Unhappy new year

We mark the time with calendars. Holidays and weekends, “the time we went to...”, start and end dates. Every year life is filled with New Year’s resolutions, lists of what happened the previous year, plans for the future. We celebrate the going out, the coming in, give it weight in how we plan our lives, what we wish and hope for.

Death becomes a different calendar, illness a different kind of resolution. After loss, our calendar shifts: no New Year’s Eve or Day, no holiday season, encompasses the time we keep to ourselves. The Before ended the day of the death; the New Year began just after. A new life without them, and our resolutions become about getting through the day, about not breaking down or floundering helplessly. Even if we don’t want to, we still keep time that way: It was this time last year that I lay in the guest bedroom, listening to her cry in pain and fear, while outside the neighbors blew off fireworks and yelled “Happy New Year!” This time last year she was in her final chemo, shrunken and waxy and haunted. This time two years ago we found out she had cancer after six hours of surgery.

Every Wednesday night I find, unbidden, that emotionally I am in a hospice room, begging my sister not to die. It's hard to sleep that night. My internal calendar knows it was the day and marks it for me, without my wishes. The calendar doesn’t hold meaning for me other than how I date my checks; instead, my months are numbered by their relation to the illness and death. New Year is now March 9: before there was a life with my twin; after there was the new year, new life, new world.

Resolutions aren’t made for the new year when someone you love is ill. Resolutions come with the news. We will fight the cancer. We will find a cure. We will get through treatment. We resolve to survive and have a positive attitude and feel better someday. Like all new year’s resolutions, they are a lie, and rarely accomplished. But lists make us happy. Resolutions of how we will bear the illness make us feel like we can do something, that it isn’t in the hands of negligent medical people and creeping time.

Time is your enemy and your friend. Time will let you forget, just a little, eventually. Some day. At least, we have to believe that, just like we believe our resolutions. But time moves fast in illness, and the calendar pages get ripped off, faster and faster as it progresses, till suddenly there is no time left. Only the backing of the calendar pad remains. It’s a new time, your After. No fireworks and party hats and champagne. This new year isn’t celebrated. But it’s marked, forever after, always in your mind even if you aren’t aware. It’s a calendar only you carry with you, and it has no holidays or weekends off.

Lost holidays

The birthdays of all my immediate family fall near a major American holiday. Throughout our childhood, my twin sister’s and my birthday was heavily associated with turkey and mashed potatoes rather than cake and ice cream. My father’s, two days after Christmas, was disappointingly linked to post-opened package enervation; his gifts usually last-minute shopping trips by frantic children to find something before Christmas time off that would be small enough not to break the already-spent bank, yet large enough to make it appear we’d gone to some actual effort. My mother’s birthday fell in between us all in early December, a holiday hybrid animal, like the reinelope or the turkdeer.

Mom devoted her efforts to making sure my sister and I weren’t forgotten in the Thanksgiving crush, and we in turn tried not to forget hers. She was especially mindful of our birthday because as twins, we received a double dose of being ignored. Relatives appeared to think of my sister and me as one sole unit and frequently showered us with gift — singular, because of course sharing one gift must be all right if you were a twin. Everyone knows twins want exactly the same things and share. If they were generous enough to give us two separate gifts, those were identical gifts. My parents inadvertently compounded with their fear of hurting our feelings, matching gifts as well and cementing the idea in others’ heads. If Karen wanted a hair dryer and curling iron set but I wanted a stereo, we got the beauty stuff. Parity was perceived in this, equality, but our individual happiness was not even a consideration, because we weren’t seen as individuals.

What made it worse was that most of the time, our birthday came on, or very close to, Thanksgiving, the most-traveled American holiday, the one everyone takes off from work, the big cheese of big days that spans religious affiliation for the most part. Only every decade or so would the birthday be far enough apart from the holiday, by a week or maybe five days, allowing us to believe that our day actually mattered. For the most part, most people forgot it. They were busy getting the food, planning the trip, dealing with the challenges of family and friends.

So, even the dreaded split gift was something, because there was at least some kind of acknowledgement in it. I’m fairly certain my mother had a lot to do with that — I could easily envision her on the phone taking care of the get-together information, telling whomever was showing up not to forget the twins’ birthday.

I loved it when our birthday fell on Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday; I love that it’s centered around food — my favorite food — and that it’s not overtly religious or gift oriented. Trading cake for pumpkin pie was a happy sacrifice, and my birthday status usually got me out of the hard work in the kitchen afterwards, if my tryptophan-induced coma didn’t. It was an added festivity, and I figured that if you had to suffer your birthday around the major fall holidays, it might as well be on this one.

It wasn’t until I got older that I realized a sense of loss; as Mom got sick and family became less central to my life, acknowledgement of our birthday slipped. On e-mail lists where members’ birthdays are acknowledged, mine is absent greetings except from a few kind people. It’s then I miss my mom’s behind-the-scenes efforts, her understanding of what it means to be forgotten because of a holiday.

Dad’s birthday, on the other hand, was a scramble. Although we knew it was coming, somehow it inevitably took pole position behind Christmas, and we’d frantically run after gifts and cards like sale-day shoppers wrestling for bargains. He never complained about the haphazardness of his gifts, and I often wondered if he even cared, as unsentimental as he was.

When Mom first got sick, though, holiday birthday dilemmas disappeared, replaced by graver concerns. What you got, or whether you were acknowledged, didn’t matter much anymore. Suddenly the favorite holiday in our house, Thanksgiving, became an peculiar test of ingenuity when Mom could no longer stand the smell of turkey. During her first chemo treatments in the hospital they gave her turkey dinners every day. After her first few visits, she brought her own yogurt and nutrition drinks to stash in the nurses’ refrigerator, and checked the box on her bedside form that said she did not want meal service. Yet every night when I visited her during treatment, some poor, rabbit-in-the-headlights orderly would bring her a turkey dinner tray, and Mom would become unglued at the sight of it. Or whiff, I couldn’t tell which came first.

The idea that you would feed anything but the blandest, least odorific food to a patient in serious chemotherapy treatment struck me as especially odd, but it wasn’t until I stood in a hallway and begged them to please stop bringing her turkey dinners, yet watching helplessly as they showed up again bearing their tray laden with poultry and potatoes and stuffing, that I understood her nearly hysterical reactions to turkey. When she was out of treatment the following Thanksgiving, it was the eight-year interval where Karen’s and my birthday fell on the holiday. My sister flew up for weekend, and instead of bemoaning our turkeyless fate (in a household that loved its turkey the way a glutton loves a dessert tray), we turned it into a joke, teasing mom about how fortunate it was that she’d lost her sense of smell so we could cook what we wanted, creating a ridiculous menu for her so she could eat what she wanted, and pouring her nutrition drink into a wine glass.

Mom loved to hit the wine during the holidays, and halfway through dinner preparation she usually started fanning herself, complaining about how hot it was. That year I poured her drink for her and fanned myself, asking her if it was really hot in there or what? She was a shell of a person by then, wasted and fried and skeletal but still possessed of a sense of humor, and I think she enjoyed being mocked about the turkey. It reminded her, it seemed to me, that she was alive enough for her kids to make fun of her.

These birthdays and holidays now are foreign territory. Without Mom’s cheerleading, the twin birthday is usually forgotten and it feels lonelier somehow, even though I know my sister will always remember the day with me. Dad doesn’t much care whether he celebrates his, other than to spend time with people. Mom’s day, is something I celebrate privately — sans turkey — but it’s still an important day, weightier now because she is gone. Holidays come and go, sometimes acknowledged, though more often lived as just another day, one we’re fortunate to have off work. Any holiday with turkey is a good one, especially if there’s a pumpkin pie or a birthday cake involved — or both — but I can never eat turkey now or open a present without thinking of her, and realizing that the celebration of these days is gone.


*****

It is a few years after I wrote this piece now. My twin is gone, and I’ve made it through the first birthday I’ve celebrated in my life alone. There was turkey on Thanksgiving, but no thanks, and in a few days will be Christmas. We’ve passed Mom’s birthday, with Dad’s rolling up behind the holiday.

To say that it is empty is such an understatement that it makes me laugh, yet I have no vocabulary to express what it is. Something so dry and dark and hollow that it can’t really be described. Gifts that I wished I could split with her, gifts that I wished I could have bought her, but nothing to show for it.

I attempted to make our birthday a holiday of my own, a sad one of memorial, and brought flowers to the cemetery where Mom and Karen are buried. The sun shone and the air was cold, and I remembered how much she hated that, how bitterly she complained when she came home to Seattle so we could spend our birthday together, and go shopping in the post-Thanksgiving sales.

I think others believe that time will heal this, that once the first one is endured, the next ones will be easier. But I know they won’t. There is nothing here I can split, or share, and it is lost in the loss, without meaning or purpose.

Things do not remember you

From a writing group exercise, The smallest thing I’ve ever experienced.

D, my sister’s friend, puts one of her tiny, thin silver rings on my finger. We’ve been going through all Karen’s jewelry, tagging and bagging for the garage sale the next day. I don’t wear jewelry much anymore — I have a ring worn all the time because it was handmade for my Aunt Annie, who gave it to me when I was a teenager. Once in a while I wear earrings or necklaces, but rarely. D thinks I should have this ring to remember Karen by; I didn’t take the last ring she put on my finger, a few days after Karen died. Instead, I gave it to her grieving friend who’d arrived too late to say goodbye, who couldn’t comprehend the empty rooms at my sister’s house, who was weirded out, like I was, to see so many people already wearing Karen’s jewelry so soon after she was gone.

It comforts them — attaches her to them — because she had so much jewelry and it holds strong associations. It represents her. There are hundreds of small plastic bags full of rings, earrings, necklaces, even a few pins and brooches, which none of us can remember her wearing in life. But this time, when D gives me the ring, I wait until her back is turned and put it in the bag with the other tiny silver treasures. I’m not that sentimental about things — when I’m done with them, I’m usually done. If I keep things, I keep them so they will provoke a specific memory. In a way those serve as the diary I don’t keep — they will give me a recounting of an event, a place, without my needing to write it down. They imprint their past on me, on their surface.

There are some things I will be sentimental over, but my tendency for sentiment is vastly different from others’, I know. D might not understand why I won’t take the ring, and it’s best to not try to explain. What I do keep is just as inexplicable: her shampoos, skin care, fragrances, makeup, a few stray items of clothing, and the cheaper décor items that she used in the less-seen spaces of her beautifully decorated home. Karen would laugh at me for taking her cheap, plain Target curtains and the inexpensive throw. She would bray derisively, “Those things? I can’t believe you’re taking that crap.” But the curtains were hers, and used in the room I stayed in when I took care of her, and the chenille throw was near her when she died. We shopped for the skin care, the beauty stuff, the Barney’s clothes, when she came to town because those were her favorite things to do. That was our annual treat: to spend our birthday buying things we didn’t need at shops we shouldn’t have gone to. It isn’t that she wore the clothes or used the creams, or that the fragrances conjure her memory, because the memory is still so painful to me I prefer to not conjure it at all. It only matters that these things give me touchstones: dates, times spent together, shared interests and passions. She wore the jewelry, but that isn’t what binds her things to me. Whether she used something or not, it holds value when it has a memory I can hold on to.