as an elemental process or an abrupt unravelling of a life, many of us live in fear or denial of the inevitable, ultimate transformation.
Sooner or later, death darkens every life.
For those that die, it is their end of this world. For those of us who watch and wait, death unravels feelings of compassion, sorrow, rage, guilt, confusion, disillusionment and the deepest love.
Silent stitch by silent stitch.
Death empties the physical body, and it is the indestructible soul that carries our essence beyond.
And … for my only sister — beautiful Jennifer, this is an exquisite tribute and celebration of a life lived, now has gracefully ended.
Part of our human experience is to experience and embrace loss as part of life. We still need to metabolize our grief, mourn what we have lost.
When I heard the news of the death of my sister, I instantly felt the emptiness of abandonment. I could not fight my body, and folded like a deck of cards into my wife’s arms; heart-sore, weary and my mind infected with guilt.
It was a guilt that had been muffled, overwhelmed and even strangled by the voices of my own expectations, powerlessness and survival.
The currents of shock surged like a rip-tide, as I struggled to feel at home in my own body — accompanied by an obliteration of life as I knew it.
Confusion, disappointment, sadness, anger — and then the tears.
The end of my sister’s life was an ending that would evoke long-buried memories of lacerating loss, opening archives of ancient pain, suffering, resentments, abuse, and the family secrets that live in the shadows of our family dynamics haunting us today.
Many years ago, Jan embraced her fierce truth-telling, courage, and values, and called out the big family secret.
Their response was to ferret for some kind of logical reason to circumvent her reality — and of course, deny it.
The knowledge of this truth blazed its way into a chasm of denial where it waits for what will never come — an admission, acknowledgment and apology for allowing/colluding with a predator — this bleached, self-absorbed, narcissistic, putrefying corpse to perform such savage behaviors.
These acts of abuse and the collusion would slowly extinguish all that was innocent, alive and possible between my sister and I and reverberated across decades of our lives — and the lives of those my sister and I loved so fiercely.
What was stolen from us — and yes, I mean stolen by the collusion and the predator — who is nothing more than a opportunistic virus, who felt entitled to use our bodies for his own despicable pleasure — which Jan innocently and brilliantly called out for what it was; would hang, like dust mites in the cold silence of separation and strain our relationships over the history we shared.
To be silenced, shut out, triggers a primal wound of rejection that bleeds for years.
To this day, I loathe this aberrant, arrogant, lying, conniving m___f**ker for what he did and stole from my sister and I. True justice is in God’s hands and I live peacefully with that knowledge.
Because I know, “some things are true no matter how hard you try to block them out, and a lie is always a lie, no matter how [rationally spoken]. Some doors, once they’ve opened can never be closed again, just as some trust, once lost, can be won back.” (Alice Hoffman)
Jan’s love and spirit will always live with my spirit; in a secured cornerstone that feels more honest, more authentic — beyond the veneer of denial, abuse, addiction, greed and the stifling grip of melancholia or the dry rattle of meaninglessness.
Instead, we dance in a fecund well-spring of something more life-giving and thirst-quenching with people who expand our hearts. Who see us and love us for who we really are and not through the aggrieved, distorted projections of a rapacious predator and judgmental hypocrites.
But where we can set aside soulful times to reflect, to soften, to smile, relax, to be in the moment — grateful to be sisters, kindred spirits in that sweet spot of connection and belonging.
I believe no one dies empty, but full of radiance, ripe with the sweet nectar of a life lived, experiences garnered in a final harvest.
Nabokov wrote that “Life is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness …” and perhaps when someone dies we, are reminded of the brevity of our own existence and that death walks with us from the moment of our birth.
I love you Jan. I love and admire your courageous, vulnerable truth-telling and — I am listening!
Eternally, your big sister, Paula.
