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My dear sweet sister Mary died on December 10th. After our mother died in 2001, Mary was the closest thing I had to a mother. I am the youngest of nine children, and, although I still have several living siblings, this loss - especially so close to the holidays - has been very hard to bear. I remember Mary as a fiercely independent woman who loved to truly experience life, travel, have adventures, and had a marvelously demented sense of humor. Her decline and death has left a hole in my heart, and it will take a long time for that to heal. I would like to share with you the words of remembrance that I wrote the night Mary passed away. May you all have someone like Mary in your life:
My eyes are bone-dry. I've cried out all the tears I can today. My eyes
actually ache and burn. And there's this tumor of discontent - uneasy,
nausea-inducing discontent - roiling in my gut.
Did I spend enough time talking to her? Telling her I loved her?
Was there more I could have done to make her last years more enjoyable?
Should I have stopped being a coward about back pain and made sure I drove up to New Jersey more often to see her?
The first year I lived in Maryland, I drove up to New Jersey as often as I could. I had a 1989 Ford Escort station wagon with no air conditioning, and I drove up and down I-95 with my left arm dangling out the window the whole way. I did this enough times that year to actually permanently cook my left arm into a darker pigment than the right arm. It's very attractive. But, honestly, it was worth it. I had a community of family there. And then, when she was still vibrant and able, Mary was at the center of it.
Mary was fun. She took me on my first motorcycle ride (right before she had a horrific accident - that was when I was a little kid.) She had a Triumph Spitfire sports car, and I believe she left the transmission (or the engine itself) somewhere on a New Jersey highway shortly after purchasing it. At one point, she headed west and lived in a valley outside of L.A. for a while. She drank Tab obsessively and smoked (much to everyone's dismay) Benson & Hedges menthols by the carton.
Mary came to visit me when I lived in Russia. She came over with our sister Barb, and we had a blast. Of course, that was in 1990, and some Central Asian guys on Red Square thought my sisters - with their Jersey uniforms of floral leggings and bright t-shirts - were hookers. I laughed my ass off. Looking for souvenirs in Izmailovsky Park, Mary chose the most bizarre and unlikely thing possible - a real dead squirrel, stuffed, posed, and glued onto a tree branch. Some sort of snap binder clip had been inserted into its paws, and it clutched a pack of cigarettes and stared with wild glass eyes. She carried it home in this awful Pepto pink box. I have no idea how the hell she got it through U.S. Customs.
Several years ago, while vacuuming, Mary bumped the shelf where she displayed her Muscovite squirrel. All the fur fell off in one fell swoop.
Naked dead varmint? Not so cute. Citizen Squirrel was finally given the Hefty bag salute and removed from the premises.
After Mom died, Mary had the unenviable task of handling the estate. There wasn't much to the estate. Mom had nine kids. We were like a constant plague of locusts. But it was a mess nonetheless. That was back in 2001. Springtime.
In the wake of 9/11, when the airlines were desperate to get passengers back in the air, United had a frequent flyer mileage reward sale. From my old days of flying back and forth between DC and Uzbekistan/Kazakhstan/YouNameAStan, I had a pile of miles. With the sale, I had enough to buy tickets for myself and Mary to Thailand.
I have great affection for Thailand, and I thought my sister would really dig it. She did. I booked a fabulous hotel in Phuket (a hotel that later would be swept away in the devastating 2004 tsunami) for $28 a night. We ate and slept like royalty and shopped like there was no tomorrow. I
