In her last hospitalization, my sister Arlene argues about everything. 

“No, I do not have emphysema.”

“I refuse to take that pill.  I know you charge $2,000 for an aspirin.”

I am not privy to any of this information, but postmortem her daughter-in-law, Danae, fills me in on these and other comments.

 “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.” 

Then, after her four sons have all learned what is going on, the prohibitions narrow.

“Don’t tell Karen.  She’ll just tell me to do something.” 

“You can tell Karen after I go.  We had an on and off relationship.”

            They buried my sister Arlene with all her teeth, the false ones.  She told me that one by one her dentist had extracted her natural teeth, repeatedly warning her that nicotine was to blame; it restricted blood flow to the gums, causing bone loss and infection. But having none of your original teeth is not a terminal illness.

When she was brought into Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington for congestive heart failure, my sister’s chest cavity pooled with twelve pounds of blood leaking from the hardened arteries, another side effect of smoking tobacco. Medication to drain the fluid around her heart led to renal failure. The treatment? Dialysis. Arlene refused. Like our mother before her, she would die at the age of 68.

Earlier in the progression of her heart disease, Arlene came up with reasons not to go to doctors.  She once told me the best gift I ever gave her was a book that encouraged the reader to develop an “imaginary doctor.” When we were still talking, she let me know she was having trouble breathing at work.  The cause? According to her, the nursing home pumped out fragrances to cover up “bad smells.” She was allergic to the fragrances.  Arlene may very well have been allergic to fragrances, but I had a feeling that the imaginary doctor was not performing a differential diagnosis.

Arlene worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant for decades, the last twelve years moving around big resistant patients on the Day Spring Unit for Alzheimer’s patients at the Good Samaritans in Spokane, Washington.  Feisty and determined to care for challenging people, she was always at risk. The residents could turn on a dime, one minute loving her to death and the next grabbling her around the throat and squeezing.  Notwithstanding, her philosophy was to treat each one as if they were her grandparent.

Our grandmother Rose Yunick was the only adult who loved us enough to play card games and cook us kreplach, a delicious Jewish dumpling filled with farmers’ cheese, during each of her Saturday visits with our grandfather Louis. She carried with her a cracked leather shopping bag full of discounted items she bought for our mother, like Witch Hazel. Nana and Papa needed three transfers on public transportation to travel from their working-class neighborhood in Mattapan to middle-class Brookline.  Our father drove his in-laws home in the evening at the end of his six-day work week.  I imagine it was a quiet car ride as the parties were not fond of each other.

After one injury inflicted by a Good Samaritan resident, I persuaded Arlene to file for Workman’s Comp. It was very hard for her to stand up for herself. In the claim she requested and would accept no more than dollar for dollar reimbursement for her medical expenses.

I was less successful in getting her into a smoking cessation program. I was in my mid-thirties at the time and my older sister was going through one of her numerous evangelical phases, Jews for Jesus this time. She told me I did not have to worry so much as Jesus was taking care of her.

“500,000 people die of smoking related causes in the US each year.  Why didn’t Jesus help them?” My attempts to talk her into getting help were frequent but neither loving nor compassionate.  I was mad at her for not doing “the right thing,” as our mother used to say. One time I yelled, “If you don’t get help, you’ll be the newest patient in the unit.”  No wonder she did not want Danae to tell me she was dying.

Danae and Mike, her second oldest son, had a gentler but no more effective approach to motivate Arlene to get help. Not long after observing her difficulty breathing on a family vacation, Mike brought her to a cardiologist but did not go into the exam room.  Arlene reported that the doctor told her to come back in a year unless she had “symptoms.”  After her death we learned what he really said.  “You have mitro valve prolapse and if you do not have surgery immediately, you will die.” I will never know for sure why she denied herself treatment. Her heart could not repair itself.

Arlene’s refusal to take care of herself seems to me so profound and so mysterious that I search the past for possible psychological obstacles to self-care.  There are two noteworthy factors, although I only knew about one of them at the time. What I didn’t know, what Arlene only told me decades later, was that she was physically abused by our mother, Clara. The other event was a public one.

Genuine conversations where people expressed their feelings and were heard were non-existent in my childhood and adolescence. The four of us managed to cohabitate without ever talking about anything that mattered. Not that my mother didn’t try. Surmans, my father’s small clothing store in working class Cambridge, was open 9-9 six days a week.  He came home each night for about thirty minutes, wolfing down his dinner at the oval grayish white kitchen table with my sister and me while our mother sat across the kitchen on a step-stool.  Why didn’t she sit with us? “It’s easier for me to get up quickly and serve.” Conversation across the two dining areas was cut short. 

“Phil, how was business today?”

“What’s the matter?  You’re not getting enough money?” We were a lower middle-class family, and money was a concern at that time. We lived in a single-story brick home, less than half the size of those around us.

On a day in 1958, my sister was 16, and our mother was out of the house. I was aware that Arlene was rummaging through bureaus in the master bedroom—the one private space in our house—when she came upon some papers.  Everything changed.  She discovered the primary family secret: our mother had been married before. My sister was actually my half-sister, our father was her step-father, and there was a missing man. At the time I pieced the plot together from muffled shouts and hisses coming from another room. Arlene dared to confront our mother and wanted to know the truth.  A name was revealed as was the reason for the divorce, his infidelities. Did Arlene find her father?  I do not know but she did learn she wasn’t who she thought she was.

I read that the divorce rate in the 1940’s was only 3%. It must have taken a lot of courage for our mother to divorce her first husband. It was followed by a shame that made her keep it a secret from her daughters. The different fathers makes some sense of the different treatment we received growing up.

After several decades, I remember just one conversation, of which only certain details stick in my mind. I did not ask any follow-up questions. And I never doubted for a second that what Arlene told me was true, although my mother never laid a finger on me (she mostly ignored me).

According to Arlene, our mother beat her only when the two of them were alone in the house. I don’t know when this would have started or how frequent it was. It may have been confined to one particularly dramatic summer, the last summer Arlene lived in our family home, in the weeks before the final crisis that would eviscerate our family. In any case, our mother was an unhappy, self-absorbed woman, repeatedly getting surgeries to close the pores on her face and holding herself back from the kind of no-holds-barred drinking she would later manifest. Something about Arlene, and only Arlene, triggered our mother’s violence. I am guessing that she saw something of her ex-husband in Arlene, and, still raging over his infidelities, she did to his daughter what she could not do to him.

Then again, maybe vicarious revenge was not the cause, or not the only cause, of the beatings. Maybe it was Arlene’s having crossed the line at Brookline High School, turning her back on the middle-class college bound Jewish boys in favor of the Catholic working-class boys taking classes in a separate “vocational” building. My mother disliked anyone who was not Jewish. Either way, the treatment Arlene would receive from the Alzheimer’s residents at Good Samaritan may have felt very familiar, and perhaps, deserved. Her throat had been attacked before, as Arlene described to me. The final summer, while I was away at camp, our mother hit her, scratched her throat with her long silver-gray manicured nails, and called the police whenever she tried to leave the house.

As a former social worker, I know that this level of cruelty is not atypical of what goes on in families where there are untreated addictions. To a reader who didn’t grow up among alcoholics, it may seem strange that my father and I noticed nothing. In fact, we were such a disengaged family that I cannot remember even looking at my sister when I was a tween and she was in puberty. Outsiders were more observant.  When we were both long gone from that house, Arlene told me that the school guidance counselor called and asked our mother, “Why is your daughter coming to school with bruises?” The response came without hesitation: “Because she is a bad child; she is stubborn.” Too bad our mother spoke prior to the “mandated reporting” era.  There were no consequences.  No state-employed social workers made a home visit and Arlene may have drawn some conclusions about how unimportant she was in the world outside our family home.

When I learned about the abuse, decades later, I wrote our mother a confrontational letter.  I don’t recall her response but I do Arlene’s. She was furious with me as “it was all in the past.”

While we were both still minors under our parents’ roof, I wanted to be close to Arlene, but proximity didn’t always feel good. Ordered to “take your sister with you,” Arlene brought me out with her teenage friends, also five years older than me.  Anything could happen from being made fun of for appearing with a “wedgie” or being put in the back seat of a car while she had sex with a boy up front.  Our mother was mean to her and she was mean to me.

There was an even earlier time when things were different between us. Arlene described many aspects of our family life from my first five years, a time that is mostly blank in my mind.

Our mother never held me when I was an infant or a toddler (which might explain why I am still uncomfortable with touch), but she hid the only comfort I had, my stuffed aardvark, because I used to wake up in the night and pee on it.  Arlene successfully pleaded my case and I got the animal back.  I wonder about the rhetoric; what arguments did Arlene put forth? I recall the night she persuaded me to pee in her bed so she could get up and watch television while our mother changed the sheets.  I don’t think I had the wherewithal to request compensation for putting myself at risk of our mother’s anger so all I got was yelled at.

I also learned from Arlene that she used to take me to the basement, sit me down at a shiny one-unit mahogany children’s desk and “make me do homework.” Her teaching had an impact; I went on to get a doctorate in English when I was 51. On the other hand, Arlene herself was not regarded as “a good student.” The difference might have been that Arlene’s early education took place in a school system inferior to the one we transferred to when moving to the wealthier town of Brookline.  At eight years old I was just starting my formal education but Arlene, age 13, was determined to be “behind.” I know my parents did not hire a tutor for my sister, and I cannot say whether there was any effort in the school to help Arlene catch up.

Arlene fled the family home, eloping with one of the Catholic boys my mother had tried so desperately to keep her from dating. The name Jimmy comes to mind, though my memory is uncertain. Here again, only part of the story was known to me at the time. Other details I learned only decades later. Our mother got wind of the marriage and went nuts, or so one would think of a narrow-minded Jewish woman turning to the leaders of the very religion she loathed, begging local priests to help her dissolve the marriage. Her assertive behavior was out of character for a passive 1950’s wife who never worked outside of the house and never made any decisions regarding the house.  My father gave her $100 a week to pay all the bills. She called it her “pay” for cleaning up and making the meals. Where was our absent father/stepfather while all this transpired?  Committed to his clothing business, trips to the race track with his friend “The Judge,” and multiple outside mistresses. I never heard an opinion from him on Arlene’s elopement or the subsequent events.

When our mother learned Arlene was pregnant, she again went into high gear, demanding an illegal abortion. Arlene refused the abortion. Finally, a compromise was reached.  Arlene would be flown cross-country to stay with our Uncle Stanley, a man who left reform school to join the Merchant Marines and later became a dealer at a casino.  After the baby was born, Arlene was to sign paperwork to give it up for adoption. Everything almost went according to plan.  After Arlene signed the adoption papers, a kind and observant social worker said, “You know, you don’t have to do this.”  Fifty years later the result of her change of mind, Stan, my oldest nephew, named after Uncle Stanley, would text me from the Seattle Super Bowl celebration, the first in the Seahawks’ history. The underdog Seahawks crushed the Denver Broncos, two-time winners. “I wish Mom were here,” Stan wrote.  I had had the same thought. During her life, rooting for our sports teams was one of the most reliable ways I had to put myself in sync with Arlene emotionally. I was as passionate about Boston’s teams as she was about Seattle’s, and we both disliked the Yankees. Now, in Stan’s and my shared jubilation over this upset victory by underdog Seahawks, the situation reminded me of the way Arlene took a stand and kept her first baby. At that moment, I think, she risked using up all her courage, just as our mother had done by divorcing the first of two adulterous husbands.

Arlene brought baby Stan home to Uncle Stanley’s apartment in Seattle.  Our father/stepfaher sent her $25 a week. She would later tell me it was just enough to buy formula and diapers for the baby and cigarettes and coffee for herself. She did not eat much. Meanwhile I was back home getting an allowance I didn’t need because I preferred shoplifting. When I turned 16, I received a brand-new Chevy Impala convertible. Two years later there was $10,000 a semester for tuition, room, and board at a private four-year college. At 20, after a pregnancy I did terminate, my father bought me a1964 red Corvette coupe. Today I see his generosity as both an expression of love and an apology.  On his deathbed in 2005 he would tell me, “I guess I wasn’t the best of husbands.”

Arlene left Uncle Stanley’s apartment when she met and married Duane, a man 17 years her senior, and they had three boys and a foster daughter.  Duane appeared to be a good provider.  Whenever I visited them, he came off as a self-confident employee of the Ford Credit Union, repossessing the cars of those who did not make their loan payments. Duane turned out to be either delusional or a compulsive debtor.  He may have gone to work but he was not always working, frequently moving the family for a job that didn’t exist, wrenching everyone, including Stan, from school to school. Repeatedly taken from where he was successful with his peers, schoolwork, and sports, Stan gave up starting over and left home to “live” in the Sea-Tac Airport until 9/11 when all the homeless were chased way. He lasted the longest walking about in an old but respectable sport coat.

I didn’t know the story of Duane’s non-existent jobs until the unveiling of Arlene’s headstone a year after she died.  Her foster daughter told me that, when they were growing up, “There was often no food in the house. That’s why we all got jobs in restaurants.” I had spent a summer living in her house with Duane and four boys.  Each week, my father sent me $25, the same amount he had sent Arlene seven years before to support herself and a baby. I kept every penny for myself, borrowing the family red pick-up truck to buy A&W hamburgers and root beer because I was always hungry but never gave much thought to the cause.

I regret taking on our mother’s shame over the “unwed mother,” a plight she and a man of the cloth created by the annulment of a legal marriage.  The summer after I lost my sister, I kept getting into trouble at Cedar Crest, an expensive two-month long camp in Maine. I somehow got it into my head that you could get high from mixing aspirin and Coca Cola, and so I got some of both and persuaded another camper to walk around all night drinking the mix.  There were only two side effects: my hearing was off for a while and I nearly got expelled from camp.  Frank and Bonnie, the Camp Directors, and head counselor Margot Polivy called me into the office.  Frank’s hand was on the telephone about to dial my mother and tell her to come pick me up.  This would have been devastating to her and to me. Margot stood up, put her hand on top of Frank’s, and said, “I’ll take care of her.”  

 I came to trust Margot. One rainy afternoon when all activities were cancelled, I found myself in her cabin compelled to talk. The only image I have from that room is a bottle of Scotch on a small brown bedside table.  Neither of us touched it. I asked her to turn the lights off, but shame demanded complete invisibility, so I squeezed myself under the bottom of her bunk bed scraping my back across grains of sand from the lakeside beach a few hundred yards from the cabin. The details of the family secret, my sister or half-sister, an unwed mother, came out in a series of truncated gasps. I have no recollection of her response, but I had some sense of relief from the smothering silent shame, pretending that nothing had ever happened, that I hadn’t had my sister wrenched from me.

For a period of 45 years after our forced 3000-mile separation, I tried off and on to retrieve the emotional bond between Arlene and me, those times in our childhood where we just laughed and laughed until our mother hushed us.  “You’re making me nervous.”  What did we laugh about?  An old relative with a silly name like Fetah Pesey because we didn’t know “fetah” was a Yiddish word for uncle. 

Over and over, I would reach out to her, insatiable for our long talks, and then pull away.  The first time this cycle happened was a few years after she kept her baby.  I was 15, our father’s infidelity was widely known, and our mother’s Vodka bottle visible on the kitchen counter. The bottles eventually disappeared until I found dozens of empties hidden under the false bottoms of garment bags hung in basement closets, right outside the room where I dutifully sat at a desk and followed my sister’s instructions.

That our mother was an alcoholic was obvious to me and the tradespeople she dealt with but not to anyone in the then estranged extended family. My father once had three brothers, but one died in a drug rehab after obtaining and ingesting the very barbiturate from which he had been detoxed. Each brother had a wife and collectively they had a total of five children. So, I once had aunts and uncles and cousins and our “Surman Club” used to rent a room now and then to share a meal while us kids ran around. Over time resentments developed and the Club dissolved.  One uncle blamed my father for it all and, of course, my father blamed his brother. Given the deep fracture, my idea that we should all “get together and do an Intervention” so our mother could get help was an unrealistic aspiration for a family splintered by decades of hard feelings.

Nonetheless, I tried to move forward. Arlene was my first prospect. Apparently, our mother drunk-dialed Arlene each Saturday afternoon.  My sister might have been pleased that, once the target of battering, she became worthy of regular phone calls. It didn’t matter that our mother was drunk.  Arlene was dismissive of my concerns.  “She just likes to have a few.” That was one time I pulled away from her.  Forty years later Arlene came back home for a visit.   After seeing our mother, she burst into my home.  “My G-d, she looks like an old alcoholic!” The Intervention fell apart after my second prospecting call.  Aunt Edith declared, “She only drinks because you don’t visit her more often.”

“Edith, when was the last time you and Uncle Harry visited her?”

“Ten years ago.”

When I got my first tenure-track job at a university in Los Angeles after completing my doctorate, I eventually reached out to Uncle Stanley and Aunt Vivienne.  A few weeks later he began daily radiation treatments for cancer, and I knew the end was close.  I called Arlene in Spokane, Washington several times to encourage her to come to see the man who had provided her a home.  She snarled at me but finally complied.  Her plane landed at the precise moment of his passing.  She arrived at his mobile home and took charge, tying the black leather straps of his phylacteries, the small boxes enclosing parchment scripture, around his head and arms.  It was just the right thing, and I was surprised at her expertise both because women do not usually do this and she had left traditional Judaism many years before.

Another fifteen years passed.  Our father was dying. Arlene flew out to see him despite his refusing to speak to her; he kept telling me she and her fourth husband Tommy were calling the house and hanging up repeatedly to give him a heart attack so they could get his money. The paranoia may have been the result of multiple mini-strokes I would later learn about or the nearly full liter of vodka he admitted to drinking each day.  Nonetheless, Arlene, the dutiful daughter, flew to Massachusetts, reconciled with him in the hospital, and became his CNA for the few days before he died. 

I asked her to stay a few more days and help me clean out the family home but she insisted on getting back to the Alzheimer’s Unit because they were understaffed. I told her to take what she wanted from the house and later I spent $400 shipping her a rusted set of patio furniture with floral periwinkle cushions.  Twenty years later I saw the furniture in her backyard after her funeral.  I do not know why Arlene was so drawn to the very furniture that evoked the worst memories of our mother’s decline. In summer she moved from the cracked Naugahyde couch in the den, where she eventually died, to the screened in back porch with these two recliners and a love seat. She reclined there for hours every day, a glass of “juice,” Marlboros and an ashtray, and the telephone, the kind you dial, all within reach.  I can still hear her loud voice talking to whomever. It could have been her mother, our grandma Rose, Aunt Edith, or the neighbor Ida.  Some conversation, same slurred speech, same easily discernable code names, “Sunshine Boy” and “The Whore,” for my father and his mistress. I imagined Arlene reclining on the same lounger in a hazy mix of alcohol and smoke just as our mother would do, an image that unsettled me.

When my father was estate planning, he made me co-Executor of his will along with a personal injury attorney he respected for getting his mistress a $15,000 settlement in a car accident she caused. I declined the position saying I could not work with such a man.  Eventually the woman who handled my divorce re-did the trust and I became the sole Executor.  He was very concerned about how to leave money to Arlene since he did not like her fourth husband Tommy, and he believed that Tommy could legally claim fifty percent of Arlene’s inheritance. My father made me promise not to release her share of the inheritance until after she obtained a will. It took her a year. 

Arlene’s share of his estate was $100,000.  I was the “residual beneficiary” who would receive the remains after all the disbursements stated in the will, payment of outstanding bills, and cleaning out the family home and selling it.  My father also made me promise to help Arlene out with whatever she needed as he knew my share would be way more than hers and she had four children to my two. While I had pushed for a more reputable estate planning attorney, I did not expect to be the beneficiary of most of his assets. Neither did I try to persuade my father to make the distributions equal. The inequitable result put another division between us. Arlene gratefully accepted money for her dental bills. In an email dated June 6, 2004, she said, “I can’t thank you enough for all you have done to ease my mind and to help financially.” Then she changed her mind and would not accept any more money from me.  Danae, her daughter-in-law, told me that Arlene’s bathroom floor was caving in and she tried to convince her to let me pay for a renovation.  She even told Arlene. “It’s not Karen’s money. It’s Pop’s money.” My sister refused.

Arlene died only six years after my father, and the money she had inherited went to her four sons. She had not spent a penny, living almost as frugally as she had in the years after Stan’s birth.

  Arlene and I had one more period of intimacy before I really did lose her.  Just before my father died, my ophthalmologist discovered what would be diagnosed as a benign cyst on my frontal lobe. As the cyst grew to 8.5 centimeters over a five-year period between diagnosis and surgical treatment, we began to talk again.  I called her and then pulled away, driven off either by my own judgment of her lack of self-care or by what I experienced as her unsolicited and misguided advice. No doubt she felt the same way about my “suggestions.” I did not know how to accept our differences or express my concerns without arguing and showing contempt.  The down times were shorter though.

In November of 2009, I had a 9.5-hour brain surgery.  A few days later, the medical team became worried that I was not doing well and spoke to me about a second surgery. They had drained the cyst and now wanted to insert a shunt from the brain to my abdomen. I was very frightened that I would not live through another surgery so close to the 9.5 hour one.  I slept and awoke in sweat, dreaming that I was being pursued by Nazis. I called Arlene, after midnight her time, and told her the dream.  She just listened. I stopped sweating and felt like I had a sister. I went back to sleep.  When I awoke, I knew that if I needed a second surgery, I would make it because I am a third generation Holocaust survivor. My condition improved and talk of another surgery disappeared.

I think that Arlene and I did listen to each other more than either of us knew. I do not recall any judgment from her when I came out as a lesbian after the end of my 29-year marriage to a man. In the last year or so of her life, Arlene became active with Spokane Valley Jewish Services.  After her death, I learned from its gay director, Rabbi Tamar, that my sister had welcomed her to Spokane with, “Have you been able to connect with the LGBTQ community here?” I felt proud that Arlene had reassured a rabbi who was concerned about how the community would regard her.

After my surgery, we started planning her visit.  We spoke of going to the kosher luncheon at the Jewish Community Center’s senior café. I had been attending a Yiddish schmooze group. Although my cognitive impairment rendered attempts to study Yiddish futile, I was able to describe the hilarious characters who attended the group.  In Arlene’s return to traditional Judaism, we finally had something in common again. We talked and laughed about how we were going to interact with the schmoozers, just like we used to do at the kitchen table when Ma told us our laughing made her nervous. Then we got nervous, or I did.  I sensed that Arlene was envisioning herself acting as my nurse, and when I asked her about it, she said, “Well, if you need help bathing, I will bathe you.”

The thought of Arlene touching my naked vulnerable body made me cringe. “No!” I said. “My partner can do that. I want you to come as my…”

“As your sister.” Arlene’s voice was flat. She was, I thought, too proud to express hurt. She then backed out of the visit altogether. “I don’t want to interfere with you and your partner being alone together.”  The open-air window between us slammed shut once again. She may also have been worried about her own health. 

I mention this brief exchange about the bathing because it’s emblematic of so many similar rifts that occurred between us over the years, where the intention to set a small boundary was interpreted as a much more sweeping rejection. In hindsight I see that I never let Arlene play the big sister; I always took her inventory. I did try to repair the breech, though.

Using my brain in a new way, I was revising a book about caregiving as a writing teacher. Who knew more on the topic than my sister?  I asked for her definition of the word. Her reply:

2/13/11. Caregiving is the act of caring for the person’s body, soul, and spirit. In being a caregiver, you help the person daily with what needs they may have and are not able to perform. You do this in a loving and caring manner so they will learn to trust you and realize you are there to help them. This will lift their spirit knowing someone cares for them and is not just doing a job but trying to help them reach their highest potential no matter how small it may be, and it will bring peace to their soul (neshma) especially if they are in the processes of dying. Hope this helps!

A little over two weeks later, I sent Arlene an email “to make amends.” I acknowledged that I had been abrupt with her and apologized for my communication skills interfering with “the kind of close relationship that I always desired” to have with her. I thanked her for listening to my Holocaust dream and for writing about what caregiving means.

            I did not expect a response nor did I get one.  Our last phone call took place two months later on May 11 after my partner’s (now wife’s) mastectomy. That day we learned the cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes and so she would not need either chemotherapy or radiation.  Claudine planned to go back to work right away.

“She can’t do that.” Arlene said.  Arlene herself had been too sick to do the work she loved for over a year. I could not persuade her to share in my jubilation over Claudine’s results. “She shouldn’t go back to work,” Arlene repeated. I said I was going to hang up and I did.

Four months later my sister died so angry with me she did not want me to know she was dying.  So angry with me our cousin called to tell me how much our phone calls had upset Arlene. Her tone carried the full force of my sister’s anger.  I was not angry with Arlene then but felt the hostility of three of her four sons as if I had been the cause of her death.

Recently, Arlene’s daughter-in-law Danae summed it up beautifully: “She spent her whole life watching you have the choices she didn’t have.”

I’m still trying to reconcile with Arlene, to make amends. I’ve written her a letter. In it, I describe the cherry tree I had planted for her at Good Sam’s and the plaque they put up. I describe the visit Tommy and I had with her co-workers who had not known of her passing. I praise Stan, the only son to speak at Arlene’s funeral, Stan the son our mother wanted her to give away.

I had a dream in which Arlene left me a voicemail saying, “I’ll try again.” I put that dream into the letter as well. Writing to her helped me realize just how much I missed talking with and sharing the news about my own children and grandchildren.  We did try and try again.

Recently I attended the bat mitzvah of my rabbi’s daughter, a miracle given that ten years earlier she had been diagnosed with non-verbal autism and was only able to move with a walker.  I sat in one of the children’s chairs in the sanctuary. Bright stained glass pyramided above me up to the oddly convex inner roof. I found myself talking with Arlene. I told her how I wanted to get her a yahrzeit plaque for the synagogue, the kind that lights up on the anniversary of her death.  I confessed how I had misunderstood and judged her for leaving Judaism and changing religions. I imagined that the love and comfort I was feeling at that moment may have been why she came back to Judaism. Yet I had been contemptuous of her return and had not celebrated what I saw as the only sustained happiness I remembered in her life. The awareness felt like light pouring through stained glass.

One of the blessings of the continual re-losing of my sister is that when the irrevocable one came, I received in return friendship with Stan, my oldest nephew.  Our early connections were full of much sad sharing.  Now one or the other calls on an anniversary of his mother’s and my sister’s death or birthday or when there’s a super bowl in their home state.  (Although if turning over in one’s grave is more than a figure of speech, I am sure Arlene did just that when her favorite baseball player, Izuru Suzuki, was traded from the Seattle Mariners to the New York Yankees of all teams!) And now we are just there for each other in the hard times. When a favorite team wins or loses an important game, the texts fly across country, as I wish I had done when his mother was still alive.