Sarah

Thresholds

I’ve been dreading the end of 2023, because 2023 was the last year that held some of my sister’s joy. I’ve fruitlessly imagined ways to freeze time or turn it back or defy reality and physics to undo something impossible to undo. And now, as I write, there are approximately 14 hours until the year that will be on documents and timestamps and anything else dated will numerically separate me more from her.

I hate it.

I haven’t been able to figure out how to succinctly explain why. Recently, I settled on the notion that passing from 2023 to 2024 feels like passing through a metaphorical doorway of some kind. And I think part of me is afraid that with this doorway comes the risk of losing her more. When I was still in undergraduate psychology, I remember learning about the “doorway effect.” When we pass through literal doorways into new spaces, we’re apparently more prone to forget memories from the past space. Because they’re less likely to be relevant. Less tied to your current reality.

I can’t handle that idea.

If I could sit in the 2023 room for longer, I would. I don’t know how long it would take me to feel ready to walk out of it, but I know that today isn’t that day. Except I don’t have the ability to slow time or ask it to let me off the ride⁠—just for a while.

I’ve unwillingly already stepped across many thresholds this year. Since May 20, 2023 I’ve entered many rooms that I never wanted to. Something about this one, though, this change of scenery that will be surrounded with celebration around the world, it hurts differently. I haven’t decided where I will be or what I will do for this New Year’s Eve. In some ways, it doesn’t matter to me at all. At the same time, it feels like it matters the most.

The first holidays in The After

In the seven months I’ve been without my sister, a lot of firsts have come and gone.

Halloween (her favorite).

Thanksgiving.

My birthday.

Our mom’s birthday.

Christmas looms large on the horizon now, and I can’t stop myself from sort of dreading my trip home. My trip to our family home where I’ve never spent a single Christmas without her. I don’t know how to prepare myself to bear what is to come. Christmas, then the new year, then her birthday shortly after… this never-ending cascade of occasions that should be happy but instead feel muted, dull, and sometimes tiresome.

I think it’s been hard for people around me to understand why I’m not filled with holiday spirit OR filled with despair. More often than not, it’s an apathy toward festive things right now. I think some part of me knows if I treat these big moments as just another Tuesday, I can handle crossing the threshold from The First ___ Without Her to the next room, labeled The Rest of the ____ Without Her.

I am doing things differently because I don’t know what else to do. I bought decorations (Halloween and Christmas) because they made me happy and would have made her happy. I have tried to find events and traditions I’d never done before so I could mark a year of excruciating newness with some memories of something good. None of it feels like enough, but nothing will, I guess.

Warning: Small things will sweep your feet out from under you

Today I was studying vocabulary for the language I’m learning for work, as I do every day. It has been months since the family vocabulary upset me. I took it in stride when we learned “to pass away.” I made it through difficult classroom discussions that the teachers didn’t know would pierce my heart. Hell, I even survived breaking down in the language director’s office a week and a half ago when she forgot that I had taken time off early in the course to attend an event in my sister’s honor, and therefore she asked probing family questions trying to elicit language from me. It was totally innocent, but it left me wrecked in its wake.

I would say on the the whole I am getting stronger; I am better at recognizing when I am losing my grip on the grief and can take myself out of a situation in anticipation of it. I can handle pricklier interactions more often.

But today, sitting in the cafe at work and studying vocab on my computer, the flashcard for “siblings” ripped me open in a way I wasn’t expecting. In this language, the word is a combination of the words you use to refer to older brother, older sister, and then younger sibling. That final syllable stayed in my mind as I left the flashcard app to come here. It’s still on my mind now. A syllable I never got to call her. Another way to represent a thing I had but lost. A complicated person who is in my life but is not alive any longer.

So here I am, sitting in a room of a few hundred people, trying not to be noticed as I try to pull myself together. The work day’s only halfway over, after all.

Grief sucks.

The idea of right when nothing’s okay: my sister’s partner is moving on.

Anyone who has read a fair number of my posts here will know that my sister’s partner⁠—former partner⁠, I need to get used to that nomenclature—has been a major character in my journey. A friend, a confidant, a brother. For the first months he seemed like the only person who came close to understanding my version of this grief, and I was thankful for his presence in my life.

I’ve avoided putting words on the page, so to speak, about many of the things that have happened about him specifically, out of respect for his journey and our bond. But it’s become clear he has not had this same mindset when it comes to me or the family, so in the name of being honest with my readers, I want to lay out the trajectory of our relationship since my sister’s untimely death to maintain the candor I’ve committed myself to having here.

My sister died on May 20, approximately six and a half years into her relationship with her partner, who I will call Andy for the sake of using a name. (His name is not actually Andy.) During the time it took me to travel from abroad to home, he and I were in constant contact. We were each other’s rock in the first weeks, too. I stayed in the house with him, we held each other and cried on the couch while letting TV show after TV show run in the background so it wouldn’t be quiet. We talked about life, death, and the futility of it all. We started sleeping on the couch⁠—each of us taking up half of the U-shaped furniture⁠—because retiring to separate rooms felt oppressive. We forged a hybrid friendship and deeper familial bond that I was grateful for, even more so when I had to return to my job abroad.

We were in incessant contact all through June and July and early August. I mean texting throughout the day, sending voice notes, talking on the phone for hours, even though sometimes that talking was just existing together on an open line. I put other people in my life slightly aside to make sure I was available to him. He did the same for me. I brought him into a virtual social group of mine, wanting him to stay connected to me and to have more bonds with people he would like. During a late-night phone call in early August, he dropped the emotional bomb on me that he “felt it was time he started looking for companionship.” It broke my heart. My sister’s celebration of life hadn’t even happened yet, and he was talking about finding someone else to hold, to confide in, to build life with. He couldn’t deal with the hole in his heart for even three months?

I took it poorly, but did not let Andy know. I talked to a lot of friends and found that people are very, very divided on the issue of when it is okay for someone who has lost a partner to move on. In that way, I’ve matured, I think, as I realize now there are two major camps⁠—the people who cannot fathom having to be so alone at a time of intense grief, and the people that feel plunging into that painful aloneness is their duty. These two types of people do not seem to understand the other. I will let each of you decide for yourselves what is right. I don’t have moral authority, and I am biased anyway.

I went home again in August, when we dealt with many of my sister’s effects and held her celebration of life. During that time, Andy confided in my best friend that he was deeply attracted to me and wanted to be with me. She asked a lot of questions and advised him that if he really meant it, it should take time. She told me everything, and I had several conversations with her as well as my counselor about this and why I did not want to be with him⁠—not like that. But I opted not to deal with this directly and to just allow him to decide what he would or wouldn’t tell me. After all, he had talked to my friend in confidence looking for advice. He hadn’t confessed anything to me, so there was no reason to change my actions, either.

In September, Andy and I traveled together to attend a concert he and she were supposed to go to. I stood where she should have stood and enjoyed music⁠—something that brought the pair of them together. In the middle, the lead singer of the band talked about how it’s okay to enjoy yourself even when you’re going through hard times or aren’t okay, and Andy and I broke down in the midst of the crowd. I am glad I went. It also hurt. I met friends she had in another city and I did things she would have liked to do. I also was on edge the whole time wondering if Andy was going to do something, try something. He did not.

I went back to our home state one more time in October to decorate for her favorite holiday, Halloween. I sought advice from friends about how to handle a possible confession and what I knew. He still had not confessed anything to me, though he had throughout the months said things about my appearance, my suitability to date, my intrinsic value, my awesomeness… never quite attributed to him, but in aggregate too much to ignore. I didn’t know what to expect. He was weird around me, bringing up topics about dating and what his future held, but nothing happened still.

And then, shortly after I left, Andy dumped something new on me: he had someone he was dating. They had started seeing each other in July. This hit hard, because I realized how long he had been outright lying. The “friends” in a town 45 minutes from his house were not “friends” but rather a singular “friend.” He hadn’t waited even two months to seek someone out. And he had decided not to tell me, when we said we were telling each other everything. And he had told my best friend in August, six weeks after he started dating this new person, that he wanted to be with me. That I made him feel like no one else had, that talking to me was incredible, on and on.

I took it in stride, warned him not to fall victim to someone who wants to manipulate or “fix” him in his vulnerable state, and wished him well. What was I supposed to do? He’s a young man with a life ahead of him, and he wasn’t going to hide away for the next six decades single and alone. My sister wouldn’t have wanted that for him, anyway.

Then, a couple weeks ago, he called me to ask for advice about his relationship, because it wasn’t going well. It specifically wasn’t going well because his girlfriend claimed that I, Sarah, was masterminding their whole relationship, dictating the shots. Why? Because she wanted to be “Facebook official” and he complied, but did not put the date they met. He said it was out of respect for me, for the family. Except I later got him to admit that he was ashamed of what everyone would think, ashamed of how it looked. I was a convenient scapegoat, and I am now the nemesis in her eyes.

They were fighting about that and then about many other petty things. Neither of them, in my unprofessional opinion, is ready to take on the project that the other represents, but it is not my relationship or my choice. (Because, contrary to the narrative, I’m not a puppet master.) In this most recent conversation, I told him I was hurt by his lies and that he had damaged my trust in him. I said I recognized he needed to live his life, and that I hoped he would find a way to do so with less shadiness going forward. I told him I didn’t know what the long-term impact of this was on our relationship. He cried. He apologized, mostly. He told me he had been holding a lot of guilt. It’s hard to want to comfort someone when you also want them to feel exactly how they feel.

Andy then asked to have back some of what we had before⁠—he wanted a weekly standing time to call and catch up, to talk, to maintain our bond. Except that bond is not the same for me, and I found… I didn’t want to commit to it at that level anymore. I don’t know what I want from him at all. Thinking about him, I am filled with the anxiety of the pain I know my parents will feel⁠—they still don’t know any of this, though based on comments my mom made yesterday, I think she suspects something.

Can this fractured family unit make it to May 2024 when we have my sister’s second celebration and scatter the other part of her ashes? Maybe.

Will Andy choose to stay with this woman because she was the first one to make him feel a little better in the wake of this grief? I couldn’t begin to guess.

Is there a way for me to trust Andy again? Time will tell.

And sitting in this type of uncertainty is, I have come to realize, one of the biggest challenges for me. The uncertainty coupled with the lack of a moral “right” answer is nearly unbearable.

Such is life, I’ve come to find out.

What have six months done to me?

I write this on the six-month milestone of my sister’s last night on this earth. I can’t help but feel a heavy mix of emotions as I consider the weight of my responsibility to live life well, because I currently still can. Six months ago she had a wonderful night, but she did not know it was the last one. Six months ago she went to bed, mind full of the things she would do the next day. Six months ago she was the baby sister I could hug and call and share memes with.

Six months ago I wasn’t the person I am now, either.

I was more type A. I was just coming around the corner of what I thought was a major breakthrough in openly telling the people in my life what they meant to me. I was stressed and letting work take more than its fair share of my time. But I was also looking forward to August and a new chapter; I would be back in my home country, closer to friends and family. It was going to be a great upcoming year.

And then the world fell apart underneath me. I’ve somehow stumbled forward for six months. I’ve sort of recovered a large part of the things that used to define the “me” I recognize, but she is not all back. I don’t think she ever will be. I’ve lost my little sister. And I’ve lost the big sister I was, too. I’ve lost the only shape of my family I recognize.

I no longer know how to answer simple questions. How many people are in my family? Do I have any siblings? What tense do I use when I talk about her now? It tears my heart each time.

The answers make people uncomfortable:

There are three living people in my family, but there were and should be four.

I have a sibling, and she is dead.

My sister is many things to me, but grammatically speaking, I should talk about how she was because there is no more is-ing possible from her.

In six months, I’ve made remarkable progress toward being “okay,” whatever that means. In six months, though, I’ve often found myself back in a profound pit of despair. Never quite as deep as the first weeks, but sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. People tell me the next six months will also be challenging in new ways. I am just so tired. I don’t know if I have it in me to face more challenges. But I have to have it in me to keep living each day to the best of my ability, because I can, and she can’t.