Tag: the future

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.

Now there’s no one that understands

Today I had a (thankfully private) meltdown over something that wasn’t worthy of that level of drama, but it reminded me that the person I would have turned to⁠—my sister⁠—is gone.

My sister’s celebration of life is in 11 days.

Our mom has, in part, kept herself occupied by thinking through the minutiae of the casual outdoor event. I know she needs to do this to keep herself sane. I know this stresses out my sister’s partner, who is focused on keeping himself afloat. I find myself playing this weird intermediary role to try to keep the peace, but it tears me up inside. Because for our entire lives, if something sparked outrage or frustration within the family, my sister and I would turn to one another. Originally in person, in conspiratorial conversation later, and then once we got older, via messages.

Today I needed her, and she wasn’t there. Because now she is dead. And I am alone.

I’m not alone-alone. I have friends. Our parents. My sister’s partner and I talk frequently. But I am alone in the way that counted, in the way I needed to not be alone. When I needed the only person in this world who could have understood why I got so frustrated as I helped our mom put together a printed handout for the celebration. When I needed my little sister who would validate my frustration, share a recent story of her own, and make it all okay.

I couldn’t distract myself with the task, either, because the task had me staring at photos of her. Her full legal name. The two dates with the hyphen between, focusing so much on the day she first lived and the day she died, eliding all that came between. A thank you from the family, just the four of us where there should have been five. (Her partner is family until he decides otherwise.)

My sobs were for the fact that no matter how many stories I tell, no one will ever have grown up with me. This magical, unspoken intuition born from a shared childhood, shared home, shared parents was ripped from me, and all I have left is the memory of how wonderful it was to have. I did not recognize how great sisterhood was until I lost it. I will spend the rest of my life confronting situations that stab my heart as I realize they would have been better or easier with her.

She would get it, she would completely understand me and this immense challenge, if only she were here for me to talk to.

“Wearing your dead sibling’s clothes”

That’s the Google search I made on June 14, just 25 days after my sister died. I already wanted to wear her clothes⁠—many of them⁠—but I turned to the internet to tell me if this was too taboo to consider.

I turned to the internet to tell me how messed up other people thought it was. But I had already decided on migrating about a third of her wardrobe into mine and wearing things, unabashedly.

So maybe the next grieving sibling who googles the same thing I did will come upon this explanation for why I (with a few caveats) think it is not only okay but beautiful to integrate the clothing of those we lost into our wardrobes and our lives.

Her closet has eras: high school, late teen deciding who she wanted to be, young adult grappling with her body size changing and not liking it, and independent woman who leaned in entirely to what she liked and built her life around it. It was only standing in her closet and observing these eras that I realized how much of her most recent era held echoes of our shared past and of influences I may have had on her that I never knew before.

Some clothes in that closet we had bought together⁠—going to a mall to get a coffee, walk and talk about life, and buy clothing was something we had done together since we were young teens. When I began to live far away, we still did it when I would visit home, calling them “sister dates.” For her birthday during the still-pandemic times of 2021, I sent her a nostalgia-filled email conjuring the idea of a mall, asked her to play the same YouTube video of mall background sounds as I did, and we hung out on a video call for a few hours digitally shopping. I sent her favorite pieces as birthday gifts.

Some clothes I had never seen in real life, but we had talked about. The dress she wore to one of her best friend’s weddings a few years back⁠—we discussed over messages what shoes and accessories would work best. The platform boots she bought⁠—only after asking my opinion, because I had worn that style of boots back in high school⁠—to be able to see better at shows stood in the corner. Dozens of shirts from events and concerts she had enjoyed with her partner. I was peeking in on a slice of her life through a hazy window.

Some clothes I had given her from my own wardrobe at various points throughout life. There was something sweet and also saddening about the possibility they would find their way back to me again. She hadn’t wanted to get rid of these clothes, for whatever reason. I hope it was, in part, because it was a connection with me.

As her partner and I, only two weeks after her death, dealt with the less sentimental stuff (the only things we could bear to work on) and I set aside a few things I wanted, I asked myself: Is it okay to wear the clothing of your dead sibling?

I don’t know. I still don’t know. But how can anyone tell me what is or isn’t okay in a world where a 28-year-old in perfectly fine health can go to bed and never wake up again?

In grief, there are times nothing is okay.

But I definitely could not handle the thought of boxing and bagging up every article of clothing she had ever worn⁠—every piece she had selected for herself, every item that defined her style⁠—and dropping them off at Goodwill like normal, everyday discards. If she had been alive and sorting through her things, none of it would have mattered to me. But to just get rid of everything would be a final loss. Almost an erasure that I was not willing to participate in.

I sat sorting through her socks and thinking about other articles of clothing she had. Things I could imagine myself wearing on dates I wish I could tell her about, to work events I would forever want to recount for her later, on trips we should have been taking together.

I will never be able to have my sister back. Our story is over, and it lasted just shy of three decades. But the story I can tell with threads of her life woven throughout it is ongoing.

Some people have spoken about it being like a hug from the person whose clothing it was. I have not yet felt that way myself, but it is a lovely thought. I see this as the final time one of us will be able to go to the other’s closet and nab a coveted piece to wear for a perfect outfit. An end cap to a sisterly ritual we had for half our lives.

Another thought occurred to me recently: What do you say when someone compliments something you’re wearing that belonged to your dead sister?

I have decided my approach varies, depending upon who says it and what I feel I can handle at that moment. But there are three responses, all of which come with a soft smile as I think of the meaning of clothes between us: “thanks”; “thanks, my sister picked it out”; and “thanks, it used to be my sister’s.”

To anyone also contemplating wearing someone’s clothing, I have two things I think you should consider.

First, while as a general rule, I don’t think it’s wrong to wear the clothing, this is a negotiation between you and the people who loved the person who is gone. I will not, for example, be wearing the dress my sister graduated in or the shirt she wore many times at work where she and her partner fell in love. Some objects become relics when those we love die, and it isn’t fair to insist on wearing something that will actively cause pain to someone else just to make ourselves feel better.

Second, I think it is important not to lose ourselves in someone else’s style⁠—even someone as beloved as a deceased sibling. In my case, my sister’s fashion sense had drifted very much toward mine recently, but I will still be very careful to select only the clothes that reflect my own taste. I am still me. My identity is distinct from hers, and just as I cannot wear something to cause others pain, I cannot alter myself in a way that will cause pain to myself. Tread lightly when you pick⁠—you want to treasure what you take, and be sure not to bury yourself in the process.

Author’s note: In my googling, I came across this blog post about the same topic. Maddie’s candid description left an impact on me and I wanted to make sure anyone who came upon mine would also find hers. Peace and love to you.

I wanted to blow up my life

I didn’t expect my sister’s death to make me want to burn my own life to the ground.

Tied up in my job is my housing, my healthcare, my retirement plans, and my actual career. Leaving my job would mean not being allowed back in. I had worked toward this job since 2014, when I figured out it was my dream job, and I achieved it in 2018. So when I tell you I wanted to walk away from my job, I’m telling you a major part of me wanted to destroy what I had built for myself, irrevocably.

Moving to the town she called home would mean living somewhere I already know I would never feel I “belonged.” I would never find a job using my degrees or my talents. I would give up disposable income, international opportunities, career satisfaction, and being surrounded by people who more or less see the world in a way that jives with how I do.

And yet, knowing this, I still wanted it ⁠— desperately. I wanted to run away from everything that had been true before her death and steep myself in the scraps of her presence where she last lived. I wanted to get to know the people she had loved in the community she built around herself. And I suspect part of me wanted to atone for having chosen to roam so far from home by chaining myself as close to where she stood as I could.

It has now been about two months since she died. I have not yet blown up my life, and the desire mostly receded. What has remained, though, is a new sense of being unsettled in my choices. I am staying the course I had charted for myself, for now. But I now have a voice in the back of my mind reminding me of the true cost of the distance and my decisions. That voice whispers to me not to feel too secure in the 5-, 10-, and 20-year horizon line. It tells me I didn’t even realize before that I felt safe to stray across the globe because my sister was an anchor that could tie me to home.

I don’t know where home is anymore. Ten years ago, I stopped living in the place I called home my entire life. Home is a complicated concept, made more difficult by the fact that my parents ⁠— the only remaining relatives with whom I have a relationship ⁠— now are rethinking their own next chapter. The state that is woven in my DNA might suddenly be only part of our pasts. The home we grew up in will be sold. The streets we drove, the buildings we walked, the places we ate will all just be distant memories. I haven’t entirely lost that home, not yet, but I feel like I am already mourning its disappearance, too.

And it’s only now, as I sit here and write, that I consider I didn’t have to make the conscious choice to blow up my life, because my sister’s death already set off a chain reaction that I can’t control. It’s already happening. I’m just sheltering in place until I can assess what is left in the aftermath.

What it meant to lose my sibling

The meaning of this loss changes⁠—daily. I lost my oldest friendship, my closest confidant, and the only person with whom there were no misunderstandings about where I came from and how I became who I was.

In the time that has passed since I lost my sister, I have repeatedly been confronted with the painful truth that many people do not understand what it means to lose a sibling, especially in young adulthood.

You can find some limited articles online about how siblings are considered “disenfranchised grievers,” and how their grief if often overshadowed by parents, partners, or children. There are some pieces that try to give an explanation of what losing a sibling is like, but I found many of them were about children losing child siblings or about older adults losing their older sibling. As I sat in my early 30s having lost my sibling in her 20s, none of it quite rang true. So let me tell you what was true for me and my sibling loss.

I lost a fundamental part of my past, present, and future.

You siblings ⁠— for better or worse ⁠— are often the only people who grew up the way you did. With the same people, in the same places, sharing the same shorthand understanding of the daily growth of the you that exists now. Your siblings are a unique promise of someone who knows your past, walks with you in your present, and is a structural piece of what should be your future. I had always assumed she would be with me through it all.

To lose that is to lose a part of yourself. The only other person who had some of the same memories as you. The only other person who could understand what you were getting at in just a couple words, because you shared the same lived experiences over a lifetime. I lost a critical presence I counted on for important life milestones ⁠— my hypothetical wedding someday, a major career achievement, the eventual loss of our parents, just to name a few. I lost the sense of security I had in my own life and future.

I had to realize that my incorrect judgments of where to devote my time had cost me the only time I would ever have with her.

We did not speak as much as I now wish we did. Weeks would often elapse between contact. I hadn’t been able to see or hug her since four and a half months before she died. At that time, knowing only what I knew then, this was natural. We were building our careers, our lives, our homes. She was happy, loved, and finding success. I was thousands of miles away, busy but achieving career goals and looking forward to being much closer to home in just a few months.

We were supposed to have so much more time.

Instead, in the aftermath of her loss, I beat myself up over all the meaningless ways I spent my time instead of reaching out. (Frankly, I’m still working on letting go of the regret and the guilt and the anger.) I wish I could retroactively unwaste the hours I worked too long or the times I went out to a mediocre meal with people I didn’t really enjoy because “you never know if it might turn out to be a good time” or the times I opted to go vacation somewhere else that wasn’t home. I would take all of those hours and offer them to her, instead.

It has fundamentally changed the way I want to spend the time I now have. My social circle has grown smaller, but the relationships I maintain are far more profound. I am very judicious

I was forced to become somebody else, and I don’t know her yet.

I’m still discovering all the insidious ways this is true. I have been thrust into “only child”hood unwillingly, but must also carry the flame of my sister, because she is dead, not erased.

How do you explain that to someone who innocently asks, “Do you have any siblings?” In my case, it turns out to tell the poor taxi driver you “had” a sister and then promptly start crying when he catches the past tense and gently asks what you mean. But I know there will be many more times in my years ahead that I will have to either say, “No, it’s just me” or, if that hurts too much, obliquely say, “I have a younger sister,” and hope we can leave it at that. Either way, I will end up lying in order to spare someone else the discomfort.

Who do I have to be now that all of our parents’ hopes and dreams are pinned squarely to me? And how do I have to reframe my entire career trajectory now that my sister, the one who stayed closer to home and was there for our parents while I was far, far away, is gone? As I write this today, I don’t know if her death also means I will have to change my career. The entire plan of my life hangs in a hazy state of confusion, now.

I lost all desire to pursue many of my hobbies, and in most cases, that desire hasn’t come back. My drive at work is greatly diminished. Many of the ways people would describe who I was in the Before are no longer true in the After. It is like I don’t even know myself anymore. And that’s terrifying.

I lost my ability to trust the future.

I think this is the impact that will plague me the longest. If one day a healthy 20-something can go to bed and never wake up again, how can I trust anything in this life? How can I make plans for the future? Why do I spend as much time as I do at work? How do I motivate myself to do mundane things that feel pointless if I my time left is numbered in hours instead of decades?

I can also feel the way this is seeping into my thought processes. I would love to find a life partner to share the time I have with. But what if I only have a few years left and I pick wrong? I want to pursue writing as a side profession, but I have no intentions of leaving my main job. What if I squander the only time I might have? My job takes me to many places far from home. While I still love that, I now also feel a gnawing fear of all the things I’m giving up with friends and family by being so far away. Is my career worth the cost?

I lost my oldest friendship, my closest confidant, and the only person with whom there were no misunderstandings about where I came from and how I became who I was. And that chasm that has now opened up in the core of who I am is with me for the rest of my life.