This is my oldest sister, Nancy. She was the most gentle and giving person you can ever have known. Everyone who knew her knew this about her.
She was my half sister. We had the same father but different mothers. Nancy’s mother passed away when she was five and she came to live with us.
My mother was unloving to her and often cruel. My mother did know that Nancy existed before that time. I suppose Dad was a bit of a cad from the very beginning, hiding his children and the fact of a first marriage from his 2nd wife and Mom never got over resenting that fact, among many others.
B. is one year older than me and used to yell at Nancy that she was not our real sister. This would put Nancy in tears and strengthened our bond as sisters, and my need to protect her.
Nancy was my Cinderella. She like to cook and make us treats and snacks and sometimes full blown meals. She changed the babies’ diapers, helped us with our grooming, supervised us outdoors and took us on walks, things our parents never seemed to have time for.
Our eldest sister was our community organizer, creating skits and shows for us to perform for the parents, who watched begrudgingly when forced. She somehow knew what family life and nurturing was supposed to look like and she tried to get us there, until the divorce.
It’s hard to believe that this article was published within a year of B.’s attack, when she dumped a coke on Nancy’s head and threw a taco in her face at a Taco Bell, in front of Nancy’s two young children. This happened just a few weeks after our sister, Marilyn, had died. Already B. had attacked me physically, the day after Marilyn had been buried, leaping on top of me and stabbing me in the head repeatedly with the sharp end of a pencil.
Nancy worked full time for all of her life until the very week that she died, continuing to work for months while on chemotherapy, long after all her hair had fallen out and her breast had been removed.
She was always timid and soft spoken and rarely did harsh words come from her mouth so when they did you can be assured they were well deserved.
But B. does not take to the truth too well, be forewarned. This is why B. attacked her in the Taco Bell. One sentence came out of Nancy’s mouth after listening to B. carry on about what a victim she was. When Nancy couldn’t take it anymore (and I know Nancy well. She had a high tolerance level.) she said, “Well let’s all shed a tear for Beth.” Within an instant, Nancy had a coke dumped on her head and a taco spilled all over her chest. She said the people all around were looking at her after B. ran out and she said, “You want her? You can have her!”
Then she called our mother sobbing because she knew she’d receive even further wrath and ostracizing from our mother. I happened to be standing beside Mom at the time. Nancy was sobbing and begging Mom for forgiveness. Mom was clenching her jaw and glaring, not saying a word, just exhibiting a deep, smoking rage. She would kill before anyone harmed the ego of her precious first child. Nancy didn’t stand a chance of forgiveness.
For the rest of her life, she and her children were never invited for any holiday with the other 5 siblings she’d grown up with and actually helped to raise.
Nancy never realized how beautiful she was, flinching and ducking with timidity in social situations. That sad reality of that came to me when I last watched our family video, a compilation of family videos over the years. In the very first scene we are on the coast and Nancy is running toward the camera, a stunning beauty, far more beautiful than I’d realized she was as a child. When she saw the camera she flinched, ducked and ran away. I saw how wounded was her self esteem in that moment and it stood in stark contrast to her beauty in a way that I’d never fully understood as a child. She was robbed of self esteem by a selfish step mother, plain and simple.
Nancy got bullied and pushed around in life by many people but out of respect for her I’ll go into no further detail for now.
Nancy was giving, without complaint, until her last breath.
It was her gentle, submissive nature that caused many people to take advantage of her.
I sometimes find myself wondering what Nancy’s last breaths were like, alone in her hospital room, struggling for air with no way to seek help. They said the nurses found her in her room, not breathing. Just 2 hours earlier I had pleaded with my mother, from 800 miles away, to not leave Nancy alone. She told me she was going back to the room to read and I asked her to stay with Nancy after hearing her labored breathing as we held our last conversation on the phone.
Nancy wasn’t her alert self. She was gasping loudly for air between everybreath as she told me she loved me. She was talking baby talk to me, as if she were drunk, something she had not done since our childhood, “I wub you.” she said, “I wub you bewwy much.”
Then Mom took the phone and told me she was going back to the room to “read” for a while. I asked her not to leave Nancy alone in that condition. Mom had run everyone else off with her angry disposition, as she always did and there was no one else to take over the job now, as usual. Mom grew testy at my concern and snapped that there were nurses there to watch her.
Nancy had just gotten her stem cell transplant the day before and a staph infection was ravaging her body. Two hours later I got the call that she was gone. Nancy was alone in the room when she took that final breath and then stopped breathing. Mom had gone back to her motel room and when she returned they were trying to revive Nancy, with no success.
I don’t think Nancy would have been alone if Mom had not run off all of Nancy’s traditional supporters a few weeks before.
It’s something Mom would tend to do in a crisis, at least to those children that she normally neglected. She liked to put on a big show and make everyone else around feel that what they are doing is insufficient.
“I feel like I’m not needed here.” said Nell to Nancy. Nell was Nancy’s mother in law and no one protected and loved Nancy more than her over the years. After all, Nancy had taken their deadbeat son off their hands. But Mom drove Nell away post haste when the cancer diagnosis came in, after neglecting and ignoring Nancy for all of her life.
Nancy was hurt but afraid to speak up to Mom. I offered to do it for her, but she declined my offer.
I will forever regret that I did not know how serious the stem cell transplant would be.
Nancy was abandoned in the hour of her death, just as she had been abandoned for most of her life. You’d think I might have seen that one coming, but I hadn’t.
When I heard Mom’s voice say that Nancy had passed away, I ran out the back door, to the edge of the hill, fell on my knees and dug my face and shoulders into the earth over and over again, trying to break through the soil, head first, not even using my hands, just pounding my head into the dried hard New Mexico desert soil, trying to bury myself from existence. I was an animal, out of control. My nine year old son came running out and watched me in helpless dismay.
Not Nancy, not Nancy.
~~*~~
When I went into Nancy’s visitation room, outside the door of the room stood Beth, who followed me in. I leaned over the casket and stroked Nancy’s face. It was ice cold. I knew she was no longer there and that this was only the shell that had once held my Nancy. It gave me some sense of comfort. I knew she’d gone somewhere else.
I stroked the shell that had once been my sister lovingly as I heard big sister, B., gasp each time I did so. She did not go near the casket but hovered behind me, gasping at me. It was too much to take so I straightened up and walked out of the room. She followed me out, showing no need to tell her sister a private goodbye and I walked down the hall casually allowing her to get a little bit ahead of me so that I could sprint back to the room that held Nancy’s casket so that I could give Nancy a private goodbye with no interfering gasps.
I was wishing so much that Beth would just leave so that I could say goodbye to my sister alone. But it seems this is the way she has been with me all of her life. She doesn’t really want something until she sees that I want it.
~~*~~
At the funeral the following day we were expected to walk past the casket. I really didn’t want to in front of the crowded room. Nancy was a well loved employee of the Texas Education Department and her funeral procession had no end as far as I could see, so the funeral parlor was packed. This was no way to say a final goodbye, in public. I’d already said my private goodbye and would have preferred it had been the final one. Instead I had to stand by my big sister B. while she decided this was the time to become dramatic. She grabbed the rim of the casket and began to wail loudly, never actually touching sister Nancy of course. But she got so carried away that the casket began to rock and I held on to it for dear life, terrified that my sister’s body was going to come tumbling out.
~~*~~
As the minister began to give the eulogy I didn’t listen. I knew that Nancy had gone to him for advice quite often, trying to deal with her deadbeat husband, and the continual electricity and water shut offs. The minister advised her each time to allow her husband control of the check book, regardless of the consequences to her family, because he was the “man” of the family, even though the deposits into that checkbook only came from her paycheck. He could not keep a job himself. I had no respect for this minister and even less when he began to talk about her, pretending that he knew anything about her.
So, instead of listening to him, I talked to Nancy in my head instead. “Can you believe this, Nancy? They think you are gone. ha, ha. When this funeral is over I am going to go and call you on the phone and I know you will answer.” That did not happen.
Mom walked up to me a few times at the burial site and put her arms around me. Each time she did so I tried to respond with civility by hugging her back but she had to put on her drama. Each time she pretended to collapse in my arms, forcing me to have to hold on to her full body weight in order to keep her up, but I didn’t. My arms fell limp each time she tried it with me, and, amazingly, she was able to straighten her legs and stand up without falling.
She never loved Nancy and she knew I knew it. I never asked her why she abandoned Nancy in her last hour. She never explained. We never discussed it again.
She’d spent Nancy’s entire life being cruel to her and demolishing her self esteem while I’d spent my entire life defending my innocent and loving big sister.
She ran everyone off and then walked away from Nancy when she was struggling for her last breaths. She knew that I knew she had done that. No way was I going to let her get away with this fake drama at Nancy’s funeral.
Only Mom and my little sister knew that I knew Mom had abandoned Nancy in her final hour. I never shared it with my nieces for fear it would be too painful.
After the burial B. came to me and said that Dad had requested I be the only daughter to drive with him because he knew I was the sister that Nancy had been close to. This is the first and only time that I saw him stand up to Beth. I didn’t realize there would be violent repercussions before the next 24 hours were up.
As I sat in the backseat of the car, my father redeemed himself to me somewhat as I heard him say to me and his wife, “I was cruel to Nancy,” shaking his head in remorse. “No you weren’t.” said his heartless, brainless, whore wife who had never had one kind word to say to Nancy but a whole lot of cruel ones.
“Yes, yes I was,” Dad insisted. And I knew he was telling the truth. I respected him once again for this rare moment of disagreeing with his henpecking demon wife. I knew exactly what he was talking about. He stood by and watched her abuse throughout her childhood, sometimes contributing in order to please his selfish, jealous, rich 2nd wife.
The morning after Nancy’s funeral the family began to accumulate in the hotel restaurant, each one had wandered in separately and happened to find each other. We were sitting at tables next to each other, barely interacting, staring like zombies, coping with the shock and despair we were feeling at the loss of our Nancy. B. happened to be the last one to wander in. She took a seat across from my father and began to glare at him silently. There is something she does that everyone knows is a warning of an impending tantrum of epic proportions. She goes silent. She frowns deeply and then she is silent. It’s the silence before the storm, before the attack. I’m assuming she must have thought that we intentionally excluded her from this spontaneous family gathering. As Dad became nervous he tried joking with B., as he always did, “Gee, what’s wrong, B.? You look even worse than Kay this morning.”
As usual, he used me as the butt of a joke to humor Beth, one of the few things that ever humored her. But, I was okay with it, anything to appease her, so I laughed nervously along with everyone else’s nervous laugh.
This didn’t sway B. as she swept her arm across the restaurant table knocking everything to the floor. coffee cups filled with hot coffee, plates with egg and bacon, purses, salt and pepper shaker, condiments. It was bedlam after that.
The entire family packed their bags in a panic and headed to B.’s house, parked in front of it and waited for hours for her to emerge, allowing her to steal the show as usual.
I told them I wouldn’t stick around to be lured into her attention seeking drama once more and that this was the last funeral she was going to destroy and headed back to New Mexico, alone with my defenseless son, across the desert, giving my reverence and attention to Nancy, feeling more alone than ever before, yet preferring it.
Oikos 