Sisters: And Then There Were Two

Today my sister Leslie is having an operation and I will be sitting in the waiting room contemplating my navel while the surgeons fix what has been broken for a long time.

We were not a close family, that band of five that moved fifteen times to ten states by the time I was sixteen. Actually, much of the time, we didn’t even like each other. Our fights were big, lacking only in physicality. We wouldn’t speak for years sometimes, one or another of us. Then, five short years ago, we started to diminish. First it was my mom, who died of lung cancer, and went out with more dignity and humor and calm than I would have mustered. I liked her a lot in the end. Then it was my dad, of a disease we didn’t know he even had until we read it on his death certificate. And then, less than a year ago, my older sister left — ostensibly by cancer, but really, she was an alcoholic who everyone pretended wasn’t. The carnage she left behind was also swept under the rug of her power in the family. I’m told there is always one in a family who has that power to affect all others. It was her. The secrets of our family — there were so many — are not worth keeping anymore because they were all due to very human flaws and so why bother?

After our older sister died last year, I sent my sister Leslie an email that read “#AndThenThereWereTwo.”