I spent the weekend with my sister. Sometimes I think we’re like sisters in a fairy tale – one tall and awkward-limbed, one short and edged by desperation. It’s the first time in many years that we spent time together outside the warm knot of our family. Our blood, the spell it casts. Do all families wind up having a spell like that? A time when, in retrospect, everything seemed to have been rattling, near to coming loose? Like the house where we grew up together, how it revealed the effects of holding our weight. There were always new cracks appearing in the ceilings, wall paper peeling in curls, water stains spreading their yellow territories ever wider. Footsteps always pounding the stairs like a crazed pulse. Doors banged hard enough to split moldings. When I see my sister at home, she is often weary like that house, weighted down with the dullness of routine, the past and its consequences, the corners of her mouth weighted, too. But coming across the country to visit me, she seemed blissfully released.
She uses a walker but with the hills and uneven terrain of this city, I rented a wheelchair. Her unburdened spirit allowed her usually stubborn insistence that she walk to yield. She let me push her in the chair while we took the dogs for a walk. When the first steep hill came, I marched head down like a football player shoving a training sled. She helped me with one festive push of the wheels forward after another, the rubber wheels burnishing her hands with each too slow release, leaving red streaks. When we reached the top she laughed because she was happy. I took her hands and asked, “are you ok?” She looked at them and smiled, said they didn’t hurt. We proceeded around the outer perimeter of the park on a hill looking for a ramp; most of the entrances were stairs. I found one, but it was steep and the curb was not cut. Without too much forethought, I charged toward it imagining that speed would help to bump up the curb and leave some momentum for a head start up the hill. I forgot about her foot rests, which hit first and cut the momentum, bringing the front tires to a blunt stop and tipping the chair forward. She was still seated, but wanted to help the situation, so as I tilted the chair back again, she climbed out onto the paved path with her hands, slowly moving away in an unsteady bear crawl. I called out to her, pleading for her to be careful. She turned over and sat on the path, still smiling, still light. She got back in the chair with gravel on her hands and pants, giggling. The next push uphill was a repeat of the first hill. Then there was the lowering down, letting her pick up some speed but not too much. “Weeeee…” she said and I laughed. On the other side of the park, the sprinklers were on. Fat splats hammered the paved path ahead of us, raking up and down it but never away from it. There was no escaping. I warned her we were going through it and took off at a cautious trot. It was downhill and a bit slippery so I didn’t want to get going out of control. But I did. And we skidded into the grass, then backtracked and fumbled at the same uncut curb when the footrests hit the street. Again she got up, trying to help, but I coaxed her back down. All during this we were subjected to interval showers as the sprinkler moved away then back, away then back. When we made it free of the obstacle park and were back on the safe sidewalk, I asked her jokingly if she’s ever had such a rough and tumble trip to the park before. She laughed and shook the water from her hair and hands.
My sister is disabled from brain damage. She’s been that way most of my life. She had a car accident when she was 16 and I was 11. The truth is that I have always been terrified of her: the dependence, the abundance of things it takes for her to function in the world like pills and sleep and equipment and gear and more pills. Back when I drank, I used to disappear on her. I couldn’t handle spending time with her and I didn’t know why. Now I know it’s because I was afraid of all her needs and certain that I would not be dependable enough to meet them. I’m still afraid of all her needs but I’m now obliged to face the fear and capable of being depended upon. What I realized this weekend is that what scares me the most is her constant reminder of my own vulnerability, my utter fragility. And that there’s nothing to protect me. There’s nothing to protect any of us. It doesn’t matter how good, how young, how beautiful, how full of promise anyone is. Tragic events happen anyway and people get broken. And I have guilt. Layers of it. That I survived the world so far intact and she has not. That I deserve it less. That I skated out across the country unscathed and blessed in every way while she stayed in my home town with my mom and my sister left to help carry the weight.
And yet there is something poetic about the tragedy. The hard reality is flecked with happiness. Real happiness. There is a complicated beauty she makes available to those of us who love her. She notices and acknowledges invisible things like the birds on the street and homeless people. She stops with her walker and her unsteady gait to say “Hi birdie” with impossible enthusiasm to a pigeon on the sidewalk. She stops and bends to read the cardboard sign in a filthy man’s hands that asks for spare change and she declares, again with enthusiasm, “I can spare some change!” Then she digs with shaking hands into her purse in the basket of her walker and fumbles crushed bills and coins into his cup. She mumbles sweetly to my dogs while they lick her face. She has unbelievable brand loyalty, like Rainman and his underwear. She falls constantly. She always gets up. She is bruised from head to toe from falling or bumping into things, she’s severely limited in both mental and physical capacity, but her eyes are sometimes sharp. Her senses are sometimes attuned to beautiful things nobody else can see. Vulnerable, broken things. Innocent things. I am grateful for both the fear and the faith she has allowed me to feel. Without her, the world would be less beautiful.
Recent Comments