The Wind Blows Cold

She thinks long about the type of person she really was.  She knows it doesn’t matter, and yet, it does.  However she lived her life, it was as it is now…as if the layers of all she was meant to be are still wrapped around her like a rose bud in drought, shriveled and dying. .  She feels alone in a world she passed through so quickly, even her memories betray her.  It really doesn’t matter, though, not now.

She turns off the lights, lays back in her comfy chair with her knees bent and feet angled on the hassock, softly shuts her eyes, and drifts out to sea floating on every note of the melody the piano keys lightly play of the music she's listening to.  Tune after tune, her existence seems merely her essence, moving to and fro as the cold wind nudges her along in her brief escape from her meaning of life.

I have two sisters, one ten years younger, and the other about half way in between.  We seemed to have separate lives growing up, most likely due to our age differences.  Contrasting personalities and nonshared interests detached us further until we might as well have been living on separate planets from each other.   

Adult life eventually put great physical distances between us, although I lived close to my youngest sister for a short period of years after I returned from my time in Panama, Central America.  We all kept in touch sporadically, but we rarely had much in common.

Somewhere in there my youngest sister forged a wedge of iron that killed what closeness there was with me.  She remembers nothing of those days.  I talk with her when she phones, but the rarely less than four hour long calls are exhausting.  I divorce myself from her reach, when she sinks me into depression and I need a break.

It’s been my life with her, for better or for worse.  It just is.  This is somewhat vague as it should be, for although I have not always liked my sister, I have never stopped loving her, as I feel she has never stopped loving me.  The other things can be accepted and forgotten.

Sonya with Dad (2004-2005)

My sister Debi shared with me last week, that Sonya was found collapsed on the floor of where she was living and taken to the hospital.  We had conflicting information from her son and from her daughter as to the cause, but the bottom line was she had cancer that was no longer treatable.  She always self diagnosed and could seldom afford doctors, so Debi and I believe she'd been sick for ages and had attributed it to something else.

Sonya died this morning.  I loved her as best I could.