Evolving

Sisterhood/Loss

My sister, Katie, is someone I've already brought up a few times previously. She's five years older an me and we've had a history of ups and downs. Like I said before, there's always certain things you know you're going to remember for the rest of your life. One of those things for me was a night where my sister let me spend the night in her room. She didn't often let me into her room, because I was a child and she was a teenager, and she valued her privacy. Well, one night she let me have a sleepover in her room. I was so excited that I ran right in. We stayed up all night, and I was so amazed by her Christmas lights she had strung up everywhere, and that's part of why I like them so much now. She pulled out her roller skates, because she would go to the roller rink on the weekends with her friends, and she'd let me put them on and roll around her room (slowly of course, there wasn't much room to skate). I always had a blast when she let me sleep over in her room, even if I was forced to sleep on the floor with nothing but a pillow and blanket.
Another memory I have was when she actually brought me to the roller rink with her. My parents always used to accompany us, because I was a kid, but one night I was allowed to go with just my sister. For most of the night, she watched me, directing me on how to skate properly, and even attempting to teach me how to speed skate like her. I tried getting the hang of it but ended up mostly using the railings on the outer edge to hold me up. She eventually left to hang out and skate with her friends, occasionally checking up on me as I circled the rink slowly. It was the most exciting thing I had done in a while. I was so happy my sister had taken me with her.
Things like that are what I'll always remember. The happy memories. I want to remember them, because I know there are always going to be a lot of hard, angry, sad and confused memories alongside them. Like the time my sister tricked me into doing her homework for her, telling me that we were playing a game of school, and I did all of her math homework like a studious child, not knowing I was doing her work for her. Or when we played a game of haunted house in my grandma's basement, and she knew how afraid I was of the dark, so she ran upstairs, turned the light off, and locked me down there by myself. I cried for twenty minutes in the dark until my grandparents finally heard me and unlocked the door.
There will always be good memories and bad memories. I just needed to learn to appreciate them both.
Once my sister was eighteen and had her son, she peeled out of our house, leaving him behind. She wasn't ready for a child, so I was left to raise him with my mother. It was hard for a long time. We would wake up in the middle of the night to him crying, and we would have to always worry about him before ourselves when we were getting ready in the mornings. It was just something we got used to. To this day, I raise my nephew, and I firmly believe that I'm what's best for him, because even my mom can't raise him correctly; she is still bitter about my dad, and she's focused on drilling herself a hole in the ground and sitting there, intent on just becoming stagnant instead of moving forward.
Anyways. My sister left, and I resented her for leaving. I blamed her for my childhood being ripped from me. Most other children were busy enjoying their weekends with their friends, and they were buying all the new clothes or video games and had nothing to worry about except homework. I was busy babysitting and cancelling on plans, I had to raise a baby, and I never had any money to buy anything new because all of our money went to Karter's needs. I understand now that he was more vulnerable and couldn't take care of himself or know any better, but back then, it honestly felt like he was more important, and that I was kicked to the curb by my own mom.
My sister got into some bad situations over the years. She constantly needed money that she owed to someone; she always stole clothes from me because hers kept getting ruined or stolen from her; she only came around when she needed help or money. I spent so much time resenting her that I never once stopped to think that I should actually help her. I never once considered the fact that she hadn't planned on her life going in this direction, that she wanted more than anything to be able to raise her son and be normal like the rest of us. She simply had an addiction that she couldn't control. I can't blame her for that, I know this now.
Eventually, she got the help she was seeking. She went into rehab. Everyone was proud of her, but I was still resentful; I still believed that she was going to leave rehab and immediately start up her addiction again, returning to her ways of lying and stealing and hurting us all. I refused to trust her, even when she was showing us that she could be trusted, and that it was all she wanted from us.
Sometime in the fall, when I was in my first year of college, I had heard from my mom that Katie was going to be coming home for Christmas. I felt annoyed more than anything, because I knew the holidays would be all about her and she'd end up messing something up like she always did. She came up from Florida for the weekend, and we had Christmas dinner with our family, and at the end of the night she started a fight with my mom, which I expected. I felt my chest puff up in arrogance, because I had completely called it that she would ruin the evening. She returned home with my mom and I and was offended that she had to sleep on the couch, and demanded my bed.
See, our living situation had been weird for years. We lived in a three bedroom house. For the longest time, my parents shared a room and my sister and I got our own rooms. When Karter was born, Katie moved out and Karter got Katie's room. When I went to college a few years later, Karter got my room, because it was bigger, and I got Katie's room. I was alright with the arrangement, because either way I had a place to stay when I came home from college. My sister demanded I give her her room back, which I didn't want to do and ended up putting my foot down on. I had reasoned that my Christmas break was a month long and I had been living in that room for about two weeks already; I shouldn't have to give it up for her. Also, I had argued that it wasn't her room anymore - she had moved out long ago, and her room was now mine. My mom told her she could sleep on the couch, since she was only planning on staying a few days anyway. Katie huffed and puffed and complained all night. She ended up making a phone call late in the night and the following morning requested my mom change her plane ticket so she could return that day. My mom couldn't change the ticket, and since my sister was so adamant to get back to Florida, my mom booked her a bus ticket, and she returned to Florida within the next day or two.
That was the last time I saw my sister. The following spring, around the same time that my grandpa had died a few years prior, I was sitting in my dorm room enjoying some music. It was loud in my headphones, so I didn't hear the knock on my door. My roommate did, and she answered it and came to tell me. There were police at my door. Now, my first thought was that my mom had called the cops because I hadn't responded to her all day. The reason I assumed that was because about a month prior, my roommate Bailey's mom had done the very same thing: Bailey went out with friends and came home and slept all night and most of the next day. She left her phone in her car so she didn't hear any of the phone calls from her family, and her mom had assumed that since she wasn't answering, her phone had been stolen or she had been kidnapped or injured. She called the campus police and I was woken up late that night to them pounding on my door, looking for Bailey. So when the cops came to my door a few weeks later, I assumed the same thing had happened to me. But when I checked my phone, there were no calls from my mom.
They led me downstairs, and it was the oddest sense of deja vu as I was led into a room at the end of the hall on the first floor of the dorm buildings, and I opened the door to see some of my family members, all in various states of shock, but all of them crying.
My first assumption at this point was that my grandma had died. I wasn't expecting it to happen, but the last time I had gotten a reception like this it was about my grandpa dying. I knew my grandma hadn't been the same since so my brain automatically went there. I was taken aback, however, when my mom simply pulled me into her arms and held me tight, and my aunt came over to me and told me that my sister had passed away that morning.
I was shocked to say the least. I couldn't speak. The questions were stuck in my throat. I couldn't even lift up my arms to hug my mom back. I didn't believe it, and I told them they had to be joking, but from the looks on their faces I knew they weren't. They had driven four hours up to my campus to deliver this news and take me back home for the funeral. I was so shocked and scared and in disbelief for the next few weeks.
I began to rethink everything that had happened between us the past few years. I thought about how she had grown up knowing that I envied and aspired to be like her. Then, once she moved out, all she had known from me was anger and hate. I thought about the last time I had seen her - Christmas. I couldn't for the life of me remember if I had told her I loved her before she left. That's something that will always haunt me. I told myself for so long after my grandpa passed that I'd take advantage of every opportunity to tell those around me that I love and cherish them, because I never know when it'll be the last time. Yet I managed to let those opportunities slip through my fingers with my sister. My sister who died at the age of twenty three; who died thinking I hated her; who left a five year old son behind, a son who I'll have to sit down one day and explain to him why his mom is in a graveyard. He knows that when he wants to visit mommy and pappy, he has to go to the graveyard; but he's still only five, he doesn't fully understand it yet. And one day he will. And I'll have to explain it to him, and I'll have to hold him while he cries over the mother he never quite got to know, and I'll have to remind him all the time about who she was and what she did for him, because he might forget a lot of things about her, and I never want him to.
I refuse to waste any other opportunities that come my way to let everyone know where they stand in my life. I'll always say I love you before every goodbye. Instead of goodbye, I'll say see you soon. I don't want to waste anymore opportunities.