The best-laid plans

Restarting the blog was the best of intentions, then Dad fell shortly before Christmas, and it's been the world's worst roller-coaster since then. Up and down, from hospital to nursing home, one week everyone planning for his death, the next he's better than he was since before the fall. I had to move him out of his apartment, which brought back such terrible memories of clearing out my sister's house, and since so many things in his place came from her home, it was heartbreaking at times. But I'm going to try to keep at this thing.

I was at the part of the story where I found out she had cancer. Her surgery had lasted more than six hours; I knew when it went past the four-hour mark that it was going to be bad news. Co-workers and online friends all said the same thing, that it was routine surgery, not to worry, but I'd been down this road before and I knew the direction it went.

Gretchen, the friend she'd relied on to be caregiver, called me at work to tell me they'd found cancer throughout the organs around her ovaries -- they had removed the ovaries, uterus, other organs, and some of her intestine, hoping they'd found all the cancer. How it had progressed so far, I don't know -- other than that, as usual, the doctor had poo-pooed her lingering illness, just as my mother's doctor had with her, a woman who was never sick but whose terrible, visible illness had been ignored for months until it was too late.

I put the phone down, and went to tell my colleagues, who all insisted I should go home. I wanted to go down to San Diego and be with her, but as Gretchen pointed out, there wasn't anything I could do and she'd already convinced me to go to Chicago. I flew out the next day, unable to talk to Karen before I went because she was still in recovery, numb from head to toe. Arriving at the hotel, I found most of the people I'd thought of as friends, and who knew what was happening, ignored the situation and acted as though nothing was wrong, making me feel even more numb -- and as though I'd stepped into the middle of someone else's play and didn't know the lines.

Fortunately, my roommate, a good friend from San Jose, had had abdominal surgery earlier that year, and she was kind and supportive, full of information about what the next steps would be in Karen's recovery. She was unique among the people I knew, because she was willing to listen to me talk, not judging, not expecting me to suck it up and pretend it was all OK. I met up with my old BFF who now lived in Chicago, and we toured the city, trying to keep my mind off things, though it was never out of my thoughts. I finally got through to my sister and was able to talk to her, even in her confused and frightened state, as my friend searched for her parking ticket in a downtown garage, the sickly green lighting above the car mirroring my mental state.

I spent the whole weekend going through the motions of having fun, but all I could think of was my sister, how fragile she was and how terrified she must be after hearing all that news. The hysterectomy was wreaking havoc on her hormones, and of course that much trauma to her abdomen meant she wasn't getting out of the hospital anytime soon, since bowel habits are the big deciding factor on release. By Sunday evening, though, she actually laughed when she told me they wouldn't let her go home until she "could fart," and I was overwhelmed by relief that she could at least find something to laugh about in the face of her pain.

Chemo was the next step, after she was released. They would only give her a few weeks to recover from the surgery before they began pouring toxic, deadly chemicals into her ravaged body to kill the cancer, along with pretty much everything else in her system. Knowing how skinny and less than healthy she had always been, and thinking of what the surgery had done to her, I couldn't imagine how she could withstand this poisonous treatment. But they'd set her on this course, and she was ready for it, even if I wasn't.

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.

Ghost stories

If you were a ghost, you could follow me as I went shopping. We’d go to all your favorite stores: Barney’s, Mario’s, Kenneth Cole. I would hold things up for your approval, show you the latest styles, and you could sneer at them or ooh and aah, and no one else would know. I would laugh at your jokes and tell you stories, and everyone would think I was either crazy or talking on a wireless headset for my cell phone.

We would stop at a Starbucks and rest, even though you didn’t need it. I’d buy an extra tea in your honor that would sit across the table from me, untouched, and I would leave it there, because you never finished your teas, either. No one else would want to drink it, since you always put too much sugar in it. We would gripe about the state of the world, my job, our family, just for old time’s sake. I wouldn’t want you to feel like you didn’t belong.

You would tell me what to buy, and we’d smell soaps, perfume sprayed into your ghostly space, and I would put lotion on and offer it to you to smell. You liked the citrus scents the best. You could look at and smell all those things I bought you the last Christmas and birthday, the things you never took out of the packages because you were too sick.

Afterward we could stop at Palomino like always, and I’d pull up a chair in the bar, just for you. Bread pudding to share, and hot alcoholic drinks. I would put my feet up in the chair and tell you how much I miss you. There would hardly be any bags this time, because you are not really here to buy all those items we never needed, but always wanted.

As a ghost, you would still be practical, and bossy, and sharp. But you couldn’t slap my arm and I couldn’t step on your heels. The rain wouldn’t make you cranky and you would just tell me to suck it up when I complained that I was cold and wet. You would no longer be cold, would you? So, the world would be more pleasant. Except that you are gone.

But you would never feel sorry for yourself that you couldn’t try on those 7 For All Mankind jeans or that Me and Ro necklace I wanted to buy you. Well, maybe sometimes you would look away in your ghostly shimmer, and I would know that you missed this life -- the cold and the rain and the tea and the sore feet and the pressure of the holiday, and the one time each year we got to be twins and rediscover what we shared.

I want there to be ghosts, I want spirits of the dead to be real. I want to feel a breeze sweep over my hand that I know to be your touch, or see you as something fleeting and glowing out of the corner of my eye. But wanting doesn’t make it so, and ghosts elude me. It would not be the same if you were a ghost, even though you would be here next to me, inside me.

This half life

Most people who write about twins are not twins. They write from a perspective of study, often, a journalistic eye cast on something they won’t fully understand. Occasionally a creative writer takes the topic up for fiction. But they are always outside looking in. Rarely have I had a chance to see my own face represented, to hear stories like my sister’s and mine from writers who know what it means to be a twin.

Writers tend to get caught in the lines of cliché, stereotype, patness. They like the stories of twins who wear identical clothes, are impossible to distinguish, where both marry guys named Ed and always wear purple and live next door to each other and collect unicorn figurines. I meet some twins like this; mostly I meet twins like my sister and I, those with differences physical and emotional, who seek their own identities. Who like being a twin, but don’t think of it as their sole identity.

I spent my life like this, as so many of my twin friends did — searching for my own self, apart from being “the twins.” Someone with a distinct name, not one alliterative burst crammed together with an and. Someone whose abilities and talents were different from my twin’s, but complementary. I was eager to stand alone, be recognized for who I was. Who I was. But it’s not exotic or story-worthy to talk about such twins; we’re not much different than any other very close siblings who look a great deal alike. At least, I think it’s not interesting to outsiders driven by the image of otherworldliness twins provide.

We were not mirror images, the way so many people think of twins. We didn’t hold a hand up to the mirror to see it match perfectly on the other side. Even if we had been mirror images, we wouldn’t have wanted to be. We knew we were twins, didn’t need to show it to the rest of the world. Instead we were split in the middle, two sides of a coin, halves of a whole. Karen went one way, I went the other. We could still stick that hand out, only rather than a mirror showing me that hand placed against mine in perfect replication, we encountered each other’s hands, a left and a right, and held them there together when it suited us. Even though we’d gone different ways, I could look in a mirror and see, not her face reflecting, but my own, Karen standing behind me, just at the edge of my shoulder. A hand like mine was always there, waiting for when it was needed, in the space between us.

Now, though, there is no other hand to grab on to, hold on for comfort, guide me. There’s nothing there but dead space, cold air, darkness. I keep reaching out my hand but nothing touches me back. The only side of the coin is mine; there is a half-person, falling, falling. Unable to stay upright because there is no balance to be found with so much of me missing.

It would have been so easy if we could have been those cliché twins. She could have understood the things I didn’t say, the agony I felt for her but never had the chance to express. She would have known because we would have had a secret language like story-worthy twins share, or the telepathic communication everyone wanted, as I was growing up, to believe all twins have. I would not be left with the burden of unspoken love and fear and dread. And maybe, just maybe, I might have been some comfort in her last excruciating hours. But she didn’t know, and couldn’t hear me. We relied on words, like regular people. We were not special and mysterious and different. I needed to be in those last days, but couldn’t.

We were never really apart, no matter how much space or irritation or exasperation separated us. It was always our birthday, we remember, let’s do this. You always know there is that person, just off your shoulder in the mirror, who is you. When that half of you is gone, the mirror is such a black, empty space, and you fall into it, no hand to pull you back up.