Never Forgive You
What’s Past Is Prologue
Friends,
My little sister was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in February 2013. She died on November 4, 2017, nine days shy of turning 33.
I started a book about burying her as part of my MFA, when our little congregation was partnering with another to offer traditional, Orthodox Christian burial, which is akin to traditional Orthodox Jewish and Muslim burials. No embalming. A plain box or shroud. The community grieving with their hands.
The five years between her diagnosis and her death marked a rift in the fabric of what I thought was a charmed life.
I pitched this book as a memoir-plus to some literary notables and received a favorable response. Not expected, considering that memoir’s popularity is on the ebb. At least the trauma memoir.
In the coming weeks, I’m offering my book, chapter by chapter, to my subscribers. Aside from this first chapter, it will come out on Friday mornings to give you the weekend to read.
Comments will be disabled on book posts for everyone but paid subscribers. I’m a priest’s wife, yes. I’m big O, but little o-wise, I’m terrible at being orthodox. Given the spiterot and own-you-rot and the “I know better than you” takes in our culture, I’d expect to see those from some people. I don’t know why, but if I’m trying to step into their world, I imagine the internet feels like a stage. Isn’t the whole world a stage? And they can advance what makes them feel safe and certain. Knowing some such people in real life, I know the adamant insistence that one perspective is the only right one actually speaks more about that person and their insecurities and needs than it does about what’s moral or not, evil or not. (Or in good order, as one male commenter insisted to me recently.)
I’ll resume my Sunday posts, including my monthly podcast with a person who thinks about the world in challenging and fresh ways, next week. I’m excited that next Sunday’s post will be a podcast with a self-taught journalist/archivist, naturalized American from Taiwan, adopted by missionaries. He works at CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute and the Ernie Pyle Museum. Andy Chandler. This is going to be a treat
Like me, he’s a person of many interests. My daughter, a licensed BCBA, would say that both of us have ADHD. I’m self-treating with long daily runs, wine, and a highly diversified set of interests. Andy just masters new skills and roles with breathtaking speed.
Nuff said. To the book.
What’s Past Is Prologue
Some people, I learned after my sister Ruthie died, hold together the fabric of relationships. And isn’t that the whole universe?
Granpa Curtis, Grandpa Dale, Ruthie, each had been warp or weft, making relationships in my family durable.
Some did it by force. Mom’s dad, Granpa Curtis, would show up in the living room of an unhappily married daughter, and hours later, this or that son-in-law swore he’d: get his act together, get a job, keep it in his pants, stay sober.
Some succeeded by nature. Dad’s dad, Grandpa Dale, would toss a punch line into an uncomfortable moment to diffuse it. When I was little and trying to draw out an evening with him and Grandma Mae, he’d pick up my little shoes and ask if he could put them on.
“Okay,” I’d reply, unable to let him down. He’d wiggle off his black loafers and stick a big toe into my Maryjanes.
“Grandpa! They don’t fit you. Put them on me.” And suddenly, we kids would be in stitches and grabbing our shoes out of his hands, pulling them onto our own feet. He’d follow us to the porch and wave until our van turned off his street, our noses leaving a sticky print on the window as we waved back.
After Grandpa Dale died, annual holiday gatherings disappeared. Where once we saw Dad’s twin Bruce and Aunt Kat with their kids several times a year, Dad and his brothers took to the internet to post and counter-post theological one-ups, trying to best each other.
Something of the same sort quaked in my siblings and my world with Ruthie’s diagnosis. The whole set of us wobbled—me, Michaela, Anya, James, Noelle, Ruthie and Christy, Dad and Mom, our spouses, our kids. The week she died, Dad envisioned a set of perfect teacups, like the rice porcelain ones Grandma Mae had collected when he was a kid. Only one of the set tipped. As it tumbled from the shelf, Dad watched, unable to prevent the shattering. His beautiful set, incomplete. In a poem he penned, he imagined himself, lunging from the distance, hands cupped, crashing to his knees. Shards of Ruthie scattered around him.
Six years after Ruthie died, Christy’s husband Ryan found a hard drive of pictures and videos we’d taken at family vacations and holidays. All from before Ruthie’s death. I was scheduled to visit her within a few days.
“You might want to save this and watch it with someone,” her husband warned her.
“Why?” She asked him.
“Your family was so happy before.”
She saved it until I visited.
“Will you go through it with me tomorrow?” Christy asked the night she and Ryan picked me up from the airport. “I can’t do it alone.”
“Yep. Mind if I run first?” Christy knew my routine from ten years of family vacations and holidays together. I ran to burn off my anxiety and wear down my brain. The next morning, I ran the snowy hills outside of Hellertown under a cold sun, the frozen hills sloping around me. I was re-reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and when Little Dog’s Grandma Lan died, he and his mom Rose curled around her. I came back to the house devastated, but I’d learned to live inside grief. I’d learned to find the brokennes of grief a valley where truth comes out, including the truth of our most warped, bent selves. Nine months before Ruthie died, we’d buried a family friend, whose unexpected heart attack at fifty-one altered our congregation and our family like a small fracture in the spine or pelvis of our being.
I shoved down that book hangover, all the poetic grief and showered, readying myself to revisit a grief that my siblings and I hadn’t been able to share easily. First, there was the rupture over my helping Ruthie be buried green. Then there was the values rift when Donald Trump assumed headship of Christian conservatism.
After I showered, Christy offered me coffee. Morning coffee is a slowdown in my family, the equivalent of a late espresso in Italy.
“Do you have to let it linger?” The lyric licked at the corner of my conscience as one cup turned into two. I didn’t want to rush my youngest sister’s catharsis. She’d suffered enough moral injury as a respiratory ICU nurse during COVID, and she’d shepherded us through Ruthie’s final weeks.
We reclined in her sunroom. Oy, her dog, foiled the nervous urge I have to move, to get something done. The lithe hound puttered up with her slobber ball, dropping it on the cushion by my hip. I reached for it. Her muzzle and my hand lunged together. I pulled back.
“Tell her to stay or, if she’s still holding it, to drop it,” Christy said. She sensed what I’d never told her. I’m nervous around dogs. Always have been.
“Stay.” Oy’s chest drew back. I grabbed the germ ball and threw it, rubbing my damp fingers on my jeans.
“So, still want to see the pictures?” I asked. “What’s in there that worries Ryan?”
Oy dumped the slobber ball in my lap. I threw. Oy, scrambling across the wood floor, backmasked Christy’s response, “Don’t know yet, except how happy we were.”
“Well, shit,” I said to Christy. “Stay,” I said to Oy. I threw the sticky saliva ball.
“Shall we start?” Christy set down her empty mug on my thirtieth toss of the ball. With that, we moved to the computer room and pulled two backless, broken computer chairs up to the array of monitors. Oy followed Christy like a toddler following her mom.
Christy pushed the flash drive into the computer and loaded the folder. It took a hot second. “I hate waiting,” I quoted Princess Bride at Christy. She smiled. Movies like that form a common language, a vocabulary to discharge our big emotions.
We started flipping through the pictures. We hadn’t looked through family photos since the night before Ruthie died. The night when most all the siblings and in-laws piled into the room around Ruthie’s bed in our parents’ back bedroom. Windows were open. Over a dozen of us sitting on chairs, the floor, on the side of her bed. Her husband Andrew reclining near her. He bluetoothed her camera to the TV somehow, and we scrolled through the last five years of her life, the only five in which Ruthie had managed not to destroy her phone—yes, she’d left her wallet on a ferris wheel and then on top of her car as she accelerated onto the interstate, but she’d overcome her penchant for dropping her phone in dishwater or the nether regions of her furniture.
We had five glorious years of photos and videos to laugh at. We savored it as we’d done the night before Ruthie died. We paused the roll and contextualized.
“Why did we let tween boys jump over roman candles?” What a Fourth of July at that lakehouse in northern Indiana.
“Andrew’s idea. No one got hurt.” Someone said it. True. But still. What if law enforcement saw tween kids stunting incendiary devices?
That picture of Ruthie from Facebook captioned, “Put your hair back on, Mommy. You’re scaring me.” When it grew out a couple of months, Ruthie rocked that pixie cut and smoky eyes. I would have hated how I looked. As it grew out, Ruthie dyed it Manic Panic Blue. At Disney with her son Devon and daughter Junia, she looked like Sadness from Inside Out. Her weight went up and down. Her style unassailably consistent. Boho. Eclectic. Thrifted.
As Christy and I clicked further into the pictures, we leaned harder against each other. Our shoulders curling under a weight, hands clasped. Ruthie would have joked that we were like Forrest Gump and Bubba. Christy handed me a box of tissues. She clutched several in her balled fist. She reached for Oy and rubbed the dog’s head for comfort.
The photos ran out too soon. I could have gone on for hours. Or years.
We stared at the last one for a long time. A hum chewed at the quiet.
“We were happier, weren’t we?” I said.
Where Ruthie had been, there was now a big crater.
When Ruthie died, I told people she’d been amputated from me, not that I knew what an amputation feels like or doesn’t. I’m relying on what I’ve read in literature or seen in movies. I’m fully abled, in body, at least. In soul, not so much. I’d read that amputees feel pain or try to scratch an itch on the limb, even though the limb is gone. In fact, in Ocean Vuong’s book, Rose shows an uncommon kindness to a client, massaging a non-existent shin. A part of me had been defined by who I was in relation to Ruthie. Now that part was severed.
Almost two years before Ruthie died, she had a period of clear scans. Still, she felt too weary to join us for the annual team scavenger challenge for Thanksgiving weekend. Noelle, the sister closest to her in age, had cooked up a set of challenges around Frederick—take a picture together in a bathtub, find a guardian to save you, drink from the same milkshake, convince a stranger to let you do their dishes, find more than five “Trump for President” campaign stickers. Send your pics to Ruthie back at the house. She’ll tally up your points and help prepare for judging.
“No is going to find five Trump stickers in this town,” Noelle said. Our other siblings, James, Anya, Michaela, Christy, plus my husband, David and even our dad, agreed. First of all, in a blue state, one so close to New York, D.C., and New Jersey? Hadn’t Trump destroyed businesses in all those states and tried to make himself seem important when he lacked all substance? We had a lot to say about the implausibility of his candidacy. True to form, no one earned points for Trump stickers.
On the day Ruthie died, I turned forty-two. “The meaning of life,” I said. Ruthie was laid out in the bedroom, now in a plain pine box. We’d dressed her in one of her favorite bright dresses, wrapped a scarf around her neck and pulled mismatching, snarky socks on her feet.
“I am a delicate fucking flower,” her left sock read.
Dry ice was discreetly tucked around her abdomen, hips, shoulders—anywhere that the body harbors the most bacteria. She’d died after noon on a Saturday, so the cemetery wouldn’t open the ground for internment until at least Monday.
We were having an Irish wake. Bidden or not. I planned to stay with her body that first night. I’d listen to the Psalter and keep a kind of vigil. Not a real vigil. That wouldn’t honor Ruthie. She’d disavowed her faith in the final thirty months of her cancer. Gone was the bible-quizzing coach. In her place, a baby atheist.
Some of the family was out on the porch, smoking or vaping, others were in the living room, chatting. I slinked down the hall and across the polished wood toward the fridge to grab food when it broke.
The sister closest to me in age, Michaela, came from the dark family room where she and Matt had been sleeping on the pullout couch for the past week. She met me with a face, a finger, and a controlled rage.
“I will never forgive you.” Her reedy anger pulsed through me. My heart responded to the shock, thudding.
“What did I do?”
“You know what you did,” Michaela said.
I didn’t. All I could think was to apologize, to try to repair whatever I’d broken.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”
She turned and disappeared into the darkness.
I took my shaky body back to Ruthie’s room. I lay on the couch and tried to recite the psalms with the recording, but I couldn’t. I began years of reviewing every misstep I’d made, every choice. For over six years, I’d continue this self-interrogation alone, with David, in therapy. What had I done? If only I knew, I could fix it. Wasn’t I a fixer? A do-er? One of my parents’ children?
What had I transgressed?
Was it giving Ruthie the green burial she wanted? Offering it in the first place?
Telling Ruthie that David would lead the memorial services as she wished? Even though Michaela and her husband Mark said they wouldn’t help?
Or was it some lesser sin?
Nearly derailing our final sisters’ weekend six weeks earlier?
Getting a tattoo, even though I was a clergy wife who previously foresworn ink?
Disavowing evangelicalism to become an Orthodox Christian fifteen years before? Not being able to share Eucharist together, even though we were both clergy wives?
The next day, I tried to steer clear of Michaela, maybe let her emotions simmer down. She found me cutting vegetables in the kitchen.
“After they’re dead, we don’t have to honor their wishes,” she said.
“It’s a little late to change the plans,” I replied.
Not in Michaela’s way of figuring.
“It’s grief,” Noelle, Anya, Christy, and David assured me.
“Grief is a hell of a drug,” I tried to make the line sound light, like the show from which I’d lifted the essence of the line.
When my daughter Mae and son Alex arrived late Saturday night, they agreed. But it didn’t settle with me.
“I know it could be grief, but that doesn’t lead her to tell me she’ll never forgive me. I did something. I just don’t know what.”
Mae settled down next to me on the floor in the toy room. She mirrored my pose: legs against the wall. I was stretching tense muscles from my long daily runs; she was mimicking me. The grace of it, the emotional intelligence of my college-aged daughter, to realize that mirroring my behavior signaled she was in it with me, even in that moment.
“Don’t let it harden you,” she said.