After a silent and lightning quick 10-day battle, my kid sister died in the pre-dawn of Saturday morning, leaving exactly the way she lived, unobtrusively, hoping no one would notice.
Somehow, I always thought we would have plenty of time to get to know each other. She was born after I left home, and we never did have a sustained amount of time together. We always lived far apart.
Superb health seemed to mark our family —many relatives made it into their 80s and 90s. What is the rush to get acquainted? My kid sister barely survived half as long as Pop, and the irony was she was Pop’s most urgent, devoted, patient, loyal companion until his closing minutes two years ago.
The rest of us were preoccupied by our lives.
It is a measure of my father’s exquisite sense of choice and unshakeable love for his seven children that his favorites were my only brother and my kid sister.
For a pragmatic reason, although that is not a term my father would have used or known, he chose them because everyone agreed with him that they were the most vulnerable.
With so many children and so few resources, my parents had to be selective about where they directed their spare protectiveness and guidance.
My kid sister and my brother may have been the smartest of us, but they were what the world, for centuries, has called wandering souls.
By the seventh grade, I knew how I wanted to spend my life, and because my brimming notion of self-confidence never has suffered from shortage, no one ever worried that I would stray.
But my brother and my kid sister never settled in, professionally or otherwise, for a complex of reasons that alternately has frustrated and angered those of us left behind. “Angered” is a muscular and true description, which most of my siblings would virulently reject. But I have been a Majority of One most of my life.
Both of them died so fast, my brother without warning (I came home and found him dead on the bathroom floor of a heart attack, extinguished cigarette in hand), my kid sister with 10 bizarrely emotional days’ notice.
When Mom died 30 years ago, she summoned the middle of my five sisters to her bedside — she was chosen because she was, not in order, married, levelheaded and lived relatively nearby. Mom urged her to protect, to actively oversee my baby sister, and she did it beautifully. For years, the two girls, on drastically different life paths, shared some confidences, and had spoken every day, even though they lived 300 miles apart.
This, however, does not acknowledge the painful, the punishing (some would say self-selected) loneliness that haunted my brother and my kid sister every day they lived, until they wore weary and gave up at nearly the same age, in their 50s. What a hollow coincidence that both of them had about the same amount of fuel to chug through bumpy lives.
Shamefully, I know less about the lives of my dead brother and my dead sister than I do about some public figures we write about.
Which shows you how disappointingly little self-confidence means when your most important values are assayed.
