Life Rafts

The oil painting hung in our living room for our entire lives, and in my parents' house long after we'd moved away.  The frame was much more impressive than the painting.  My mother loved it because she and my dad had bought it early in their marriage - their first grown-up purchase - real art.  I looked at it many times, but more often than that, I didn't see it at all.  It was there in our lives, but not something I noticed every day.

It is funny how we cling to things when the people we most want to hang onto are gone.  For me, it was my mother's pajamas and T-shirts: as if, when I wore them, I could pretend she was still with me.  Items of clothing that are comfortable, reassuring, and a part of every day life:  these were the items of hers that I clung to as if I could, just by wearing them close to my body, feel her back in my life again.  When my dad died, it was his flag and his ties:  items that defined the impressive, debonair, and imposing person he was in my life.

For my sister, it was the oil painting.  I can't pretend to know what kind of comfort she thought she would get from it.  I can't pretend to know its meaning in her life.  But, I did know how much she wanted it.  I knew that it was more than a painting to her.  I knew that it was her life raft.  And I threw it away.

The painting was promised to her by my mother.  In fact, my sister believed that it had been repaired after the fire that destroyed everything in my parents' home about seven years before she died.  It was kept in a number of black garbage bags and a large box meant for storing paintings.  Perhaps that box gave truth to the lie:  a painting in such a box must have been repaired.  But it hadn't been. 

I had to clean out my father's apartment before he died.  It was sad, it was backbreaking, and it was lonely.  I looked at things they had saved and saw them in the cold light of stark reality and my heart broke.  How could their lives be punctuated by these things I found around me?  They were more special than these things, they were everything and these things seemed like nothing.  And then I opened the box to the oil painting.

For me, it was like opening a door, expecting a portal to my childhood and my parents, and instead finding a decomposed corpse.  This painting which had looked over our lives was decrepit.  It was smoke damaged.  It had holes in it.  Removing the plastic bags led to the removal of paint which had seemingly melted into the plastic.  It was damaged beyond repair.  My heart fell for my sister, realizing that my mother had not attempted to fix the painting all those years ago, and that it was destroyed. 

I wanted to spare my sister, my baby sister, from that pain.  I got rid of it.  Better that I could tell her it was gone, if she should ask for it, then to have her see it like I did.  I didn't want her to feel burdened by it:  unable to enjoy it, but unable to get rid of it.  I thought I was being merciful.  My gut reaction has always been to shield my sister.  For many years, I was her surrogate mother, taking her with me on dates, to parades, and attending her parent/teacher conferences.  This was my role:  to protect her.  I did what I had always done.

People grow up and your truths are not always remembered as their truths.  Despite her place in my heart, in my life, my sister and I grew apart as she grew closer to my other sister.  Though she remained in my heart, I did not remain in hers and I am sure my place in her life became something that I would not recognize, any more than she could remember what her place in my life had been.  It was painful, but it did not prepare me for the annihilation to come.

As we were leaving the funeral parlor, after having buried my father, my sisters, united, confronted me about the painting.  I was shocked, I was hurt, and I was exhausted.  I told her that it was gone, and I tried to explain.  An ugly scene ensued.  They have not spoken to me since.  I am, simply, out of their lives.

Sometimes I am angry.  When I needed them the most, they forsook me for a painting.  Mostly, I am hurt.   We could be, to each other, what we cling to in order to feel our parents back in our lives.  We could be each other's life rafts.

There must be more to it.  There must be years of resentment, disgust and loathing behind this excoriation of me from her life.  I don't know.  But I will not give truth to another lie.  I will not let her hatred change what I feel in my heart.  She is still my baby sister and I will cling to that.