2007

We came into the world one at a time over the span of approximately six years, I, wedged in the middle of the estrogen-powered progeny of our parents.  Three girls.  All different. All somewhat the same.  It did not occur to me as we played in the sandbox or rode our bikes together that I would someday hold a sister's hand and think how much it looks like my own or hear her voice on the other end of a telephone line and feel that I had never left home.  The same soil from the same garden produced us, but the blooms were, though spectacular, very different.  It was that garden loam that still clung to us in September of 2007 when we all came together over Daddy's death.  Humming unmistakably in our hearts was the family song, this time a dirge.  Grief was the common lyrical line, but we each sang it differently.

In February of 2002, we had all met at Daddy's house to go over his finances and to discuss his future care.  It was the first time we sisters had been in the same room together for several years.  Our individual pain had customized our very different reactions to the train wreck that was 1985.  My younger sister had brought her daughter, as had I.  Heather had given us our first grandson in December of 2001, so she met me in Dallas to show him off.  Four generations crowded around Daddy as he leaned back in his recliner wearing pajamas and reading off his final wishes, his glasses pulled low on his nose so he could peer at the print through his bifocals.

In the kitchen that evening we were our mother's daughters as we peeled broccoli, chopped and diced vegetables for salad, kneaded biscuits, and fried chicken. We could have been in high school again; the air was familiar as we breathed it together, our differences lost in our kitchen busyness.  Daddy had a "lady friend" - a recent widow - he wanted us to meet.  The anticipation of meeting a new person in Daddy's life made the discomfort of our being together after so long apart seem familiar and safe. We barely knew each other any more, but no one knew her.

I had moved away.  That was much of the problem with our communication. My sisters lived in the same south Texas county and were integrated into each other's lives.  Though there was genetic soil beneath our fingernails, we had been planted in far different settings by then. Though we shared the same genes, it was apparent to me, after the trip in 2002, that being sisters would require some work; it was not an automatic ongoing "given" that we will deeply connect without pursuing each other.

Our hands were not the only common thread that was obvious to me; our hearts, also, were and are forever intertwined.  Though I could not take those hearts out and look at them in wonder nor hear the actual song birthed into each of the three of us, I was struck by the palpable love I felt for my sister as I cut her hair with Daddy's kitchen shears that evening when the plates were cleared, the dishwasher humming, and the "lady" was gone, leaving the foreign scent of her perfume behind.  She had clearly had no interest in Daddy, but, it seems he was hopeful that, since she had cared for a handicapped, dying husband, this lovely widow might take him on, also.  We all instinctively knew this and breathed a collective sigh of relief, as I clipped away at the reddish strands of my sister's hair, that this sweet widow was too smart to become entangled again.

Seeing my niece again, her beautiful face reflecting my sister's, made the world somehow smaller once more. Mother's dishes in her German hutch, the familiar knick-knacks gracing the mantle, and the oil paintings on canvas over the sofa all closed in to embrace us in "home" for a few hours.  It is in our marrow.  We have known each other from the beginning.  We know what we were like as kids; share memories that only sisters who have ridden long distances in a family sedan for seemingly endless hours on vacations can possibly know.  Though the lines had gone mostly silent for a while, it was not dead.

Daddy died on a Saturday morning in a month when the world seemed upside down with Blackwater security personnel accused of killing seventeen Iraqi civilians, with Nuon Chea, the second in command to Pol Pot, charged with the slaughter of over one million innocent Cambodians, with the massacre of ten peacekeepers by Darfur rebels, with Idaho's Larry Craig's resignation over allegations of homosexuality, the devastations of three earthquakes in Indonesia, and with the release of Bin Laden's latest video threatening to escalate killings in Iraq. Daddy's death was but a small, unheralded leaving - a quiet, early morning stilling of his heart, almost unnoticed as the world ground forward in its agonies and ecstacies.  My older sister was in Europe; my younger sister called me with the news.  We were not expecting it so soon; but, sitting alone in the overstuffed ivory chair in my living room, I held the phone in my hands long after the line was disconnected.  My world certainly changed that morning, and I had to close my eyes and replay life, my soul searching with some hot sensor for just what I should feel.  Forgetting the din of the grasping, screaming, clamorous world, the event no one recorded changed the tenor of my life.  Relief was the preeminent response.  Not red-hot and glowing.  Soft and peaceful.