Sarah Lois

I had a little sister named Lois, and I have a daughter named Sarah.  The two of them are so intertwined in my psyche that I often transpose their names.  I call Sarah “Lois”, both when referring to her and when speaking to her.  Sometimes when I’m thinking of one of them I’ll go back and forth a few times with the names until I figure out which one I’m really thinking of.  I wonder what it means that they are so connected inside of me.

In that last week when we knew Lois was dying, I thought I might be pregnant.  I asked her, “If I have a baby and it’s a girl, would you like me to give her Lois for a middle name?”  She said yes.

Lois and I were very close; since childhood we had created a world of our own, and we belonged to each other in a special way that the whole family recognized.  She said to me, when she knew she was dying, “You paved a way through life for me, now I’m paving a way through death for you.”  Lois died on October 20, 1994, six days before her 40^th birthday.  I was 41.

I wasn’t pregnant after all, and I went into full-blown grieving.  I set up a place in my room with candles and mementos and Lois’s picture, where I sat and cried and wailed and told her how much I missed her, how I couldn’t imagine my life without her.  I grieved and grieved, very actively; I couldn’t do it any other way.  The ground had been ripped out from beneath, a gaping sinkhole had appeared, and I had to somehow navigate the world with a big chunk missing.

A lot of the grieving was my longing and trying to reach her on the other side.  So I talked to her a lot.  I asked her, if she had any influence on these things wherever she was, to get them to send me a baby girl.  I begged for a girl, I prayed to all and sundry gods and spirits and ancestors – “All Those Who Wish to Help” – to send me a girl.

In February I got pregnant.  When I told my mother the due date, November 2, she said, “Oh! That was Lois’s due date—but she was born early because I was pulling carrots in the garden.”  About a month into the pregnancy, the nausea started, and I couldn’t grieve so actively anymore.  I resented the baby for preventing me from being with Lois.  The nausea was miserable.  But eventually it let up and I began to turn towards this new life that was coming.  I reluctantly pulled one foot back from the other side and returned to the rest of my life without Lois.

The ultrasound technician for the amniocentesis, famous for predicting the sex accurately, told me it was a boy and showed me the penis.  I was confused, because I felt so strongly it was a girl.  I had to work at being open to having another boy when I wanted a girl so badly. 

Meanwhile, I was still hoping Lois had sent me a girl.  One day when I was driving the back roads home to Point Reyes, I asked her, “Is this you, Lois?”  “It’s not me, but I sent you a good one,” was her reply.  Later, I had a dream of my daughter at many different ages, and knew her name had to be Sarah, a name we weren’t even considering.  When the genetic counselor told me that the amnio results showed it was a girl, I couldn’t speak.  I wanted to believe, but the error rate is one in five thousand, and I could be that one!  So I didn’t count on it.

Of course I was ecstatic when the baby was born a year after Lois died, and it was a girl!  Every time I changed her diaper, she was still a girl!  This baby girl brought me back to Life, and Joy.  As she was growing up, we played some of the same made up games Lois and I used to play when we were little.  But mostly she is her own person—like Lois in some ways, but very different in others.  As it should be.

I imagine when I’m old and demented in the nursing home, Sarah will come to visit me. I’ll say, “Thank you for coming to see me, Lois,” and she won’t correct me.