On this day six years ago, my sister died in our mother’s arms.
She hadn’t slept for two weeks. You could see the cancer pressing through her back, a red blotch that darkened as the days went on. She asked Mom to rub it, over and over again, to hold her, to do something, to make it stop, please --
She had been sent home to die just before Christmas. A hospital bed was moved into her bedroom, an IV stand, a slew of medication. There was a great party when she at last came home. There were relatives, friends, more food than any of us could conceivably eat. We were so happy to see her. We wanted her to be welcome, this Christmas to be the best.
No one said a word about death. We told ourselves that she would live, right up until the very end. Had we told ourselves anything else, it would have been the end of what little sanity we had left.
In those last two weeks, my sister existed and did not exist. She lay in her room most hours of the day, groaning and rolling over, trying to get comfortable in a body that would not let her. She was all skin and bones. She cried endlessly. She hallucinated visions of our grandparents welcoming her to the afterlife (they were teddy bears in the wall. Mom reasoned that they appeared like that so as not to scare her). Slowly, so gradual that I did not see the difference until it was too late, she drifted into a catatonic daze. She was unable to move on her own or form coherent sentences. Her eyes wobbled this way and that, never focusing on any one thing. Looking upon her was like looking at a different plane of reality - vibrating, indistinct, right in front of me, but so very far away.
Most days of those last two weeks, I pretended that she did not exist.
Her room was quiet and the door was always closed.
It hurt too much to see anything else.
On the day of her death, while I was at school, she was admitted to a nearby Hospice. She was the first child to ever be given a room there. Every nurse looked on us like we had a curse, like we’d brought a freak of nature into the building. A sixteen year old is not something you see everyday in a geriatric facility.
I came home to an empty house that day. I heated up some leftovers and spent the greater part of four hours pacing back and forth, unable to concentrate on anything. Around 9 or 10, my parents called me, told me where they were and begged me to come in. I told them that I had school tomorrow, that I needed to get to bed.
They had said something to that effect.
I packed up and went out the door. It was the dead of Winter and the roads were none too forgiving. They showed me to her room and I saw my parents smiling inside. I was hugged and greeted. We told jokes. We remembered the good parts of her life.
A nurse came in to change her underwear and with a great deal of relief, we realized that we could give Lyd some privacy. That we were no longer caretakers, but loved ones. We had had no space for mourning up until then. No time to do anything but try to make her comfortable.
When we came back, the nurse was holding her feet.
Her limbs are getting cold, she had said. This means that a change is coming. Just so you’re aware.
I had thought, in the broken remnants of a mind that had nothing but hope left, that she was going to get better. For a long time I was angry that she had phrased it that way. Why hadn’t she straight up said that she was dying? Why did she give me that last cruel burst of hope?
Whatever it was that she had said, at that point, I don’t think I could’ve heard anything else. All of us were far too gone to hear a single thing about death.
I kissed her on her pale cheek and told her to have a good sleep. That was the last I saw her alive.
An hour later, she struggled to breathe as she lay in Mom’s arms.
It’s all right, Mom whispered to her. You can let go.
I heard them coming home in the night, not knowing if I was dreaming or awake.
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