17th Anniversary

My sister Lois died October 20, 1994.  She was 39.  Every year since she died I get really crabby around the end of September, and can’t figure out why, until it comes to me, “Oh yeah, it’s almost October.”  It wasn’t quite as bad this year, and Lois’s daughter Helen said the same was true for her.  We were speculating that it might have something to do with the fact that we interred Lois’s ashes when I was in Florida this summer with my daughter Sarah, who was born a year after Lois died, and carries her name.  (Sarah Lois, April 2011)

Helen is very special to me.  I promised Lois before she died that I would be there for her daughter, since she was only 11 at the time.  There are so many echoes of Lois in Helen that it’s “wow, what a gift” to have her in my life, especially now that she’s an adult and we can talk about everything.  And we do talk and talk and talk, because that’s the Kalter way, and she seems to have gotten that DNA in big doses.  She’s analytical like I am, like Lois was, and there isn’t anyone else in my family who thinks in quite that same way.  That’s just one of the things I love about her. 

Lois's husband is remarried to a gifted fabric artist who couldn't be a better partner for him.  They came down from Tallahassee and rented a room at the Bellaire Beach resort, where we hung out in the heat of the day, played cards and had ourselves a great time, like we always do.  In the evening we drifted in the warm Gulf water and lounged on the white sand beach, gazing at fabulous sunsets.  It was Paradise.  But the absence of Lois is always with us when we are together.  So it’s a mix – lots of hilarity with that crew, and then in certain moments, the poignancy of our loss. 

Helen and her dad had decided that it was finally time to inter Lois’s ashes in the niche in the mausoleum she had chosen before she died, in a beautiful rambling cemetery near a pond where otters frolic and great flocks of giant Wood Storks roost.  For the last 16 years, Helen had kept the urn with her wherever she lived.  She realized the time had come “for the cemetery to not be in my house,” as she put it.  The whole experience was full of tears, but full of grace too; the sweetness of remembering Lois together, feeling our closeness to each other, taking one more step toward being at peace with her being gone.

As I write that, a protest erupts:  I REFUSE to be “at peace” with her being gone.  She was too important.  She was my little sister, and we went through everything together.  I won’t “let go,” not yet.  I don’t know if I ever will, or should. 

But it was good to give her a “resting place.”  The bronze plaque wasn’t ready when we were there, so Helen took a picture when she went to visit on the 20th, and texted it to me.  It made me cry, seeing those dates, so absolute, so factual.  No changing it.  Seventeen years later, my reaction to seeing the plaque:  I still don’t want it to be true.

A friend shared a quote recently, by Leon Weiseltier:

Though we encounter it as suffering, grief is in fact an affirmation. The indifferent do not grieve, the uncommitted do not grieve, the loveless do not grieve. We mourn only the loss of what we have loved and what we have valued, and in this way mourning darkly refreshes our knowledge of the causes of our loves and the reasons for our values. Our sorrow restores us to the splendors of our connectedness to people and to principles. It is the yes of a broken heart. In our bereavement we discover how much was ruptured by death, and also how much was not ruptured.

Thank you for your life, Lois.  I still miss you, too much.