8:08 AM Missed Call – Mom
8:09 AM Missed Call – Mom
8:10 AM Outgoing Call – Mom (6 minutes)
My Saturday morning started the same as any other. I was up prepping breakfast and deciding what order to tackle chores, a workout, and a social plan, my phone to the side. I didn’t hear it vibrate, twice. They were FaceTime video calls, too, which was weird. My parents never call via video without a text exchange first. I called back with some confusion but no sense of how much my life was about to change, in just 6 minutes.
I greeted my parents, both in frame, anxious looking. My mom asked if I was sitting down. I knew the news would be bad, but I couldn’t comprehend what it could be. Both of them were there in the video. I complied and sat down. With no preamble, she told me my sister’s partner had found her unresponsive in bed that morning and tried to do CPR but that my sister was dead.
I can remember her words verbatim, so I knew I heard them. But I didn’t feel them. I simply could not superimpose my reality with the words she said. It wasn’t surreal or an out-of-body experience. It was just like the part of my mind that ascribes real-world meaning to the things I’m told wasn’t clocked in for work yet. I stared at my phone, at my parents. I am pretty sure I asked, “what?” in a clearly rhetorical way.
And then the overthinking kicked in, big time. Why wasn’t I upset? I should be upset. I better respond upset. “Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. Obscuring my face would help me hide that my reaction wasn’t appropriate. You should be sad. You should be crying. Why aren’t you responding the right way? I felt my face start to pinch in the way it does when you try not to cry. I felt tears well in my eyes. Was I forcing this crying? Or was some deep, subconscious part of me bringing up that well of despair I wasn’t consciously ready to confront yet?
My parents told me to get there as quickly as I could and that they were haphazardly loading the car. It would be a 5-hour drive for them. It would be a 18-hour international journey for me. We ended the phone call and I sat, stunned and lost.
Getting home was a logistical nightmare. It required me to notify multiple people at my workplace and then set a bunch of administrative tasks in motion. Within an hour, news had spread to people I didn’t want knowing. I got text messages and phone calls from people I didn’t have the mental capacity to handle. It took three hours before I had a plane ticket in hand, but the flight wasn’t until 24 hours after the first missed phone call.
I was left in my apartment to ponder, alone, the injustice of the universe. To berate myself for somehow still not being as sad as I was “supposed” to be. To do an absolutely terrible job of putting things in a suitcase in preparation for the long journey ahead. To will time time pass, since it refused to go for me in reverse.
I scrolled through her social media and dissolved into a blubbering mess. I screen shotted a bunch of content and worked myself into a tizzy over how little we had spoken in the last few months. I made my eyes and nose raw with the low-quality toilet paper I was using as tissue.
I only remember sporadic bursts of time from that Saturday. I didn’t eat. I could barely sleep when the time came. I drank tea and did a lot of mental spiraling.
All night I tossed and turned. Every time I woke up and looked at my phone to see the time, I wondered, “Is this when you died, sister?” We didn’t know anything, except that at 5:16 AM in her time zone, her partner found her.
I was afraid to fall asleep and somehow not wake up for my alarm, despite the fact I had set three separate alarms on two devices to ensure it was not possible to miss them. If one thing I could count on had failed, what was to stop the rest of the world from crumbling in on me also?
At 6:30 AM I got in my taxi to the airport. On the way out, the apartment building’s concierge said the very normal human greeting of, “Good morning, how are you?” I couldn’t contain myself and started crying as I choked out, “I’m not okay.” He looked concerned and worried, but I had to leave. I got in the taxi, sobbing.
I arrived at the airport, barely done crying for the moment. I ate something because that’s what I was supposed to do. I got a tea that was so hot I could not drink it for ages. And I focused as hard as I could on achieving the task at hand—being in motion and getting home to my family.
It was three flights, two tight layovers, and I had to rush during both. I nearly lost my mind when people took their sweet time getting off the plane and couldn’t find where they put their roller bags. Some of us had places to be. Being “that person” on the plane—the impatient passenger acting like a bit of an asshole and pushing ahead without waiting their turn—has forever changed how I’ll think of those people moving forward. I know that I was in crisis and just needed to not be standing still.
At 10:49 PM local time, but 12:49 AM the next day to my body, I finally arrived. I had held it together the entire time, not crying since my taxi ride that morning, on another continent entirely. By the time I made it there, I was too tired to cry. But I fell gratefully into my sister’s partner’s arms as I collected my bag and went out to the car to meet up with my parents.
There was a lot to do, talk about, and feel, but not that night. I was running on three hours of sleep and needed—desperately—to not be conscious. We went to the home my sister and her partner had shared, the place I would be staying, with her partner. My parents hugged me many times before leaving to their own accommodation. I stood in the house, a place I had never been before that moment, and willed my brain to not think about all the things I could confront in the coming days.
I told you this story, in part, because there was something cathartic in it for me, to recount the steps of my old life fading from existence. But I also wanted you to know that in that first 39 hours, I judged myself for my reactions, I had long stretches of forming no memory of what I did, I cried and then did not cry for a long time, I was a menace to fellow travelers, and on and on.
If you were not okay and are now berating yourself for it — please don’t.
If you were okay and think that means you’re broken — please don’t.
When you receive life-altering news that sucker punches you out of nowhere, you’re entitled to whatever reaction you had. It was a valid response. You are not “doing it wrong.” You need yourself more than ever, so please be kind to yourself.
Unmoored Sister 