Thinking of Her

I took the Caltrain up to San Francisco today on an errand and went to a lovely tea house with my dear eldest daughter, about to launch into the world and, I hope, a stellar career. Her artwork is so beautiful, it wrings my heart and makes me glad that I have encouraged all my children to follow their dreams.

Sadness came to me, though, as I sat and looked out over a gorgeous San Francisco landscape, knowing how much fun it would have been to enjoy this lovely place with my sister. My sister's ashes were scattered at Point Reyes a short time ago, and this so much seals the finality of her brief life for me. At least my mother lived into her seventies, though much of it was spent in the misery of active drinking. My sister's life was such an abbreviation, and my heart breaks for this. So much of her existence was spent gathered around a single wish that never happened for her, a wish for a life with a man who ultimately cared nothing for her, whose love for her now boils down to dollars and cents. Her memory is a bill he would like to pay and be rid of. My sister was so much more than anything she believed about herself. I wonder if I dream of her in relation to mirrors because she so invested her self-esteem in what others thought of her.

Now she is fully gone, her ashes dispersed in a gray-white cloud over icy gray water. I am haunted by the idea of this finality, the fine dust of bone and carbon making a cloud in the tide, just for a moment, then vanishing, as if her life had only been the quickest of thoughts. This was her wish, to be scattered in this place of rough and silent beauty, but I wonder why--why no footnote of permanence, some testament to the fact of her life? My mother lies with her grandparents in the family plot, in Malden, Massachusetts; on my desk is a blue glass bottle filled with sacred earth from this place. Anytime I am on the East Coast, I can travel there and put flowers on my mother's grave. Anytime I am in Los Angeles, I can put blue and green carnations on my grandmother's grave. My daughter whispered to me over the phone when visiting the graves of our loved ones in Los Angeles that a single red maple leaf lay on my grandfather's grave, bright as a splatter of blood.

But my sister has no such place, no final mark to say, "I was here." She died alone, as did my mother, no one calling us in time, though I would have traveled across the world to hold my mother's hand at the very last, to cradle my sister in my arms as they unhooked her from life support. I am old enough now to have stood at the bedsides of the dead and the dying; when I was not even in my thirties, I held my stillborn son in my arms, saying hello and goodbye in the same instant. I would have done as much for the woman who gave birth to me and the sister who shared my life.

So I say to my sister, don't be afraid. Yes, the water is dark this time of night, the waves tall, as if in a painting brushed by Hokusai, the water black as squid's ink, but let it be your cloak, let the black water and the night air, pregnant with rain, give you a new body, fragile as the dome of a moon jelly. How often we looked for lights out in the ocean, thinking they were spirit lights, messages from a veiled world we thought we could almost glimpse. My two hands release you so that you may find the light, a bone-colored dove who flies away from me, easily into the silence, sure of its path.