Grief Note

In the pantheon of weird life experiences comes this: I just mailed a one sentence note to my sister telling her our brother died late in January.

The gravity of the message required that I drive the note to the downtown post office to mail rather than clipping it on my mailbox for the letter carrier to take. He might drop it in the snow, I told myself, but what I really wanted was this tiny bit of ceremony.

My sister has been gone, as they say, for a long time. It is a peculiarity of our family, a remarkable stamina for estrangement. I know this from my own experience a long while ago of having been estranged from my parents, my brother, and my sister for many years. The dam on that estrangement broke finally because of my father’s gentle and heartfelt apology. “I’m so sorry” he wrote to me on a card. And, like magic, the estrangement healed, water rushing to flood a parched field.

Then it was my sister’s turn to divorce all of us. We turned around and she was gone. There was no loud fight, no threats, or pronouncements. She just untied her boat from our dock and floated off. We’d talk about why she left and where her boat might have ended up but, after a while, we stopped worrying about it. After all, people had left before and come back. I did.

I wrote my sister in the summer to tell her that our brother was very ill and not expected to live long. There was no response. I decided to read this as a positive development; she’d not returned the note to me unread like she had before. Perhaps she would reach out to him, I thought, but she didn’t and when he died, no one had her phone number.

“I have her address. I’ll write her a letter.” I made this offer but then wondered why. Was it my job to send my sister this news? Maybe she already knew. Maybe she played the weird game of internet searching for family members from whom one is estranged. Did they die? Is there an obituary? Or perhaps she could feel it in her bones. There are people like that, people who sense things. She might be one of them, I don’t know. I don’t know her anymore.

My husband and I have been cleaning our attic. Last week we found boxes of old slides from my family’s road trips in the fifties. I was a very little girl then, the baby of the family, wearing flowered dresses and saddle shoes with anklets. I had red hair and wore a cowboy hat. In the pictures, someone is always holding my hand. My brother and sister, nine and six years older than me, both blond, my brother with his butch haircut and my sister with her straight bangs and bob, both with plaid shirts and rolled-up dungarees, stand with me on the beach in California and on the edge of the Grand Canyon. There are shots of everyone laughing and making goofy faces, the late afternoon sun shining its magic light on a log cabin we rented in some national park. I remember that night. A bear came rustling through the metal trashcans.

That’s how we were. And now I have to write my sister a note to tell her our brother has died. A lot has happened in between times but I’m not sure what it all was. I’m so sorry would be the words I would say.