she was my sister

He watches me go to my knees and pull the box from its hiding place under the east slope of the house's low eves.  I drag it out.  He watches me as I circle the box a few times then open it.  I pull out two frames both of which the glass has been shattered. I set them on the lid and circle the box a few more times.  It is over flowing with photographs and papers- none of which are mine.

He breaks, "Are you going to be able to do this?"

"Yes, of course."

 I'm not feeling anything. There is a dull remembrance of a time when feelings were all I knew. The world of reason and logic silent and the chaos of lose, of regret, and of something else I don't have words for, took over.


People who know me now may not have any idea. And as much as I don't want to out myself not having any idea is a big part of what killed my sister. So the truth is after my sister died I suffered a complete mental collapse. I sank so far into depression I didn't even want out. 

The trigger for destabilization was PTSD.  Although I might have been the "good" well, the "better" sister of the 2 of us, I was not as smart as we thought I was. 

I thought all my medical knowledge, all my time sorting through the dead of others, all my time in the OR, my success in the ER, all my book smarts, that they would protect me from any of the gruesome reality of my own sister's death. I foolishly thought I was untouchable, mentally and emotionally. I knelt in her blood, cleaned her apartment, identified the 4 day old rotting corpse and thought I would be okay. 


I wasn't.       

"Will you be able to be honest with her?" He asks.
"I can answer any question she asks but...." and the stammering takes over. This is disassociation a coping skill that turns disease. 

However I managed to climb out of the darkness of those couple of years, I paid a price. And I don't mean having to walk away from a career in medicine. I am at peace with that decision.  What was hard was I had to give up all my words about it. I can see them lined up down a long alley and as I try to read them doors start closing- leaving me wordless. An ironic event only witnessed by those asking about my sister, life with my ex husband, or about love & commitment. 

My niece, her daughter, is coming over to talk to me. She has questions for me about her mother. I am the person most willing to be honest- me and this box. 

For better or worse I am the keeper of her mother's soul. And too many things have been left unsaid.

Driving in the dark (excerpt from Taming Venus)

October

How do you explain the slow descend into madness?  What words would you choose to describe the world as seen though my eyes?  Would it matter?  I mean, how anyone who has not been there themselves could possible be made to understand just how I came to be here not knowing which direction I was running.  Whatever reason stops you, you will find a world crashing to a halt carries casualties in its wake. And when you dare to open your eyes you will find that this is the bottom. Maybe it isn’t so bad.  Maybe around the next corner you will find your way.  Standing alone beneath a ceiling of grey branches stabbing out the sky one by one, walled in by thick knee-high under brush threatening to over take the trail.  The road, worn with deep troughs, long ago weathered and dried.  It is as if summer has forgotten this place, sentenced to an endless winter without snow.  At every corner there is another turn, no spots from which you can view your progress.  In shadow there is an ominous feeling of a mountain high above you but no sight of it.  Do you continue up hoping to find your mountain or do you ascend hoping to find you home?    

I often believe it all still there.  The apartment intact, her body underneath me as I straddled her width, reaching into the bathroom greedily grabbing the most out of reach, most hated, most prized of all, the thing I believe she saw last- the photo of her children.  I see the currents of evil and hopelessness circling the rooms as I waded through them.  I see time over lapping.  I see my sister walking to her death.  I see her.  Was she scared? Did she know? 

Related Blog Posts:

Taming Venus, mlb  (A real life, firsthand, unedited, often graphic, diary-essay of the time surrounding my sister's death and the aftermath.)

Seven Years, give or take, mlb