family conflict – Unmoored Sister

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.

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:

She loved buying new clothes.
She never got rid of clothes.
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.

How do three opinions about a celebration of life become one event?

I had a lot of stress leading up to my sister’s celebration of life, but somehow we avoided the worst of it, and the event was nice.

My sister’s celebration of life was 99 days after she died. I selfishly pushed for a date around that timeframe, because it was the next time I could be home. It served other purposes, too. Firstly, none of us were ready or able to do something in those first few weeks. Her only “service” was a very, very small set of invites to her closest friends to say their farewells, but we had no funeral or formal event before her cremation. Additionally, she and her partner have many friends from online gaming communities who live all across the country; this gave people enough forewarning to arrange for travel. (I’m gratified to say half a dozen people did make the long, expensive journeys.)

Slowly over the three months of time, our parents, her partner, and I worked on small pieces of the puzzle. We started from an important place: my sister did not like big, formal, or stuffy events. Her celebration of life should reflect her, and therefore we wanted it to be laid back, simple, and fun. In May, we all agreed to this. In June, we continued to agree on this. In July, this was still the plan, but there were some inklings that it was getting a little out of the narrow lane we had defined. In the August lead-up to the celebration, I spent a lot of emotional energy on trying to bridge the growing chasm between what my sister’s partner wanted and what our mom wanted.

With the benefit of retrospection, I can say with certainty that my sister’s partner wanted to honor the person my sister was at the moment she left this world. He wanted to throw a low-key event that she would have enjoyed attending. Our mom, in contrast, wanted an event that showcased every facet of who my sister had ever been. She wanted a celebration of life and a funeral and a memorial and a museum-like atmosphere all rolled into one. These hugely different intentions are indicative of how mismatched many parts of this grief journey have been among the four of us. If anyone ever asks me for advice on navigating this part of life, I will definitely have recommendations borne from the bumps along our way.

I will admit, I ultimately called in a ringer. My best friend, who cares a lot about making things aesthetically pleasing, has a lot of experience in conflict resolution, and is unabashedly on team Sarah, flew across the country to be there to help. With mom’s permission, I set her up to be an event coordinator of sorts, freeing up the family from having to be in charge of a lot of things. I made sure mom explained her vision to my friend, and I made sure I explained in private the nuances of what would and would not be acceptable. My best friend also knows my sister’s partner, because I brought him into a social fold back in July, so she knew and cared about expending energy to not only meet our mom’s demands but also to execute as much of his desires as possible. Without her there, I would have absolutely burned myself out trying to prevent conflict.

Part of our mom’s vision included bringing box after box after box of what I took to calling artifacts or relics. Objects from throughout my sister’s life. She wanted them out on display for people to look at. My sister’s partner was upset by this, especially stressed that this much stuff would create a physically oppressive atmosphere and chase people away quickly. We both agreed that my sister would have been mortified to see this, too. But the thing I’ve learned about family dynamics is they only get exacerbated when you add grief. There would be no dissuading mom.

Another part of mom’s vision was to have 100 printed, framed photos, representing the 100 days since she died. Mom had told me a few days earlier, and when she asked me if it was crazy, I told her, “We throw these events to contend with difficult milestones because this is how we make meaning and find something approximating peace for ourselves.” I meant it then, and I meant it now. I did not know, however, that mom had not run any of this by my sister’s partner. I also did not know that the photos were sometimes quite large. So we were all surprised when the photos got unloaded, and this was also an upsetting moment for my sister’s partner.

Somehow, my best friend used her myriad skills to help mom edit the number of things and create an event that I am so, so relieved to say was a nearly ideal blend of the expectations everyone had, as divergent as they were. Mom had a moment at the beginning to say some short words before the event evolved into an outdoor hang out. The space we picked was large enough and had enough picnic tables that we were able to create spaces for eating, hanging out, and remembrance. We spread photos throughout the venue, so no one was confronted with too many photos at once. The catered BBQ food was delicious, and people noticed and appreciated the candies and sides we brought or made specifically because they were all emblematic of my sister. Our mom got the peaceful satisfaction of seeing people peruse the history of my sister’s life and learn something new about her through them. I had the chance to gift people the pins I designed as mementos of her essence. My sister’s partner got to see the friends around him in his life that were showing up for him, again and again. Everyone was able to come together and share stories and let a little bit of the pressure of their grief out, though it also brought back up pain that many had worked on pushing aside.

Was it perfect? I don’t even know how to answer that, especially for an event I desperately wished we were not throwing, because I wanted to undo the tragedy that precipitated it. But it was lovely, it was an important moment in this sad timeline, and there was not a dramafest. So I am going to consider it a huge success.