47 Years

So while all the country is concerned with Hurricane Florence and its potential destruction in the Carolinas, our president is busy trying to convince us that the 3000 number of deaths in Puerto Rico is just a plot by the dems to discredit the "incredible job" he did on the island.  There should only be a few more than the 67 that he heard when he visited there right after the storm.

In the meantime, with hurricane season starting to get in full swing, he has taken $9 million from FEMA and $20 million from the Coast Guard -- the two most important entities after a hurricane -- to give it to ICE so they can build more barbed wire detention facilities so he can arrest more children.  I hope those of you who are still Trump supporters are happy with yourselves.

I should have written that last instead of first because I'm so angry, I'm now shaking from the frustration of it all.

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My sister died 47 years ago today, after lying in a coma (maybe brain dead?) for 7 weeks.  She had been shot by her partner, who first said that she (the partner) had decided to commit suicide and Karen tried to take the gun from her and in the process the gun went off accidentally.

Even someone like me, with all of my knowledge from crime dramas, can figure that shots to her chest and head would not result in a struggle over the gun, but it took her several days before she finally admitted that they had argued and Bernie had shot her.  People ask me what happened to Bernie and all I know was that she spent a year in a medical health facility to assess her ability to handle prison, but I don't know what happened after that.  My mother said she had never seen anyone so devastated by anything as she was.

Karen and I were 4-1/2 years apart (Bri and Lacie are 3-1/2 years apart) and were never close.  She was sports and tailored clothing; I was frills and girly stuff.  I was jealous whenever she decided she liked something I did (like Judy Garland, for example...when I started a scrapbook, she did too.  I was not very nice about it.)  

I'm sure we did things together, but today I don't remember them.  The only "uniting" things we had between us was our fear of our father and our frustrations with his mother ("Hon, like a good girl would you...")

When I went to high school, I chose the smallest Catholic high school in the city because I was shy and it seemed more "safe" for me.  It  was and I excelled during my four years there.

When Karen chose a school, she chose one of the larger school because she didn't want to compete with my "reputation"

In her senior year, she fell in love with a woman and became very secretive.  My mother thought she broke the relationship up, but when Karen moved to her own apartment with a "roommate" she made up a name and the woman was the same one she met in high school. She separated herself from the family for a long time, until she finally admitted who her roommate was. (These were the days before PFLAG and my parents agonized over "what they had done.") 

The roommate eventually broke Karen's heart and she found another partner, Bernie, whom we all loved for bringing Karen back into the family.  But they had their disagreements and Karen finally found another place to live. Bernie, angry, shot her.

Her death became my father's great sorrow and nobody else could share it.  My mother was afraid to cry around him.  He became obsessed with proving Berne's guilt and his anger was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back of my parents' marriage.

That seems like a whole lifetime ago and I truly have never felt great sorrow about her death, other than how much it hurt my mother.  But I do admit that in these Alzheimers years (and in the years when my parents' marriage was falling apart), I am sometimes angry with her for being safely 6 feet under.

I've been an only child far longer than I was a sister

Sibling Day

Today is apparently National Sibling Day.  People all over Facebook have been posting photos of their siblings and expressing love and/or affection for them.  I wish I could do the same thing.

Karen died in 1971, at age 24.  We were 4-1/2 years apart and so that would make me about 5-1/2 or 6 in this photo.  I was pregnant with David (who also died at age 24) when she died.  I never saw her after she was shot, nor during the six weeks she lay in a coma in a convalescent hospital, or later when she lay in her coffin.  My mother felt it would be too upsetting for me in my delicate condition.

I have many regrets about Karen.  I regret that we were never close sisters.  We were oil and water and I don't really remember doing much together, or doing those "sister things" that people on Facebook are remembering fondly today.  

We had different clothing styles, so we never giggled over clothes and borrowed from each other.  We never did each other's hair (my mother did hair for both of us until we moved out of the house).  I don't remember us ever sharing sisterly secrets.  We shared a room but I don't have those warm sister memories.  When I listen to my mother talking about her many sisters, I am sorry that I don't have that memory with Karen.  The only shared "thing" we had with each other was how to cope with our father's mercurial temper.

I also regret that we never had the chance to be friends in adulthood.  When she left home, she led a very secret life for about 2 or 3 years and rarely contacted anybody in the family.  We found out later she was living with a female lover which was why we were never allowed to visit her apartment.  She even made up a name for her girlfriend and it was not until she finally decided to come out to my mother that we learned that she was living with someone we actually knew.

When that relationship broke up and she had another girlfriend, Bernie was instrumental in bringing her back to the family. We all grew fond of Bernie. I have shared before that Karen and Bernie came for dinner one night, their first visit to our house. I made a Mexican dinner and Karen brought the best salsa I had tasted.  She was going to give me the recipe.  I remember so clearly that we had such fun that night and as she left the house I thought to myself "maybe now that we are adults, we can finally be friends."

Two days later, Bernie pumped several bullets into Karen's chest and head and she never regained conciousness.

I felt guilt during the days following her death, as we made funeral plans.  Everyone assumed this was a huge emotional tragedy for me and I felt guilty that it was not, that I was aware I was pretending grief because while I was sorry she had died, I did not feel the traumatic loss that I should have felt for the loss of my sister.  My pain at the funeral and following days was watching my mother suffering grief, and my father, stone cold and withdrawn in his anger toward Bernie, shutting everyone out and letting us know this was "his" tragedy, not ours.  

In the following months as my parents' marriage fell apart and both of them took to confiding in me, trying to pit one parent against the other, I remember standing at Karen's grave and mentally yelling at her for going off and leaving me all alone to deal with this mess.  (I don't so much get angry with her now, but every so often when the situation with my mother closes in, I do send her a few angry messages for not being here to help me make decisions about our mother)

Even today, I posted a message about not having a sibling to share Sibling Day and many kind people sent words of sympathy and I feel guilty because I didn't need sympathy.  It didn't feel right.  It felt that everyone felt more sorry for Karen's death than I did.  And that makes me feel sad and bad.

I may not have a sibling any more, but I made sure that my kids have siblings...even if they don't have as many as they used to.

Bwing, Bwing, Bwing

I'm thinking about my sister almost every day this month.  It's because of a commercial that runs a few times a day.  Probably only California people see it.  There is an old man, looking lonely and downcast, walking through the streets at night.  He enters an apartment building and slowly trudges up to his apartment.  When he gets there, he finds an envelope with a big red ribbon attached to his door.  Turns out it's a few "scratchers" from the lottery, given to him by his neighbor across the hall (who is watching through the peephole in her door). He gives a smile and walks inside his apartment, standing a little straighter, and with a little smile on his face.  

The commercial is accompanied by a recording of Debussy's "Clair de Lune."  My grandmother loved that piece.  I didn't find out until just a few years ago that she had been a pianist and quit cold turkey one day when she realized she was always the piano player at all of the parties she attended and never got a chance to "party."  She never touched the piano again and once offered to pay me $100 if I ever learned to play "Clair de Lune" so I could play it whenever she wanted to hear it. But, alas, it was way above my skill level (for one thing, my child's hands didn't stretch that far!!).

My father learned to play it (I don't think he got $100 for doing so), though he was a jazz pianist and this was the only classical piece he ever played.  I don't know how often he played it, but enough that I know the piece very well.  

In the commercial I watched, the background music goes up to the part where there are three trills.

Every time my father played "Clair de Lune," Karen would stand by the piano (she must have been fairly young at the time) and say "bwing! bwing! bwing!" on each of the trills.  I have never ever been able to hear that piece played without thinking of her when they get to the bwing-bwing-bwing part.   Interestingly, my mother, who has forgotten so much of her life, also remembers Karen doing that.  She giggled about it with me when I told her about the commercial.   We talked about what Karen would be like today, if she hadn't been murdered in 1971.

I stopped murdering the piano after two years of lessons, two years of dreading my weekly hour with Sister Mary Victor, of the famous ruler, which would land on your wrist or fingers if you didn't hold them right.  My father never forgave me for not living out his dream and to his dying day he talked about the money he "wasted" on my piano lessons. 

He somehow never remembered that he, too, had quit formal piano lessons and had taught himself to play "by ear." 

I never got over the guilt of having disappointed him.  And I never got over feeling sad that in all of the years that we were on this earth together, I don't remember anything that I ever did that made him proud.
But I remember how much he loved to hear Karen say "bwing, bwing, bwing."

Karen

It is very difficult to realize that today my sister Karen would have been 67 years old.  But, like David, she is permanently preserved at age 24.

My relationship  with Karen was convoluted, so much so that I remember feeling guilty when she died because I didn't really feel anything, at least nothing like everyone was assuming I was feeling.

I remember the morning when it happened.  Well, I sort of remember it.  I think I called her at work to ask her something, but she hadn't arrived yet, then my mother told me there had been an accident and she was being taken to the hospital, then I called her office back to let them know she would not becoming to work.

I was pregnant with David at the time.  Walt and I went to San Francisco and met my parents at the hospital.  Karen was in surgery.  We still didn't know what exactly had happened.  The story was that her partner, Bernie Maes, was with the police.  Bernie said that she (Bernie) had decided to commit suicide and Karen tried to stop her by grabbing the gun she held. The gun went off and Karen got shot.

The doctor described the injuries to her brain and all we were concerned about was would it affect her fine motor skills, since she loved photography so much.  It never occurred to us that she would actually die.

Later, of course, it was clear that was not the story, as Karen had been shot three times, once across their bed, and twice with Bernie standing over her and shooting down at her.  

The argument was over Karen's decision to leave the relationship.   She had found a place somewhere else, where her dog wouldn't have to be locked up all the time (Schroeder was a miniature Schnauzer and Bernie hated dogs, so she made Karen keep him locked up at all times).  I don't know what else went into her decision to kill my sister.  I also don't know what her ultimate punishment was.   She was under mental observation for a year and then I think I heard that she served five years in prison.  We really didn't try to keep track of her.

Karen was in a coma for several weeks and ultimately died of a kidney infection.  I never saw her after she was shot because my mother was afraid that it would be upsetting for my pregnancy.

We lived together for many years, as kids, of course, but I don't remember ever feeling like we had a close sister relationship.  We really were oil and water.  I was girly and bookish and Karen was a tomboy.  We shared a bedroom and I don't really remember us ever whispering secrets to each other or doing sisterly things.  I'm sure we did.  I just have never been able to remember them.   It seems impossible to believe now, but I used to get so angry with her for being messy, when I was trying to keep our room neat.  (You may all laugh at that)

Maybe it was the spectre of my father that kept us all on our toes and prevented intimacies among us.  I always seem to paint my father as a monster and he really wasn't.  He never beat my mother, I never saw him fall-down drunk (until his last year), and we had a lot of laughs with him. He rarely spanked Karen or me (but did beat her pretty badly once) But he created such an atmosphere of tension in the house at all times, that it was impossible to get away from it.  We never knew when something good would turn instantly into something bad. It is the bond that I feel with my mother today, but it's a bond I can't mentally recreate with Karen.

Karen and my father both had volatile tempers and I remember so many evenings when they would start arguing at the dinner table.  I learned to eat very quickly and leave the table as soon as possible to avoid having to sit there and watch them yell at each other.  Karen had a very strong sense of social justice and she and my father disagreed on most things.

I remember once when she came home to say she was going to the movies with a man who worked on the cable car she rode every day.  He happened to be black and my father found him at the cable car after he got off work and told him that he did not believe the races should mix and he could not date his daughter.  Karen was furious.  

I often wondered how he felt when Karen went off to live with a woman she had fallen in love with. The woman's name was Vicki and I was kind of on the fringes of all that happened because I had moved out of the house by then, but Vicki managed to separate Karen from the family.  (This was before the formation of PFLAG and my parents wondered where they had gone wrong)  The story Karen told all of us was that she had a roommate named Paula, but nobody ever met Paula, nobody was every permitted to visit her or even see her apartment.  

It wasn't until Vicki dumped her for another girl that the story came out who she really was.

Bernie was good for Karen.  She actually did a lot to heal the rift between Karen and the family.  I liked Bernie.  We all did.  Even my father did....well, up until she shot Karen in the head.

Even with the tragedy of her death, I have never forgiven her for one thing.  When my parents moved out of San Francisco, my father was going to get a dog.   He had wanted an Irish Setter all of his life and Karen and I were going to go in together and get him one.  This would finally be the thing that I could do for him that would make him like me, I felt.  But then I got a call from Karen.  She and Bernie had found a fuzzy little puppy and had rescued her and were calling from my parents' house, where my father was just ecstatic about his puppy.  It was the ultimate one-upmanship that I was never able to recover from.  Forever more. my father talked in glowing terms about how Karen had given him his beloved dog and nobody ever remembered that getting him a dog had been MY idea in the first place and how angry I was that Karen hadn't called so that we could have given him the dog together.

I have twice become very angry with Karen for dying, over the last 40-some odd years.  I remember standing at her grave and mentally yelling at her during the last days of our parents' marriage, when I was pitted one against the other and I felt so alone.  Why wasn't Karen there to share all the bad stuff that was happening?

The other time has been this past year, trying to get our mother settled somewhere.  Now that she is settling into Atria, it's not so important, but trying to make decisions I so often wished that I had her to confer with.  Ed was there, of course, and so was Walt, but really I felt the decisions to be made were up to me and I desperately wanted Karen around to talk to.

So, Karen...wherever you are...I hope you've hooked up with Paul and David and that you have a good birthday, with lots of angel food cake.  :)

Rhyme Time

I guess you would call Swap Bot a social media site.  It's where people who like to send "stuff" to other people gather.  Not being a crafty person, I don't participate much, but I do, from time to time, sign up to participate in mostly pen pal sorts of activities.

Yesterday, for example, I wrote a letter for "Appreciation of Mothers."  The idea was to send your favorite "Mom" memory to another person on the list.  I wrote the person I was paired with a brief history of my mother and included my favorite memory, which is the sight of her sitting at a table (I have dozens of pictures of here sitting at various tables) peeling apples in preparation for making an apple pie.  She was one of those who peeled her apple in one strip and she saved the peelings for Karen and me, and we loved to sneak those thin slices of apples, all sugary and cinnamon-y.  She made her own crust from scratch too, and made little sugar pies for us out of the left-overs.

It's sad that she doesn't remember how to cook any more and that the height of her "creativity" these days is deciding which of the "green boxes" in the freezer she will microwave for dinner...if she remembers to eat.   She sometimes doesn't.

On Easter, we are splitting up again.  Walt will go to his brother's house, as will their sister, and be with the big crowd there. I will fix dinner for my mother, who doesn't like large crowds any more.  I was going to make a small roast lamb for her, since we both love lamb.  But the small roast I found today costs $35 and I decided perhaps is a better choice!

Another SwapBot swap that I signed up was to send a poem to 3 people on a post card.  I am not a poetry person, but I thought it would be an opportunity to introduce my 3 partners to the works of my sister Karen.

After she died, we found a bunch of poems that Karen had written and in the year after her death, I typed them up and had them bound into a book to give to both my mother and my father.  I used one of them to print on the back of this postcard:

This is the poem, written April 7, 1970, that I printed on the back:

The fog rolls in under the Golden Gate
And, spreading her fingers wide,
She reaches out to touch
Every nook and cranny of the city

Enveloping alll, she covers them
With a blanket of refreshing dew.

I walk out at twilight,
Reach out my hand,
And greet the moist fingers of fog
Which surround me

Choosing the poem, however, made me read through the whole book again.  It's a short book.  She didn't leave a lot of poetry, but she seems to have written poetry when she was at her most "down."

Karen came out as a lesbian in her senior year in high school and she moved in with a partner.  The partner was an older woman and the story I was told was that she picked up young girls and then when they got older, dumped them for someone else.   It sounds like the sort of stereotypical stories that floated around in those days, before PFLAG, before gay pride, when police were still raiding bars and throwing gay men in paddy wagons if they looked at other men at all.  My parents were still thinking they had done something wrong.

She kept a very secret life with her first partner, but her poetry reflects the pain she suffered,

"Why why, WHY?  Why can't life be simple and sweet, and uncomplicated," she asked at one point.

In a poem called "Night" she wrote,

Night is the time when I miss you most
At night is when to have you near means so much--
Not caressing me or even touching me-- But to
Know that all I need do to fine you -- to feel your warmth --
Is to reach out-- and find you there.
That I miss!
Good night, you in the next room.

She wrote

To hold a hand
To feel its strength
To know its warmth
To experience its soft caress
To respond to its pressure
To know that hand like your own
To recognize it in a dark room
To have it withdrawn
To miss it when it is gone.

The book is full of such sadness, such isolation at a time when she was supposedly in a happy relationship.  The last poem says it all

empty words
written on an empty page
signifying nothing
from an empty brain

I wish David had known her.  This is the stuff he would have written, and would have talked with her about.

She eventually found another love in her life and we were happy because Karen seemed happier than she had been in a long time, and even came back to the family,briefly and we had the potential of being friends for the first time in our lives.

Until her lover shot her in the head.  She died September 13, 1971, when I was pregnant with David.  I often thought, through his growing up years, that somehow she had been reincarnated in him...he was as frustrating as she was.  

I miss ya, Karen.

Siblings

One of the questions at That's My Answer this morning was about how well you get along with your siblings.

As I have explained before, my only sister, who was 4-1/2 years younger than I, was murdered in 1971 by her partner. I have suffered a lot of guilt about Karen's death over the years.

A lot of the guilt stems from the fact that she and I were never close. We shared a room but were always at odds with each other from her birth. I don't remember any wonderful sister moments. In high school, she took up with a woman and pulled away from the family. It was more of a stigma to be gay then and the whole fact of her being gay, which we only suspected for a long time, was a big issue for the family, until she finally confessed to my mother (but never spoke with me about it).

We were all relieved when she was dumped by her first partner and met another woman, the woman who eventually killed her, who seemed to be very nice who kind of brought Karen back into the family again.

But by that time I was married and raising children. Karen was hardly on the radar. It seemed that every time we got together there was underlying tension around.

But the last time I saw her, when she and her partner came to dinner, we had such a wonderful time and the thought in my mind as she and her partner drove away was "that was a lot of fun--maybe now that we are adults, we can finally be friends."

A week later she was in a coma, from which she never emerged and two months after that she was dead.

My guilt comes from the fact that everyone assumes this was a huge tragedy in my life and, in fact, it was not. I don't remember crying about her death. I remember being angry with her for dying when my parents' marriage broke up a couple of years later because of the emotional upheaval I was going through by myself, which I felt should have been a shared experience....or at the very least a bit easier if we could have shared it.

But lately I'm surprised to find that I miss her. I never thought I would say that.

I thought about her a lot during the wedding in D.C. recently. One of the things I love most about the Sykes family is how close they are. Walt and his siblings are extremely close and have been brought even closer together by the failing health of their mother.

Walt and his sister are huge text-buddies, in the weird shorthand that both of them use.

As we sat at Steamers on the day after the wedding, and those of us "Hour Baur widows" sat there watching the 3 Sykes siblings chatting incessantly, I missed my sister. I missed having a sister to talk with, someone who has known my entire history.

1947

On Cousins Days, I listen to Peach and Kathy each talk about their sisters. Both have difficulties with their sisters, but they have sisters. Karen has been gone so long we seem to forget she ever existed.

I watch the closeness of my own children, and the support they are to each other, even if they don't see each other all that often.

I don't know how my life would be different if Karen hadn't died. But somehow I know that it would have been different and I'm sorry I missed the chance to find out how.