Rejected Before it Began

My sister's surgery was scheduled for a day in August when I was getting ready to fly out to Chicago for a convention I went to each year. I had lost my job earlier in the year, with all its accrued vacation time, and had become a contractor at an online magazine. The nice thing about being a contractor was that you could take off whenever you wanted; the downside was that you didn't get paid if you didn't work. Even though I didn't have the funds and would lose money for not working, I offered to come down for her surgery and even skip Chicago, but she wouldn't have it.

During my mom's long battle with ovarian cancer, I'd come to realize that Karen and I handled crises very differently, and she hated my style of dealing with illness, death, and all the attendant misery that comes with their details. She assumed that my ultra-quiet mode was simply a sign of being stupid and incompetent, rather than being in listening and thinking mode, carefully trying to consider all options. My tendency to worry and fuss over people, to be ultra-attentive and hyper-conscious of their needs, drove her batshit crazy.

After Mom died, I had tried explaining to Karen that she didn't know what it was like, the day in and day out caregiving, that she had no right to judge my behavior on something she was able to leave behind for most of the time. She had never borne the burden of being responsible, and it was easy for her to judge the things she didn't like about me. Living one thousand miles away made things a lot easier for her. But the issues were already there, festering, when time for her surgery came. Later Karen would tell me she needed me not to fuss and not to be silent and watchful, that I couldn't be emotional; I had to be her rock, she said. When we both knew I'd never been anyone's rock before, certainly not by the standards with which she judged a rock.

Years before, she had asked me to come down and care for her after surgery she was considering -- a breast implant. Horrified by the very anti-feminist concept, I had talked her out of doing it, or so I'd thought at the time. Months after her death, her friend told me that she had in fact gone through with the boob job. I was devastated at my failure to convince her, at the fact that she hadn't wanted me to be with her because she didn't want my disapproval, at the fact that she'd lied to me, and maybe most of all at the suspicion that the implants could have triggered her cancer and if I could have stopped her back then, maybe she wouldn't have got ovarian cancer.

But it was easy then to see why she hadn't wanted me to come down for her cyst surgery. I was fussy, I worried, I was incompetent, I had been negative about her previous surgery... there was nothing she wanted or needed from me. I had never heard of the friend, Gretchen, she said would be caring for her; in that moment I felt, not for the first time but certainly for the most strongly, so unlike a twin that I could have been merely a distant relative of Karen's she just happened to mention the surgery to when catching up on the latest family gossip. She'd rather have someone I had never heard her mention before take care of her after surgery than her own twin sister, who had cared for her mother for three years after cancer surgery and during chemo.

It was easy to push me away -- she knew I wouldn't get any money for days away from the job on top of the ones I was already taking for Chicago. And Karen had always been a shrewd saleswoman, she sold me on taking my annual vacation, convinced me that she wasn't as important because it was, after all, minor surgery, and I was eager enough to be convinced. Despite my belief that things were not going to go well, I accepted her proposal, and it was Gretchen who went to the hospital with her, and Gretchen who called me that awful August day to tell me they had found cancer.

Starting again

Four years. I abandoned this blog four years and some days ago. Trying to inject some life back into my life, I took antidepressants, but found that I couldn't write. Or read -- anything longer than magazine articles seemed impossible to focus on. People kept piling books on me; they're all still sitting on the shelf. Some of it might have been the work as an editor; after reading books all day and trying to fix things in other people's writing, reading for fun is like the busman's holiday.

But fast-forward four years, and I'm no longer on the antidepressants, for good or bad. And I'm thinking more and more of writing, about a lot of things, but mostly about my sister.

So, I should go back and start at the beginning. I don't want to forget it all, even though it is still so hard to accept. It's the most important thing that's ever happened to me, and defines who I am now, here at the middle stages of my life.

People who are at least a little wise know you don't forget a death of a sibling easily. They know you don't just get on with things. There aren't a lot of wise people in my life anymore; by now, everyone expects that I'm supposed to be back to normal. It's been five years, after all. I don't think any loss is that simple, but the loss of a twin makes it so much harder. To figure out how to stand on your own two feet instead leaning on that other back, doing whatever you do together, is something no one ever prepares you for as you discover what twinship is about, every day of your life.

Now I've discovered different things about that twinship as I've gone along without it. What it meant to me being part of that pair, and as an individual. And the nice thing about abandoning this blog is that now there is no one out there who remembers it, and I can write to my Imaginary Reader, to borrow a phrase from a friend. I can tell you, Imaginary Reader, about what it was like to grow up with a twin, what she was like as a person, and what it was like to lose her, and in doing so, remember the things that were important.

So, back to that beginning. The day I first knew she was going to die was the day she called me to tell me that she had a cyst on her ovaries, but that "the doctor isn't worried since I've had them before." But she had a strange, lingering cough, she said, bronchitis that wouldn't go away. And I knew that it was cancer the moment she said that.

Our mom had died from ovarian cancer seven years before. I had learned as much about the disease as I could, and everything Karen told me about her health clued me in. Of course I couldn't say anything, other than that I was concerned, and I hoped that they would schedule the "minor" surgery soon, since they'd already delayed for a long time while the doctor waited for the cyst to disappear.

The thing about the way cancer goes is that you never stop believing, from somewhere deep inside that's impervious to reason or experience, a miracle will happen and the person with cancer will be cured. Even at the moment of their death, you believe that somehow, some way, they will open their eyes and you will all breathe a sigh of relief at this narrow escape from its terrible clutches. Even then, when I first heard she was having surgery, I believed Karen would die, and yet I didn't believe she would -- some way, she would escape it, because she was my twin, and you couldn't lose your twin. It was unimaginable.

Yet there I was, imagining it. Nebulous though it was, the possibility had formed in my mind; in my heart, I knew even then it would come true. It was a probability, a certainty. All I could do was tell her that I could come down if she wanted me to and see her through the surgery, and express my concern that it might be something more, so please be careful. It's pathetic how mundane we are, even when faced with something we know will be terrible.

After that, I waited. I never spoke of what I believed then, nor through the rest of her treatment and death. Over the course of my life, I've kept a lot of terrible secrets for others; this was the first one I kept for myself.