I had a little sister.
She was less than two years younger than me.
And I loved her.
And I think she loved me.
That was a simpler time, the early mid Twentieth Century.
But she died when I was nine or so years old.
And I don't think I have ever come back from that.
I wrote about it in Screen Saver, so, since I seem to have been posting excerpts from that book recently, I am here posting another one.
"Annie’s death had been a great deal closer to my heart. She was a year and a half younger than I was. We were the typical mixed gender, close in age siblings. We cared deeply about one another when we weren’t fighting or trying to kill one another. She was expert at getting me in trouble with my mother. I was expert at stumbling into her snares and artifices that got me into trouble. All in all it was a satisfying and loving relationship.
"After we had moved to Portland and after my parents had divorced my mother and Annie and I moved to a court apartment on North Ainsworth Street. Annie and I had shared a bedroom. That Christmas we each got a new Schwinn bike. Annie’s was blue. Blue was her favorite color. Mine was red. Red was my favorite color. Neither of us had known how to ride a bike. Learning to ride was to be the major non-scholastic project of the coming year – once the weather improved enough to allow us to take our shiny new bikes out without getting them wet and muddy.
"One day not long after Christmas Annie had looked at my mother and my mother had seen one of Annie’s eyes cross. My mother took Annie to the doctor. The doctor had been taking care of Annie and me since we had moved to Portland which by this time was half of Annie’s life. He took one look at Annie and referred her to a well-known brain surgeon. The well-known brain surgeon took one look at Annie and said some things that really upset my mother. It must have scared the hell out of Annie. I never knew, because she and I never got to talk about these events. In almost no time at all Annie had undergone brain surgery. They had shaved off all of her beautiful dark blond hair and drilled a couple of holes in her head. What this was supposed to have accomplished I would never know. Whatever it was, it didn’t. Apparently it was hopeless because what we did next could only have been done in a medically hopeless situation.
"As it happened, we never took them out together, that year or ever. That is because “we” had become “I” before the new year was out. Although “I” ultimately did learn to ride my bike Annie never got to touch hers. There never was a “we” happily careening around the neighborhood.
"My grandparents - my mother’s parents - occasionally used the services of a chiropractor. He was a large, bald, rather loud man who had lots of opinions. His name was Bob. One of his opinions was that somehow a daily regimen of chiropractic adjustments would cure whatever it was that was afflicting my sister.
"My mother, Annie and I moved to Seattle to live with my grandparents to submit Annie to this regimen.
"As Annie continued to worsen – she went from eating with the family at meals to being served in bed, and from being able to sort of talk to not being able, or perhaps being willing, to talk – we added a daily novena to the chiropractic regimen. Life seemed to stabilize into a daily routine of visits from Bob the chiropractor and my mother and my grandparents and me gathering on our knees in the back bedroom around the bed of the presence that had once been my little sister. We mumbled the various Catholic incantations that were required by the novena. Annie didn’t improve; Annie didn’t worsen; Annie was in suspended in some state of not being quite fully alive, but not dead.
"None of this seemed ominous to me. Nor did it seem odd. It was just what one did until a bad situation turned for the better. It had never occurred to me that Annie wouldn’t get better. She was my little sister, not a frog or a caterpillar – or even my mother’s best friend, favorite entertainer or favorite baseball player. Little sisters didn’t die; they got better. But Annie didn’t get better. One morning early in the summer she went into convulsions. I saw my mother on the bed straddling her and pushing on her chest. The back bedroom was a scene of chaos. I was hustled out of the house to my friend Dickey’s house for the day. My belief remained unshakable that this was just one more pre-requisite activity on Annie’s ultimate return to being my troublesome and wonderful little sister. Dickey and I went to the arboretum with kitchen strainers with long sticks attached to them with multiple wraps of string. The attached sticks made the strainers into quite long handled nets. We spent the day gathering creatures from the waters of our favorite frog pond. In later years that pond would become a Japanese garden, a sad metamorphosis.
"Early in the evening my mother picked me up at my friend’s house. Although my grandparent’s house was only a block away she had come in the car. We got in the car and she started driving away from the direction that would have taken us to my grandparents’ house. After we had turned up the hill that would lead to the lake and had sat in silence to that point I broke the silence. “How is Annie?” “Annie died.” At that instant something happened to me. Something either entered me, or something left me. In either case I never knew what it was, but I forever after felt its iron influence. It was a sense of aloneness; it was a sense of self-preservation; it was a sense on uniqueness; it was a sense of anger; it was a sense of fear. I never lived without it after the moment I heard the words, “Annie died.” I inhaled the deepest breath of my life and filled the car with my wracking sobs of grief."
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