LOSING MOM - Part 38

Lost as I was in my musings, I didn’t hear Lib come back into the room, her sudden presence next to me startling me out of my thoughts.

“How’s she doing?” she whispered, seeing Mom was asleep.

“Okay,” I whispered back. “Was actually pretty alert until just a bit ago. Hope I didn’t wear her out for you.”

Standing up, I grabbed my phone and purse from the table, then leaned down to kiss the top of Mom’s head. “I’ll be back,” I promised, even though I knew she probably couldn’t hear me. Since she'd been in Hospice I'd found that I was never quite able to leave the room without saying some sort of goodbye...just in case.

Then, shooting Lib what I hoped was a reassuring smile, I headed out to the hall, leaving her alone with Mom to say her own, impossible, goodbye.

The corridor was quiet, so rather than waiting in the adjacent sun room where I would normally go, I settled myself in the little desk alcove across from Mom’s room so I could keep my eye on the closed door, unsure what to expect when Lib reemerged from behind it.

Because, really, how strong was she going to have to be to actually walk out of that room a final time, knowing she would never see Mom again? It was hard for me to imagine, and I worried that once she did she might crumble into a thousand pieces at my feet.

Then what? I wondered, watching the door nervously. Would I have the strength to pick her back up, or would I crumble down along with her under the weight of our shared grief? The big sister in me hoped I would stay strong. That I would find a way to put my own sadness aside and let Lib be sadder than me, at least until I got her to the airport.

But I don’t think my big-sister-self was very confident I’d be able to hold it together because I kept hearing her voice, loud in my head, telling me over and over ‘You can’t fall apart! You can’t fall apart!”

Growing up, I’m afraid I wasn’t the best big sister in the world, the 2 ½ years between Lib and me just enough to make her seem more a pesky nuisance in my life than a comrade in arms. Lib and Sal were actually closer back then, despite their 7 year age difference, often leaving me on the outskirts with their whispered giggles and code names. I can’t remember now what they called each other, but whenever I overheard their secret sister banter I know I felt left out...like they were on one side and I was on another.

Of course, it didn’t help that their bedrooms were, actually, on one side of our upstairs hall and mine was on the other, next to our parents. Or that they sat next to each other on one side of the dining room table at dinner, while I sat by myself on the other. It also didn’t help that both their birthdays were in June, while mine was in January, or that they both had Elizabeth in their names, but somehow I didn’t.

I don’t know, maybe I was just ‘overly sensitive’, as Sal and Lib were always quick to point out. Or maybe I was suffering from what psychologists refer to as Middle Child Syndrome. But even now, so many years later, I can still feel the angst of my younger middle-sister-self that Sal and Lib, for whatever reason, were sharing things with each other that they didn’t share with me.

But when Sal was 15, she headed off to boarding school in Connecticut, leaving me and Lib to navigate the next few rocky years of early adolescence without her. And sadly, because my experience was way, way less rocky than Lib’s, I was often heedless, if not outright oblivious, to what my younger sister was going through.

For instance, while my biggest adolescent worries were a flat chest and an occasional pimple, Lib had full blown, painful acne and a tendency toward pudginess. Where I had a close knit group of friends all the way through high school, Lib got ousted from her friend group in the 5th grade, in the worst mean girl kind of way. I wasn’t unsympathetic - I’d actually had my own ‘war’ with my best friend in 5th grade, making all our other friends choose sides - so I think I figured Lib’s troubles would blow over the way mine had, and subsequently didn’t offer too much in the way of sisterly support.

Then, just as I was getting to the age when I might have started to see Lib as more friend than foe, I left for boarding school, too, and pretty much lost track of both my sisters’ lives for the next few years, caught up as I was in my own. I mean, we’d see each other on vacations and such - Mom and Dad were great about getting us together as much as they could - but for many years my sisters and I were like three planets spinning around the same solar system, but each on its own separate axis so their paths rarely aligned.

But then we grew up. One by one we got married and started families of our own, and our paths, once so separate and apart, began to converge more and more frequently in our mutual desire for our children to all know each other. And through that shared experience of parenthood, I got to know my sisters in a new way, happily realizing we had way more in common than I’d thought.

Then tragically, when we were all somewhere in our thirties, Dad died quite unexpectedly, and the three of us suddenly found ourselves together on a difficult and unfamiliar path. Certainly not a path we would ever have chosen, and certainly not one we wanted to be on, but nevertheless there we were, stumbling along beside each other the best we could.

My sisters’ presence in my life then, weighted with so many shared memories of our father, was what got me down that painful path in one piece. Sal and Lib were the only people in the whole entire world who understood my overwhelming grief, and in that shared experience of losing Dad, they became more important to me than I ever would have imagined when we were growing up.

And now here we were, stumbling together down another painful path we didn't want to be on, this one even more difficult because we knew how much harder it was going to get.

The door opened and Lib slipped out, the look on her face at once shell-shocked and resolute. Wordlessly I stood up and wrapped my arms around her, swaying back and forth in the middle of the hall as I hugged her to me, my big sister-self trying hard to be strong. An aide walked by and, catching my eye, offered me a sad smile as she put a hand to her heart in silent sympathy.

Oh god. I squeezed my eyes shut, the aide’s kind gesture more than I could bear. My throat was so tight with unshed tears I could hardly swallow.

But then, thankfully, because I could never have pulled away first, Lib took a step back and gave me a small, watery smile.

“I’m okay,” she said, taking a deep, shaky breath. “Let’s just go.”

We walked out to the parking lot, the cool March air refreshing after my long day inside, and I followed Lib as she weaved her way through the maze of cars to where she’d parked Mom’s old, but beloved, green Honda just a little while before. Suddenly, as Lib reached out to open the passenger door to get in, she bent over, like the wind had been knocked out of her.

“This can’t really be happening,” she moaned under her breath.

The fear in my sister’s voice was so palpable I felt it like my own, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. Somehow, despite all my spiritual bravado since Dad had died, the deep, dark nothing I’d imagined death to be when I was younger had found me again, right there in the middle of the Hospice parking lot. And as I stood helplessly next to my grieving sister I could feel its darkness threatening to swallow me up into its frightening void.

“Don’t go there, Peggy,” I heard a voice in my head warn urgently. “Remember who you are. It’s going to be okay.”

I’m still not sure whose voice I heard...my big sister-self, my higher self, God...but whoever it was, it gave me the courage, in that particular instant, to pull myself away from the edge of the gaping void I was teetering on, and help my little sister get into the car.

To be continued...