I was right in the middle of 2 things the morning of August 4th. One was the third part of a wrap up of StokerCon 23 and the next installment about my solo CD Blood and Cigarettes. By the early afternoon however, I had received the news that my older sister Adina had died. She lived in the UK with her husband Clive, their two dogs and their cats.
She’d not been well the past year or two, with a pile of ailments that ranged from the banal to the downright baffling. Clive had taken the dogs for a walk and when he returned, my sister was unresponsive. She was just gone. I had talked to her on August second in what would be our last conversation. It lasted about ninety minutes. It was a great, funny and lovely talk.
I’ll save that story for another time. It’s a good one for sure, but I think this one is better. This is the story of when I knew my sister loved me.
I think it was either third or fourth grade. I was walking out of church which was a weird occurrence for a regular school day. The kid in the class above me, who also happened to be the bane of my existence, waited for me outside. He went by a name I won’t put here as I’m fairly sure he’s still alive but let’s call him Dipshit. Now, Dipshit had made it his personal mission to torment me all throughout grade school and from pretty much first grade until he graduated in 1984, he was a constant source of fear. Anyway, as I was walking out of the church, he came out of nowhere grab me from behind and was offering me up as a punching bag to his stupid ass cronies saying “Free punches.”
Unseen by me, my sister had watched the whole thing happen and she started to walk (not run or move quickly, but to walk) slowly in our direction. As she was doing this, she very quietly began to assemble her flute.
“Let him go,” She said.
Nothing happened for almost a full minute. Dipshit whipped around and faced my sister. She had a look on her face that was terrifying. I’d had that look directed at me, so I kind of already knew what it meant but I’d never seen her give it to somebody else. He was holding me from behind, so I couldn’t see his face, but the next words out of his mouth indicated what it probably looked like.
“We’re just having some fun with him, Adina.” He said. There were all the appropriate stutters and voice shakes.
She repeated her original sentence which was let him go Dipshit Except, she emphasized every.
Single.
Word.
With each word, she raised her arm holding the flute a little higher and took a step closer filling the space between us; the three of us.
He let go of my arms and slowly backed away. She never took her eyes off of him. I don’t even think she looked at me once. She asked if I was okay, but not in a way that was warm. I said I was and she said grab your bookbag and let’s go home. She watched Dipshit walk away with his shitty pals.
I knew that this wasn’t going to be the end. It was an extraordinarily small grade school that we all attended and the chances were more than likely that I was going to see Dipshit sooner than later. But for the moment, my big sister had saved me.
It was this incident that changed the direction of our relationship. Up until that point, my biggest bully was in fact, Adina. She had done stuff that, in hindsight was absolutely hilarious; just not during the time. Like the time she taught me to do a handstand at the head of the stairs and then pushed me down my head bouncing off every step. She would then say, with great acting skill.
“Oh, the baby fell.”
Hilarious
I never really told her or went over how much she became a hero to me after saving me from that particular beating. It would probably pick up later on in the year if not the week. I’ll always remember that as the day everything changed between my sister and I. She didn’t stop the bullies from bullying because that’s what they do. They’re assholes like that. It’s also subsequently why, to this day, I do not like any kind of bullying whatsoever. But what Adina did is what older sisters do too.
“No one fucks with my kid brother….well, except me.”
Now, it feels kind of like real life has become the bully and I got to watch it bully my sister for the last 20 or so years. Except… the universe can’t be a bully because it’s not actively doing anything to bully you or me. Life is just what it is-life-and you either stand up to it or you take all of the shit that it has to give out.
And rest assured it has a lot to give out.
My sister found a lot of solace in saying prayers. She was very much as devout a Catholic (as much as one could be with a mouth that would shame a sailor.) She may have spent close to 20 years living in the United Kingdom, but her New Jersey accent was stronger than when she lived in Jersey. I do not know how that is possible. (I’ve lived in Pittsburgh for over 20 years. I have not picked up the accent whatsoever, although I will confess to saying yinz every once in a while.)
But this isn’t about me. It’s about my big sister.
She was as devout of Catholic as she was capable of being and had recently taken to doing the rosary over the internet with my cousin Angela. It brought her a tremendous amount of comfort. She was always worried about how people perceived her. She would always apologize whenever she would talk to you, even if it had been only a day.
“I’m so sorry about that. Can you please forgive me?” That was a common thread in a lot of the conversations that I had with my sister and a lot of the conversations she had with other people.
It wasn’t because of how we were raised. We had a long-term running joke that her and I were raised like veal and it was a good joke. It made people laugh and we would laugh too. But we weren’t kidding and it didn’t make it any less true. We had a crap childhood (and that’s putting it very, very mildly.) One of the things that occurred as a result of our childhood was that she never truly felt worthy of the love that people had for her. It is one of the saddest realizations that I ever had about my big sister. She didn’t feel loved no matter what you did. She just didn’t feel loved enough. It’s not anybody’s fault. (Well, it actually is, but another time…) That’s just what she felt. That’s what happens with childhood trauma.
She loved her husband Clive. She loved their pets. She loved her mother in law and her brothers in law. She loved that she lived in the UK. She loved her friends and her cousins, her aunts and her uncles. She loved her nieces, her sister in law and she loved me too.
If you knew her, she likely loved you, too. Just like we all loved her.
She doesn’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. Somewhere, she knows all of this now. She’s safe, and she knows she’s loved. She’s hopefully with her aunts, uncles, her friends and family that had gone before her.
No one toxic, no one shitty.
Not anymore.
Leave a Reply