It’s the three month-iversary of my sister’s death, and I’m ready to talk about it a little bit now.

Genesis

My sister caught a cold, or maybe flu, in or around November of last year. It lingered, and by February it had progressed to pneumonia. She felt like crap but she was still functioning - taking care of her three kids (she was a single mom), working on her masters degree, going to work most days. She was a para-educator in an elementary school, working one-on-one with kids with behavioral issues. It was a tough job, and exhausting, but she was good at it.

On the night of March 14, she mentioned to her kids and boyfriend (romantic partner? Non-marital spouse? I don’t know how to express that relationship) that she had a headache and was going to go to bed early. Within 24 hours she was brain dead.

The bacteria from her lungs got into her brain, causing it to swell. The swelling killed her. That’s what we call bacterial meningitis.

Month One: Shock Punctuated by Horror

The last thing I told my sister, when her body was still alive but her brain wasn’t, was that I’d take care of her people. I made the decisions no one else could face making, about her body and her memorial service and her estate. I began shutting down her life, a depressingly boring and mundane process that mostly consists of calling banks. I announced her death on Facebook, where she had literally hundreds of friends, and fielded their expressions of sympathy and dismay. I ensured that her kids would be able to stay in their house and keep their dogs. I emptied her bedroom of everything she owned so that her ex could move in with them. I laundered her clothes - god, she had so many clothes - and hung them in a spare closet, packed up her mementos into boxes, kept everything safe and tucked away so that her boys could have it later.

I was glad to have something to do, a set of problems that I could solve.

Most of the time - maybe 90% - I existed on a surface where it was real, it had happened, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened, but I absorbed it and kept going almost on pure momentum. It was like the few seconds after a terrible accident has occurred, and it’s too late to stop it but the full catastrophe hasn’t unfolded yet - you’ve blown the stop sign and you’re about to crash head-on into an oncoming car - and all you can think is this is happening. It was like that, but it lasted a month.

From time to time, though, I fell through that calm surface into a realm of visceral and existential horror. Those were the times when it felt the least real - when I was actually facing the reality of it. The protective numbness would dissipate for a moment and I would think oh my god she’s actually GONE this can’t be happening I’ll never see her again I’m an only child now what the fuck.

Month Two: Depression

One day, I was calling banks and notifying them that she wouldn’t be paying them anymore because she was dead. Banks have lovely employees whose whole job is to take those phone calls. They’re professionally sympathetic.

Unlike the poor woman from my sister’s university, who called her phone to find out why she hadn’t turned up for class, and I answered and told her it was because my sister was dead, and the woman said, “oh…. I’ll make a note of that” and hung up on me because how was she supposed to respond to that?

Unlike the other poor woman who answers the phones at the property management office of my sister’s rental house, who has a child the same age as my sister’s twins and who cried so hard when I told her what had happened that she couldn’t speak for a minute. I probably ruined her whole week, because it was like 9am on a Monday morning.

Anyway, one day I was calling banks and then suddenly I couldn’t do it anymore. It hit me what I was doing - tidying up her life, folding it up and putting it away, just like I had her clothes - and I couldn’t make any more phone calls. The protective shell had shattered and I had to escape the ubiquitous reminders of her death. My husband took over what I’d come to think of as the deathwork.

I’d been spending most of my time in Portland, while my younger child was living at home alone and getting himself to school. My older child had flown out for the funeral and then gone back to college. Both of them were struggling, with their own grief but also with the reverberations of mine. Things were fraying. I had to go home, and there I fell into a funk.

There’s nothing interesting to say about depression. I’d been through it before and I was anticipating it this time, so I just let it happen. Grief is a matter of time, and time keeps going regardless; all you have to do is let it pass, and it will carry you inevitably to a new moment that might feel a little better.

Month Three: Okay Mixed with Euphoria, Sadness, Irritation, Anxiety, and a Dash of Mania

My sister was the one who got me into houseplants. My parents always had a few, on a bookshelf in the dining room window, but I never paid much attention to them. They’d always been there, which in a way is like they weren’t there at all.

She lived at home for a year or so while she was in college, and during that time she dated a stoner hippy guy. I think she picked the interest up from him, but at any rate around that time she turned her bedroom into a conservatory. Plants filled the windows and covered every surface. It was stunning.

Because I always wanted to do whatever she was doing, and because she took care of me like I was her own - there were eight years between us, I was in middle school and it was a bad time for our parents - she taught me everything she knew about taking care of plants.

All my adult life I’ve been trying to re-create my sister’s conservatory.

Maybe that’s why, in month three, I went on a repotting binge. I aspired to repot my plants annually, at least shaking their roots loose from the old, spent soil and giving them a new bed. I don’t think there’s been a single year in which I’ve actually done it. But by god, I was going to do it this year! Those plants were going to be nurtured like they’d never been nurtured before.

And then I decided to get a frog.

This didn’t come totally out of thin air. In the back of my mind I’d been developing an aspiration to have a bio-active terrarium with a herptile resident at the top of the food chain. It was purely theoretical, something that I’d like to do someday, when I had some terrarium experience under my belt and could commit to taking care of a small, fragile animal that - unlike my mammal companions - could not remind me that it needed to be fed.

In the wake of my sister’s death, I decided that day had come.

My sister, before she had kids, was a zookeeper. Large primates, specifically. That was her dream job since she was a child and by god, she did it. I was so proud of her. She trained dogs and worked with rescue organizations. She captured stray cats and then made other people (my parents, her boyfriend) adopt them. At various points she had lizards and fish. And frogs.

I always wanted to do whatever she was doing.

Don’t worry, one lesson I learned from her was to always take the responsibility of caring for an animal very seriously. I did not go out on a whim and buy a frog.

But I did go out on a whim and buy a frog habitat.

The frog will be coming later this summer. Stay tuned!

What Have We Learned?

Death sucks. Life is unfair. Time keeps grinding on even when you want it to stop, and it carries you with it like some hapless schmoe who got their pants leg caught in the gears. You keep going because you literally don’t have a choice - unless you decide to die, too. But then someone will have to call the banks, and you don’t want to do that to them.