Month: September 2023

A death bureaucratically closed but forever unclear

On September 12, a clerk somewhere in a state office administratively finalized my sister’s death investigation and triggered an envelope to slowly make its way to our parents. On September 16, it arrived.

There is not a shred of anything resembling empathy on the documents inside. Without preamble, the first line is just: “On September 12, 2023, the Cause and Manner of Death were amended on your late daughter’s death certificate.”

The cause is hardly a cause, though. It’s a medical version of the shrugging emoji, it feels like. “Cause: Idiopathic cardiac dysrhythmia. Onset Interval: seconds.”

Within mere moments, for a reason no one can explain, my sister’s entire being was wiped off the earth. She died because she died.

On September 26, we received the full autopsy report. It contained no additional information that would help me make sense of this tragedy. Sure, it laid out all the parts of my sister that were scrutinized, measured, dispassionately handled, and considered. It also forced me to really think about what physically happened to her body during that process, which was upsetting. And it left me with more questions than answers, which I had been bracing myself for all along, but still found tough to accept.

On paper, this is over. The bureaucracy churns on, and will spit out an updated set of documents that codify her death. In my body, my mind, and my soul, I’ve only lived the first chapter, and there is no “ending.”

Grief is sometimes someone irrationally lashing out

Almost none of us are “good” at grief, and we have to be prepared to ride out not only our own highs and lows, but those of the people around us.

I mentioned previously that our mom had printed and framed 100 photos of my sister for her celebration of life. On the day our parents were departing my sister’s town, mom dropped the news on both me and my sister’s partner that she had done this, in part, with the intention of handing off dozens of them to both him and I. This wasn’t a conversation or discussion⁠—this was an implied imperative. Mom had dad bring in the boxes of photos and asked my sister’s partner if he wanted to look through the photos and choose some. He politely but firmly replied he didn’t need any and had all the photos he wanted already.

Mom got pissed. She thinks I didn’t see her angry crying as she stormed out into the garage to busy herself with helping dad load up the truck, but she was upset. She wouldn’t speak to anyone for a while. The muttered phrase about “erasing my daughter” came up again.

And the point of this anecdote isn’t to litigate the series of communication failures or the interpersonal issues⁠—though I could write much on that. Instead, I am here to say for you as much as for me that when there is an outburst, whether it is your own or someone else, it’s probably not about the thing happening in that moment. And if you have it in you to take that moment to pause and be inquisitive rather than acting, it will go a long way toward diffusing the situation.

I know mom wants to grieve by surrounding herself with my sister. She wants to hoard everything my sister touched or had. She may slowly turn our family home into a museum or shrine of my sister. I also know mom expects others to think and act in a way approximating her own thoughts and actions. So when my sister’s partner did not want those photos, she took it as a rejection of my sister herself. She saw it as a total erasure of my sister, especially on the heels of the clothing donation we had made the day before. Mom doesn’t see just how much of my sister remains in that house, despite the major exodus of things. Because the part of my sister that lives in that house is the adult woman who made a home and a life with her partner, separate from our parents. And that part is less obvious to mom than the part she raised. My mom isn’t wrong for wanting him to want the photos, but it wasn’t fair for her to project meaning onto the refusal, either.

I also know my sister’s partner wants to grieve by speaking into existence the idea that he is “farther along in his grief than everyone else.” He finds comfort in distraction and distance from the pain, though he also keeps many prominent reminders of my sister throughout every room of the house. He takes care of my sister’s cat, an animal that is not the kindest or the best behaved. He parks every day next to my sister’s car, still on the driveway. He indulges in their shared hobbies with her things around him, now unused. He failed to see that my mom needed the validation of him wanting those photos to know that he still very much loved and missed my sister. Though he wants to believe he’s way ahead of the rest of us in processing the loss, he’s still very focused on protecting his own mental wellbeing, and he knew having more photos of her physically around would not be healing. He isn’t wrong for this in any way.

I avoided inserting myself in the situation. I was torn, because I obviously care about my mother, but she didn’t want to speak, and she doesn’t have any interest in having emotional conversations. I also feel an allegiance to supporting my sister’s partner, because I know it would break my sister’s heart if the winds shifted in a way that left it as him vs. the three of us. My sister loved him enough to nearly get to make him my brother-in-law, and so he is definitively family, too. I’m also just tired of constantly feeling like I need to resolve conflict and preempt it when possible. This doesn’t leave time for me to focus on my own grief.

And maybe that’s a lesson I need to learn. I can’t mitigate every moment of interpersonal friction, and it’s okay to step back and focus on myself. Or maybe there isn’t a lesson at all, and the entire moral of the story is death sucks, grief hurts, and there’s no amount of fixing that will fill the hole. 

Decisions about my sister’s earthly possessions

After her celebration of life, we dealt with maybe three quarters of my sister’s things. This, too, was not without conflict.

Since my sister’s death, we had always planned to take a first major pass at dealing with a large percentage of my sister’s things during August, when I was back in the country and after her celebration of life. For three months, her partner more or less lived in the house like it was a time capsule, minus the adjustments we made to the master bedroom⁠—the room that was my sister’s⁠—so her partner could move into that space. Even that was only to shift things around but largely not go through them. I did leave in June with half my carry on full of some clothes and trinkets, to tide me over as I returned to ride out my grief alone abroad.

A few days after her celebration in late August, the four of us started the task. I was anxious about it. Not because of the work itself, but because I strongly suspected we would encounter friction among the four of us. A lifetime of being the daughter of my parents had taught me what to expect from them. And now, without the partner diffusion and buffering force of my sister, I was left alone to navigate. I felt, too, that I had to help protect the interests of her partner, because it could be really, really easy for him to feel pushed aside because he wasn’t blood. He hadn’t married her, despite their eventual plans to do that. No matter how vocal our parents were about how he was part of the family, I knew he would be this “other” if things got sticky.

I very much wanted to avoid things getting sticky.

It started out simply. Anything of hers that related to her life before she met her partner had no sentimental value to him, and so it went with our parents. We hit snags even here, though. A random, small piggy bank my sister had on a shelf had a lot of coins in it. I popped off the bottom to remove the coins, thinking that they should go with all the other random money we had found throughout the house. Our mom freaked out and demanded that I put them back “because she put them there.” It made no sense, and yet I understood perfectly, even if I disagreed. I put the coins back and endured the awkward, stony silence, with the exception of the chinking of the coins as I returned them.

I will admit, at times, it was briefly fun, remembering an object, seeing a photo, finding something that delighted one of us to know she had held onto. A fair number of her things had never been unboxed after she and her partner moved into the house they were in two years ago, so we didn’t even open those things up⁠—the boxes went straight with our parents for our mom to sift through at a slower pace later.

The lion’s share of the work would be my sister’s clothes. She had a lot of clothes. This was true for three reasons:

  1. She loved buying new clothes.
  2. She never got rid of clothes.
  3. She had recently experienced significant medicine-related weight gain, requiring her to keep buying new clothes in larger sizes.

The month before her celebration, I had put a lot of time into researching what local charity would make best use of her clothes, shoes, and accessories. It was gut wrenching enough to know we would be putting them into black trash bags and carting them off somewhere in the pack of a truck. I needed to know they would matter to whomever received them on the other end. With the blessing of our parents and her partner, I selected a place I think she would be proud to support.

I cherry picked things I wanted and would wear. While there were fond memories wrapped up in so much of her wardrobe, I had to tell myself I could only take what I truly wanted, would wear, and could use. Our parents took anything that was tied to her life⁠ and the things she had done⁠—culinary school, high school activities, etc.⁠—and our mom also took some items specifically because she hoped to make pillows or a quilt or something else sentimental with them. Her partner held onto band tees, because going to shows was one of their primary hobbies and music is how they found their way together in the first place, and a small variety of other specific clothing items that were sentimental. After we had all taken what we could justify, the rest went into bags. I estimated we donated 600 items of clothing.

As that task progressed, though, our mom got quietly more and more agitated. I asked her at several points if we needed to stop or if we should finish the sorting but not go through with the donation. She unconvincingly told me it was “fine,” which most people know is a universal sign that it isn’t. When we had gone through all of the clothes, shoes, and accessories, her partner and I then loaded up his truck and took them to donate. 

I stood for a moment outside the house, alone, looking at the large number of bags in the truck bed and felt overwhelmed with emotion. I hated that we were doing this. I wished desperately that, instead of what was really happening, I was visiting home and helping my sister purge her closet for the sake of improving her aesthetic environment. I wished I was able to reassure her that larger clothes did not correlate to diminished beauty or worth. I wished I could have reminisced with her about the clothes⁠—the things she had gotten from my own closet, the things we had bought together, the lovely things she had bought for herself that I had never seen. Instead, I stood looking at massive bags destined for elsewhere and metaphorically stared down the gaping hole still very prominently left in my life.

We quickly did the donation and returned. Mom was more upset, but pretending not to be. It didn’t matter⁠—I know how to read those subtleties. My sister’s partner and I cooked a quick dinner for the four of us while mom began to throw passive aggressive comments out about how “this was just all so fast” and we were “erasing [her] daughter.” These comments weren’t really directed at anyone, but they were meant for everyone’s ears.

How do you respond to something you know is an emotional barb from someone who believes they aren’t ever in the wrong in a way that won’t cause more drama? I opted to gently emphasize how much of her clothes we didn’t part with before steering conversation elsewhere. After eating, mom and dad left earlier than they normally had been (they were staying somewhere else, because the house is small). Mom declared she felt like she was “encroaching on [us]” and cited that only my sister’s partner and I had gone to do the donation. I saw red for a moment, because I had specifically asked if our parents wanted to come or not, and mom had definitively said “I don’t think we need to.”

This never got resolved⁠—just pushed under the rug⁠—and added itself to the long list of way that I have felt my grief over the loss of my sister has been subtly disenfranchised and discounted. I wasn’t also hurting, I was just causing pain to our mother. I wasn’t suffering the life-altering effects of the loss, I was just getting in the way of others’ grieving. Even now, nearly four months later, it is baffling to me how siblings can be some of the closest immediate family members and yet so easily overlooked. If you find yourself wondering how it feels, I tried to explain just that in this earlier post about what it meant to lose my sibling.

The truth is it changes all the time, growing with, in, and around me as I figure out who I am in a world I never wanted to walk alone.

Scattering some of my sister in the sea

I didn’t know what to expect when we scattered some of her ashes, and I doubt I could have prepared myself anyway.

When my sister was cremated, her ashes got divided in four: two small urns, that reside with our parents and her partner, and two small “scattering tubes,” which we planned to take to her two favorite places, in two separate states, one after each celebration of life we would hold. 

Three days after the first celebration, we piled into a car together and made the three-hour road trip. We went to the coastal town she lived for two and a half years while she went to culinary school and did her externship. The oceanside place where she truly blossomed into an adult, shined in her chosen career path, and spent time at her favorite place⁠—the seaside. I had only been there once, for her graduation in 2014. This would be just one of many, many people, places, and things I didn’t truly know because I had built myself a far-flung life abroad.

We stopped at her all-time favorite restaurant, a sushi joint. We made sure to enjoy her favorite roll. I brought the ashes in their tube in my bag. I couldn’t leave her in the car. When I picked up the tube, I was surprised by the heft of the ashes that represented a quarter of her physical body. I had a backpack purse, so I decided I was giving her a piggy back ride that day. I hadn’t given her a piggy back ride since we were children.

We then went to the first of her two favorite parts of the coastline. I had come here with her and our parents when she graduated. The four of us walked the length of the beach. Her partner told some stories about the many trips the two of them had taken out here. We eventually picked a place where we would spread half the ashes. Until this point, I had felt heavy but wasn’t specifically sad. But the moment the tube was open and I watched them hit the water and quickly fade into nothingness in sea, I started sobbing. It was too perfect of a visual metaphor⁠—there and then suddenly gone. We all stood there for a while in silence, regarding the waves and the endless horizon. A heavy fog rolled in as we made our way back to the car.

The four of us then drove a couple miles up the coastline to my sister’s all-time favorite place, a rocky state park area that had a lot of wildlife, too. I had never been there, and that realization struck me hard. As I have done many, many times since her death, I fantasized about standing there with her, letting her show me this beautiful place, instead of being there for the first time to let a literal part of her go. We sat at a lookout for a while. Because I had looked through many of her photos, including photos from this period of her life, I recognized these rocky formations, despite never having been there myself. I knew I stood where she had once stood, because the angles lined up. Her partner found the perfect moment to spread the rest of the ashes when no one else was around. I did not cry this time. Once again, fog began to roll in after we spread her ashes. This isn’t uncommon on the coast, but I think we all also wanted to find meaning in it. Grief does that. We spent as long as we could justify at that location, too, before we had to start the three-hour trip back. 

I had hoped to feel some greater sense of peace or finality after this step. I don’t. I still feel sad, unsettled. But I do feel like I now have two concrete places to go be, every chance I get to visit our home state, and sit with my sister. So that’s something, right?