There are moments in life you just don't forget. Vestments so innately true to the person you have become that they hang above you like virga across the desert sky. July is one of mine...
I can feel July press against me. It is heavy and onerous; like a child pushing forward from the back of the line.
Do you know July has a smell?
All winter the world sleeps in the most marvelous of ways, a slumbering giant. Winter is an equalizer. When the made-up rules about how to act and behave fall and become buried beneath blankets of snow.
In the spring the ground wakes and unleashes its revenge. It rains and the dirt gives up green. But by July the earth grows tired and it begins to die- you can smell it in the burning grass.
The middle of July, it was the last time I really talked to her. I had pulled Wendi aside. Sitting at a picnic table on the deck separated from the others by 4 meager steps but it had seemed more like miles. Or even as if we had stepped into another reality. A place we could set aside everything that was between us to once again, and for the last time, see each other as sisters.
I had described it as dream-like even before she died. The dreams that followed match it perfectly leaving me to wonder if she wasn’t already dead that day.
Dead like Margaret….
UofU/GenSurg/2002:
Two days prior Margaret had sat chatting with us in clinic asking for one small favor. “Please try to close this.” She had asked patting her stomach. Her belly wound’s long history was not given to me but I was there beside the surgeon in the OR when we did as she asked and closed it.
And the patient went home for the Christmas holiday. But she returned to the ER with a fever. Readmitted and reopened on Christmas Eve.
How do explain that she was already dead? Dead last week, walking and talking, heart beating, lungs filling, and just as dead then as she was now. Just as dead as she was about to become.
Back in the OR the surgeons searched in vain: 115 life saving cm of intestine simply were not there to find. Dr. B ordered her closed. The pile of rotted intestines resting on a sterile tray replaced back into her failing body.
Taking me with him we headed for the waiting room. At the open door Dr. B paused sending me in first.
The families in the waiting room who earlier had watched us like orphaned kittens now stared at the specks of red dotting the blueness of our scrubs. It was as if they could smell it on us. Some even turned away.
When I walked towards her she let out a small gasp and backed away from me. I managed to coax her into the small conference room her head shaking no. As I talked I realized she was younger than me. She held the book which days earlier Margret had held in pre-op. The book she had meant to read during her recovery.
I was standing alone at the moment I took this young woman's mother away from her. Dr. B. sat on the table too small for his mass, his words silent. Arms crossed over his chest concealing his hands beneath his armpits.
Usually I'm lost to this world of monitors & medicine. Often swallowed whole by the monstrous rituals; nothing of my recognizable self. But not that today.
Then seconds later when hours had passed, back in the peace of the SICU I sat at the side of Margret's bed & I closed my eyes. If I had had her book I might have read it to her.
I left at 2 am slipping off into the darkness of Christmas morning. A new blanket of snow covered the stairs and sidewalks. I left alone. Had I known how shortly after Margret followed me I might have lingered elsewhere.
The Sunday following the last time Wendi and I really sat down and talked, I couldn’t even stand to look at her. I had gotten up from the table and walked away.
On Monday I called her. It would be the last phone call between us. She told me wanted to stop drinking because she didn't want to die and I laughed at her...
Of all the things to not remember, I don’t remember how we said good bye.
Did I say "I love you"? Or "I'll talk to you later"?
What were my last words to my sister?
I have no idea.
What I do know is...
when the phone rings & there is too long of a pause or that little electronic blip that proceeds a tell-a-marketer's call, I can hear her saying my name.
I have no idea how to out run a storm that never breaks.
