About My Sisters

With the exception of members of the author's immediate
family, all names and identifying characteristics of individuals
discussed in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

Epigraph

Prologue

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Debra Ginsberg

Copyright

About the Publisher

february 2002

It's a week after Valentine's Day. Winter, such as it is here in southern California, is effectively over. The air is warm and dry enough to crackle with static electricity. I've had twelve long-stemmed red roses sitting on my coffee table since last week and they are still fresh. They are huge and beautiful and look as if they might live forever.

In South Africa, on the other side of the world, my mother's sister is dying.

My aunt, who has been fighting cancer for the last few years, is not an old woman. She has been ill for some time, it is true, but, until recently, it seemed as if she might have beaten her disease. It is only now, in the last month, that her death has become imminent. My mother spoke to her sister a few weeks ago in what turned out to be their last conversation. They discussed my aunt's illness but not her death. Now my aunt is in the hospital and no longer conscious. And my mother waits for a phone call.

Among us, my family has experienced few premature deaths. In this way, we have been very fortunate. My parents have also spent most of their adult lives physically separated from their families of origin. We have always been removed, by many miles, from the deaths of our relatives. I am almost forty years old and I have never been to a funeral.

Although she was a presence in my life and despite the fact that I saw her fairly regularly over the years, I have never been very close to my aunt. The constant geographical distance between us prevented the formation of a strong bond and it is impossible to know now whether or not one might have been created had we lived in closer proximity. I have spent more time thinking about her in the last few days than in the last several years combined. I grieve for my cousins, her children, although I can't truly imagine how they must be feeling. It is for my own mother, however, that I feel the greatest sadness. She is losing her sister. And the loss of a sister is one, in the selfishness of my sorrow, I can't envision.

I can remember a time before I was a mother. And, with some difficulty, I can picture a future when I am no longer a daughter. But I can neither remember nor imagine my life without sisters. As the eldest of five children, four of them girls and one of them our only brother, my role as sister will always be an inextricable part of my personal identity. All four of us maintain an exceptionally intimate bond with each other. We all live within ten minutes of each other and speak every day. This is not a recent phenomenon. My sisters and I have been close our entire lives. The four of us are hardly ever in unanimous agreement and our very different personalities prevent us from ever thinking with one mind. Yet, in our relationships, our work, the face we present to the world, in every day of our lives, each one of us carries some part of her sisters with her. I can't imagine my life without any one of them. Nor do I want to try.

In keeping with our disparate viewpoints, my sisters and I have been responding to our mother's grief in different ways. But we are united now in the desire to comfort her. This is why we are gathering to take her out for lunch and shopping today. Despite the frequency with which we see each other, we are seldom together at the same place and time and never go shopping as a group, so this is an extraordinary circumstance.

We assemble at my mother's house and, after some debate, decide to ride in one car. My mother seems subdued but not depressed. I've made her a mixed CD of all the songs that have been going through my head over the last couple of weeks. They are songs that were always playing in our house when I was growing up. There's a bit of Leon Russell, a little Sly and the Family Stone, some Beatles, Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, and the Staple Singers. We listen to it in the car, and my mother says, “This is lovely.”

Nobody talks about my aunt, although she's there, in the air among us.

I am impressed by how well my mother seems to be managing emotionally. She is sad, yes, but not in a morbid way. I've been talking to her every day lately, after she receives updates on her sister's condition. Although she has clearly come to an acceptance of what is happening, she still expresses some surprise at the inevitable trajectory of this illness.

“She's a very strong woman,” my mother says. “She always has been. She didn't have to die this way. She's had a lifetime of bad advice, all of which she's taken as the gospel.”

For the most part, though, my mother seems philosophical and resigned, willing and able to let her sister go. I have begun to believe that my mother will get through what is euphemistically called “this difficult time” with heartache that will at least be bearable. My mother can be cagey about certain things, but I've never known her to hide her emotions. What she projects is
almost always what she feels. Still, I expect to see a crack in this calmness of hers. I anticipate a visceral expression of impending loss. I wait for tears.

That rupture comes now, before we can hit the freeway. One of us asks her whether we should go to Ikea or Nordstrom, and my mother leans her head against the window, hand to her mouth, and sobs.

The inside of the car rings with a chorus of “What? What is it?”

“I hate to think of her there, dying,” my mother weeps. “Alone. She's all alone.”

My sister Maya says, “She isn't alone. All of her children and her grandchildren are there with her.”

My sister Lavander says, “Don't feel bad because you aren't there. There isn't anything you can do other than what you are doing.”

My sister Déja says, “In the end, you have to go alone. There isn't any other way.”

I say nothing. Alone without her sister. This is what my mother means.

“Do you want to skip this outing?” Lavander asks her. “We don't have to go if you're not up for it.”

“Or we can just go to my house for tea,” Maya says.

“What do you think, Mumsie?” says Déja.

“I'm all right,” my mother says, wiping her eyes. “I'll be okay. It just hit me now. That's all.”

“Then you still want to go?” I ask her.

“The living must live,” she says. “And how often do I get to spend time with all my beautiful daughters?”

“All the time, actually,” Déja says.

“I mean
together
,” my mother says.

There is an uncharacteristic quiet in the car for a while after this, as we each shift around in our seats, wondering what to say or whether to say anything at all. And then, as if her memory has
opened in a slide show before her, my mother says, “When I was a girl, I had this friend Shirley who was an artist. We must have been about eighteen or so and she had a project she had to do for a class, a lino cut. She asked me to write a poem and she'd make the print to go with it. So I wrote this poem, ‘Four Thin Girls.' Shirley did a Modigliani thing with these four figures and she displayed it with the poem on one side.” She pauses as she looks at the print in her mind's eye.

“Do you remember the poem?” I ask her, and she recites it easily.

“Not a happy poem,” I say.

“It's not
un
happy,” she protests.

“What does it mean?” says Lavander.

“It's all of you,” my mother says. “I just remembered it and realized that the poem is about you. I didn't know then, of course, but those four girls are you. I saw all of you way back then. Four sisters. My girls.”

 

Less than a week after our shopping trip, my mother gets the phone call. And then she calls me.

“My sister died,” she says.

“Are you all right?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she says. “I'm okay.”

We don't talk about it again in any detail. We still speak on the phone every day, but there are no more updates. She is no longer waiting to hear. What is left now is to sift and sort through
the layers of emotion. My mother will do this on her own. As for me, I have been spending my time thinking about my own sisters and our relationships. I have been thinking about the nature and the quiet strength of sisterhood. My sisters and I are unique in our particulars. There is a fifteen-year span between the first and last, for example, and because of this, we have grown up in different generations. We share the same parents, but not the same parenting. Our family lives closer and spends more time together than most. But in our generalities, we are much like sisters everywhere. With personalities shaped by birth order, we are the keepers of each other's secrets and protectors of each other's childhood memories. We are givers and receivers of female wisdom and are constantly learning from each other. We are each other's harshest critics and strongest supporters. As sisters, we mirror and define ourselves as women through each other's eyes.

It is this relationship, I decide now, that I want to write about.

After I make this decision, but before I really embark on the journey, I put the proposal to my sisters. I have written two memoirs in the last two years. The first,
Waiting
, is an account of the twenty years I spent as a waitress. The second,
Raising Blaze
, is about my son, an exceptional child with undiagnosable learning differences, and the journey the two of us have made through the public education system. My sisters have appeared in both books, but as supporting players. This time the focus will be sharpened on them. I am not asking their permission, but I want—no, I
need
to have their approval. Characteristically, my sisters don't ask me
why
I want to write about them. They have long since come to an acceptance of my position as family chronicler. Maya tells me to go ahead, that she's got nothing to hide. Lavander assures me that I will do a great job, but asks me, please, not to ruin her career. Déja says she thinks this will be the easiest book I'll ever write because what else,
who
else, am I more familiar with?

It is true, my sisters are as constant and familiar as fixed stars
in the night sky. They are my geography. But it is also true that any landscape can change depending on the lens and angle through which it is viewed. This is what I think about as I start writing. I rely on the familiar, but I expect to find some new scenery here in the territory of my sisters.