Wednesday, November 03, 2010

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.

No comments: