On being an inspiration

My next door neighbor and I are good friends.

Anne and I are surrogate sisters, I guess. She lost her youngest sister to suicide nearly a year ago, and I lost my only sister eight years ago to a car accident. So, even though we are very different (my sister and I were opposites in just about every way, too) and we don't spend a lot of time together, there's an underlying understanding that we care about each other and we'll always be there for each other.

The months of the past year have been awful for Anne. She's struggling with her sister's death, trying to cope with the complicated combination of grief, pain and anger. She's swimming in a sea of thick, suffocating mud. Some days seem utterly impossible.

I know how she feels. I know what it's like to wake up and just want to go back to sleep forever. I know what it's like to want to scream at anyone who will listen. I know what it's like to walk through Kroger with unexpected tears streaming down your face just because you caught a glimpse of your sister's favorite cereal.

I know that living with heartache really does mean that sometimes your heart aches.

Anne is very public about her grief and how she's struggling, and I think that's very good. She talks to me. She talks to her husband. She talks to her counselor, other neighbors, her children. And I have to think that every tear that is shed, every memory uttered, brings her closer to
learning to live healthily and happily in a redefined world. A world without her sister.

I'm not/wasn't so open about my grief. Somewhere along the line -- before my sister died, and even before my brother died, I learned to cope with life's sorrows by swallowing them deep down and burying them. It was all I could do, really. It was the only way I knew to get myself up out of the corner where I huddled and be a wife and mother and daughter and friend.

And people just seemed to like the fact that I was doing so well accepting the tragedies I'd faced -- and with such courage and grace.

It was just easier for me that way.

Which makes me feel just a little bit uncomfortable when Anne tells me and others that on her darkest days, I am her inspiration. When she says that, I want to confess that I shouldn't be her inspiration because I haven't ever really dealt with the losses I've faced. My sister and brother died just two years apart and then my mom died right after that too; there just was
no way to deal with it all, so I stuffed it away.

But I don't tell Anne that because I want to be strong for her. She needs me to be strong. I'll do anything for her and I'll be anything she needs me to be. My friend - my surrogate sister - needs to get through these dark days and I'm going to be there for her.

And if she needs me to be her inspiration, then by God, I will.

I realize that the ball of hurt and anger I've swallowed can't stay inside forever. My friend Gordon wrote about swallowing grief in one of my favorite essays, ever.

I'll paraphrase, but it goes something like this:

There, in the pit of your stomach, grief becomes an emotional bezoar, knotted and tortured and matted with undigested sorrow. But grief will not be denied. Sorrow will not go away but will remain in your belly, a tumor that no doctor can feel.

And someday you will have to cough that fucker up.

And when that happens for me, Anne will know it. Maybe by then she will be in a place where she can help me wade through that sea of suffocating mud, and help me learn to live healthily and happily in a redefined world.

Maybe, just maybe, Anne will be my inspiration.

After all, that's what sisters are for.

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