survivor's guilt

Today my sister would have been thirty-six years old. She didn't make it to her 34th birthday.

The last time I saw her, she had just turned sixteen. I was seventeen. I had just returned from summer camp when on the drive home my Mom announced that we were going to the Garden State. I was quite shocked, and honestly didn't want to go. I think my initial thought was that she was joking (or crazy).

I think she thought that her father (whom she actually survived) was on his last legs, and wanted to say goodbye to him. She also thought it would be a good idea for me to see my own father as well as my sister and grandmother.

We met my grandmother and sister and great aunt at this Chinese restaurant off Journal Square that had been there for as long as I can remember. It is true American Chinese food complete with those crispy noodles and duck sauce set out on each table.

It was an awkward meeting at best. I don't remember what we talked about. I was presented with a cookie jar that belong to my great-grandmother as well as a teddy bear dressed as a doctor and another in a bride's dress. I don't think I brought them anything. I felt bad and unprepared. I think a part of me knew that that would be our last meeting, but how do you articulate that when you didn't know you would be here 48 hours before?

My sister had been disowned by my mother two years previous. She had been told she was going to spend the holidays with our grandmother (father's mother) but the truth was that it was a one-way ticket. My mother didn't want her back. At one point it was supposed to be a package deal, but somehow I convinced her I should be allowed to stay. I knew I was lucky then; in hindsight I had no idea what the word lucky meant.

The logical side of me realizes that in so many ways this is for the best. That given the path she was on, she at long last has found peace. Another part of me though grieves. Not so much for her death but that she wasn't able to get past her past and as a result we were never able to have an adult relationship.

In my mind she will always be a child. I never saw a photo of her as an adult. I have no mental image of her as an adult. Part of me can't believe she is gone, despite that I knew it a year before I was told.