The Really Big Sister Kingdom

We use titles to define the most important relationships in our lives – mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, husband, wife, daughter, son, friend.  We toss these titles around as lightly as plastic balls, sure that when we throw one out, the person catching it will know exactly what that particular relationship means to us. But of course, no title can accurately describe what one person on earth means to another person on earth.  Every relationship is its own private kingdom, with its own language, its own stockpile of joys and sorrows, its own shared experiences.  

Two weeks ago, my youngest sister died from a brain aneurysm.  When she died, a whole kingdom disappeared from the earth, a kingdom inhabited only by the two of us, a place in the world that was just ours.  In the midst of my personal, self-centered grief, I have come to realize that private kingdoms are lost every minute of every day, all over the world - kingdoms I will never see or hear or understand.  So, while the kingdom I shared with Sandy is still vivid and whole in my mind, before it dissolves into fragmented memories, I want to paint it with words.

I was nearly 14 when Sandy was born and when she was three or four and I was in high school, she used to refer to me as “my really big sister”.  Being a really big sister is a weird thing. In the beginning, it is a little more like motherhood than sisterhood.  When Sandy was a baby, I mixed her Enfamil, sterilized her glass baby bottles, changed her and fed her.  I rocked her in the mornings while waiting for the school bus.  In the evenings when I was doing homework, she sat nearby in her infant seat or highchair cooing and gurgling.  When our mom was sick with a postpartum infection and later, hospitalized for nearly two weeks for a hysterectomy, I walked the floor with Sandy at night, just us two in the dark in our own private kingdom, her black curls nestled against my neck, smelling of Johnson’s baby shampoo and that particular, sour baby scent that all mothers know.

When Sandy started school, our mom went to work as a food service director in a nursing home which required her to take evening classes for a while, and to then to work many evenings. I supervised Sandy’s homework and attended her parent/teacher conferences.  I was the leader of her Brownie Troop, her little league coach, her Sunday School teacher.  When she had chicken pox one summer, I came home from work to give her oatmeal baths and entertain her with stories I made up about wild horses that lived in a meadow.  In those years, our kingdom was full of lost library books, last minute science projects and Halloween costumes made from magic markers and sheets.

When Sandy was a teenager and college age young woman, being a really big sister got harder.  She came to me with every drama and problem but then refused to listen to my advice.  “You’re not my mom,” she would say, and then go on to make choices that I knew would cause her to suffer.  In those days, there were a lot of arguments and heartache in our kingdom.

As Sandy matured, our kingdom continued to evolve.  I walked down the aisle in a burgundy dress at her wedding.  We exchanged recipes and nonsensical complaints about our respective husbands.  I was in the delivery room when each of her three daughters was born.  The labor nurses kept referring to me as “Grandma” which pissed me off but made Sandy laugh.

In the last ten years, the kingdom I shared with Sandy expanded beyond my wildest imagining as I discovered that, in many ways, she was more like me than anyone else on earth.  In daily phone calls, visits and texts, we shared our frustrations with our ADHD, our inability to deal with mundane, boring tasks and our impatience with routine. We both struggled with profound intolerances to authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the status quo. But we also shared many loves, including a deep reverence for the earth and the animal kingdom. We both found our peace and our joy in nature, among the trees, the birds, and the stars. 

One shitty day, when we were both annoyed with life, she came over after work and declared that we needed to “ground”.  We took our shoes off, pulled patio chairs out to my yard and sat barefoot in silence with our feet in the grass. Suddenly, our home generator kicked on, indicating a power outage. 

“Karen!” Sandy exclaimed, “Did we do that?”

I reassured her that our “grounding” had not caused a neighborhood power outage, but she was unconvinced.

“Karen, why are we so weird?” she frequently asked me.

“Everybody’s weird, Sandy.” I would tell her and that may be the truest thing I ever said to her.

Every human being is weird, unique, beautiful, crazy, worthy of understanding and of love.  Every human (and animal) relationship is its own private kingdom, with its own battles and its own treasures.

The world is full of lost kingdoms, and today my heart goes out to every person on earth who longs for a place in the world they can never return to, except in their memories and in their dreams.