Grief and Remembrance (a bit of a downer)

When I was 13, my sister died by suicide.  Sorry if that introduction is a bit abrupt but I didn’t really want to waste any energy trying to put it more delicately.  Perhaps as a coping mechanism, I’ve struggled with remembering my sister and my childhood.  To help, I would do remembrance sessions.  I’d sit down with a pen and paper, concentrate on a memory I had, and record where that led me (one would remind me of another and so on).  I was looking back through one such session the other day and it spurred several thoughts on the importance of and difficulties associated with remembering a loved one.  Here are a few of the entries (please forgive the tense shifts and quasi-stream-of-consciousness):

I remember sitting on my Mom and Dad’s bed, listening to them talk to my sister when she ran away the first time.  They were trying to convince her that things would be better and that she should come back home.

I remember being on the same bed after she died.  I’m crying and Dad comes upstairs to check on me.  He’s surprised to find me crying and I’m not sure why I’m hiding up there anyway.  It must have been a weird transition to go from having a spoiled kid who cries about stupid shit to a grieving kid who cries about real shit.

I wonder if I was crying loudly and that’s why he came upstairs.  My wife says she doesn’t think I know how to cry loudly.  But I know I did when they first told me she died.  That was a crappy day to begin with because I got hit by car while walking home from the bus stop.  It wasn’t serious, I just got picked up on the hood, but it shook me up.  I came home.  They told me.  Lots of crying, hugging.  Dad said it’s okay to be mad, throw stuff, do whatever I need to do.  Soon after, my girlfriend at the time called to talk (she didn’t know about my sister yet).  I’m unresponsive.  I give monosyllabic answers.  I’m in the fetal position on our futon, the phone laying against my face.  After a few minutes of this, I realize I have a choice.  I ask to hang up…cry with my parents some more.  She was very supportive once she found out.  Later, I broke up with her for reasons I didn’t really understand.

I remember being on the same futon years earlier.  I am trying to explain to Sis my science fair project on elasticity: how every material has an elastic limit, and once deformed past that, it holds its new shape, but otherwise returns to its original shape.  She doesn’t believe me.  Says “you’re telling me that if we unscrewed these armrests from the futon, they would go ‘schploing woing woing woing’ and return to a flat state?”  I double over with laughter.  Little brothers find their sisters immensely entertaining.  I could have done a better job explaining elasticity, but I think she was more concerned with making me laugh than with understanding my project.

Not that she wasn’t inquisitive.  She came home from school once (don’t know the year, but I was in elementary school I think) before my parents got home.  She was so excited, walking with the half-skip she did when she had something to show.  “Check this out,” as she spun an open, half-full two liter with outstretched arms, proving that her centrifuge would prevent a spill.  Now I see a lot of similarities between the way she explained centripetal acceleration and the way my dad would one day explain Doppler shift to me.  Fearing a mess, she added, “don’t tell Mom and Dad about this.”

Out of five distinct memories of my sister, two are death stories and three are life stories (though one is very close to the end).  This is not nearly proportional to the time she had with me.  I am upset by the way that the memories of her life are overshadowed by memories of her death.  For some time, I was very fixated on how she died (what were her last moments like, did she cry or was she steadfast, were there people around, what was the weather like).  I want to remember more of her life than her death, but I often feel like I’m failing.

Over the years, I’ve become less concerned with those details but I still hate that her death infects her life.  It’s a stain, a venom that travels backwards in time, spoiling the integrity of her life memories.  And if I remember incorrectly, I change her life.  What a ridiculous burden.  Memories of the dead are far different from memories of the living because the living are there to contradict you.  Memories of a dead person, even when accurate, become some sad semblance of a life themselves, but a life imbued with fate, finality, and false prescience.  Not a history.  A fiction.

I wanted to post about these memories to subject them, the parts of her that are me, to the sunlight.  To remember her as she was and not as I want her to be.  To better understand myself in some small way.

But do I have an obligation to her to remember correctly at all?  Earlier, as a novice griever, I would have said yes.  And while I still think it’s important, lately I’m much less offended by the idea that it’s not such a big deal.  An illustrative anecdote:

My grandmother was a bit of a packrat.  So when she died, it fell to my mother to get rid of or keep a lot of her stuff.  Naturally, this was an emotionally charged divestiture.  My mother recently told me that she learned to keep the things that held special meaning to her (my mother) rather than the things that were meaningful to grandma.

This is how I’ve come to understand my memories of Sis.  Frankly, she had her chance with her memories.  The ones I remember are mine now.  If I remember her death more, it’s because it was a profoundly transformative moment in my life.  That may be a shame, but it’s a meaningful shame.  And although I still have a personal obligation to remember things accurately, I no longer feel that I have a sibling obligation to keep my sister on anamnestic life support.