may you go in peace

Honestly I am not sure (still) of the exact date. Really on some level it doesn't really matter. All that does matter is that she is gone, and that the hope I held for us being able to have a sisterly relationship again died with her.

This grief I feel is on so many levels unresolved. It is such a different loss. And yet is many ways it is similar because I lost her so long ago.

The topic of my sister has always been a difficult one. It is an understatement to say that she was a troubled child. There are so many stories about her. Things she did, that just seem so hard to fathom.

One of the 'best' occurred when she was in the first grade, about six years old. My parents were already used to the idea of weekly conferences to hear the latest list of Alice's indiscretions. But now we were in parochial school, and the teacher wasn't seeing improvement, so she referred the case to the principal, who was also the mother superior.

So on this Friday morning my Mother went down to the school to meet this time with the principal. I still don't know what Alice did. I never will. But whatever it was, it was awful enough that upon walking outside my Mother passed out on the front steps of the school. I still can't imagine. This was a little girl who was hitting kids with wooden blocks when she was three completely unprovoked. She whacked me with a hammer when she was four (again without cause). I don't even want to guess.

At any rate, you can imagine how as time passed, things got worse. I recently had a flashback of when she was about 9-years old (I would have been 10), she killed my pet hamster. And I mean killed.

I honestly don't remember what provoked her. But it is also possible that it wasn't anything (see above). At any rate what I remember her doing is running out of the house with my little hamster in her hands. I chased her, yelling at her to stop, and clearly she wasn't paying attention.

Once she got outside, she moved off the porch and past the front yard and headed down the street. She then stopped and threw my hamster at the concrete sidewalk. Amazingly he did not die instantly. Poor thing. He hung on for a day or so.

I was not only crushed at the loss of my pet, but I couldn't believe the cruelty that lived inside her. This little animal hadn't done anything to her. And how could this little blond haired blue-eyed girl have such spite within her? Even better, how safe was it really to share a room with her?

My Mom had finally had enough and sent her to live with our father's mother when she was about 14. Alice had been caught that year trying to strangle me - thankfully my Mom arrived in the middle of this incident or who knows what might have happened. The final incident though was when she threw a plate of food at her - that's when my Mom decided enough is enough.

Originally the plan was that we would both be sent away, but somehow I convinced her otherwise. Actually the somehow involved getting so upset that I had a bloody nose that ended up all over me and the walls of my bedroom. I can't even go down that path of what ifs.

Part of me felt horribly guilty that I couldn't save both of us. But part of me also knew that things were getting to a point where Alice's behavior was causing too much turmoil at home. I honestly thought that it would be the wake up call that she needed. I never thought that it would be forever.

I did see her once after that. I was before I started my senior year of high school. I thought my Mom had gone mad when she said picked me up from summer camp and told me we were going to visit that place, 3000 miles away.

And there were a few times after that when we had contact. Of course the craziest being when she contacted me via email pretending to be an adopted 17-year old from Maine, and then confessed on AIM her true identity. Fun times.

Please don't misunderstand. I loved my sister. Despite the many terrible things she did to me and those around me, she wasn't all bad. She had her good moments too, although rare.

She was an amazing sales person. We were only in Girl Scouts for a year, but I still remember when our troop leader called our Mom and asked when she was going to pick up Alice's cookies. At first my Mom didn't understand. She thought the students were just supposed to pick them up at school. That's when the troop leader explained that Alice had sold so many cookies that you couldn't just walk home with them.

Our living room was literally filled with boxes of cookies. And these weren't orders from friends and relatives. Nor were they the result of our Mom bringing the forms to work and getting her co-workers to pitch in. Alice had literally spent days gone door-to-door throughout our neighborhood. She just wouldn't take no for an answer.

Part of me still can't believe she is gone. I know that has something to do with how and when I found out. It still doesn't seem real.


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