Dreaming and feeling

My sister

I’ve slept poorly two nights in a row, maybe more, but by forcing myself back to sleep I think I’m not too terribly underslept.

Maybe it’s checking the phone. Yes, I still have the phone on my bedside, this evil thing that I know should be banished to the kitchen by 9 pm nightly, but what about an emergency?

There’s not much I could do in the event of the emergency that is actually unfolding, so who am I kidding? But maybe it’s because I’m doing so little that I feel I need to be eminently reachable. It’s not much, but maybe it will provide a little solace in the face of brutal suffering.

It’s my sister I’m speaking about, thinking about, dreaming about, worrying about, fretting about, and who’s calls and texts I’m awaiting.

My sister, who appears to have finally done herself in good this time.

After years and years and years. Decades is the word I’m seeking. After so much time and so many efforts to help her, she’s moving into a realm now where I fear, where I in fact know, she is unhelpable.

Maybe she has been for a long time.

But with addiction, you always hope the addict will come to their senses. You never give up. Not with family, not with your sister, not with your mother.

Or, I never did, anyway.

I never gave up on my mom, either. And I was always sure, I mean 100% sure, I would save her. It was the mission of my childhood and teen years. I remember as a young girl, a child of 10, when I began to realize it was the booze that made her behave the way she did, I was grateful. Grateful to know and to shortly thereafter discover that there was a solution. The person simply had to stop drinking.

Yeah, right.

Many of you know where I’m going with this.

Suffice to say, that didn’t work, and she died of cirrhosis when I was 25. She made it to 59, though, and my sister will not.

She also is a drinker. And what a drinker. She’s a wino. She thought avoiding the hard stuff would save her. Our mother was a vodka-lover. Or eventually became one after years of bloody marys, glasses of white wine, and whatnot.

Things have been bad for a long time for my sister.

Her worst nightmare came true when she became homeless a few years ago. She’s been living in a tent in the dirt near Hilo, Hawaii. She wound up in Hawaii when our other sister, the baby of the family, decided she could help K. when no one else could.

I tried to warn her.

I called her. “I’m not sure you understand…”

She insisted and bringing K. to Hawaii. Within two weeks, she’d amassed a veritable fortress of wine bottles around her bed like a spiny moat.

Our sister L. cried, “I have a young daughter! I can’t have this in the house!”

When she asked K. to leave, K. refused. I’d been over this ground too of course. Twice I’d had K. live with me to “get sober.” Both times, she didn’t even try. She just drained the house of any alcohol in it, smoked constantly, and fought tooth and nail against any discussion.

As our cousin said recently, “She’s not a good drunk.”

L. wound up having to call the police who removed K.

I went through that too, but in my case, K. bolted out the back door when the cops arrived. In Hawaii, she wasn’t so lucky and was jailed for several days, barefoot.

It was terrible and upsetting, but we were all hopeful that maybe, finally, this could be a bottom.

We’d been waiting for a bottom for years of course. Getting her teeth knocked out in a bar fight in Japan where she was teaching English wasn’t her bottom. Getting arrested multiple times in the Bay Area for bar fights and belligerence, and once for attacking a woman who accidentally nearly hit her with her car in a parking lot wasn’t her bottom. Several DUIs in a span of a few months wasn’t her bottom. Nearly going to Santa Rita prison until our talented attorney cousin sprung her via a residential rehab center that cost our father thousands wasn’t a bottom.

Some people don’t have bottoms, I’ve learned.

For some people, like my mother and my sister, the bottom is death.

And K. now is facing the results of her lifestyle, and it’s bitter, I tell you, and I don’t want this for her. I don’t want this for her at all.

She is my little sister, you see.

Yes, she is difficult, awful, feisty as hell. She is terrible when drunk. Scary. Terrifying. Exhausting.

And she is my little sister. And all I can think about or remember now is her favorite blankie, that shredded, grey, once-pink, once-satin-y thing that she clutched for years, suckingi her thumb, peeing on the carpet, waifish, malnourished, thin as hell.

She was probably an FAS baby. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. She had many if not all of the symptoms. My brother had quite a few too. And he also was a dreadful alcoholic. He was literally lifted up from a gutter in Salt Lake City by a priest and found sobriety for 20 years. There’s been some slippage, but he’s fighting the good fight.

Unfortunately, K. has run out of runway.

She appears to have late-stage colon cancer, but no one really knows because she hasn’t received a proper diagnosis yet, a month after first visiting the emergency room in Hilo. That’s because, of course, she’s indigent in America. She has no health insurance, or rather she has whatever you’re given in Hawaii when you’re indigent and homeless.

She thinks it’s insurance. She calls it insurance.

I volunteered for a year in a hospice at a Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, an infamous, brutal place. I met many patients there who’d received roughly a week of “treatment” before they were sent to hospice.

I don’t tell K. this, of course.

Last night, she texted. It was around 3:25 a.m. here in Oakland, California. She said she’d vomited all over the place and was told if she began vomiting to go to the ER right away. Our sister L. brought her there.

She is in a hospital bed now, and they gave her morphine, which she’s excited about and grateful for—finally no pain, she said. She’s been having terrible cramping for a month now, can’t sleep, can’t eat. No appetite. Of course. She has two (at least, no one knows for sure) huge tumors in her bowels, and the waste can’t get through.

She believes at the moment that she’ll be schedule for surgery, and the doctors will remove the tumors, and then she can get on with her life.

I fear it won’t be that easy.

It took six hours for her to get a hospital bed, but she has it now. And morphine. And care. She has a little care now and hopefully some compassion.

What hurts me most, no, not most. So much is painful about all of this.

But one thing that hurts is the idea that people who encounter my sister now find her abhorrent, disposable, just a another drunk whose destroyed her life.

She is so much more than that.

She is smarter than I am.

My boyfriend Richard once tutored her in math and told me that.

And I know that.

She was cool. She had great taste in music, always ahead of the curve. She knew about the Smashing Pumpkins long before anyone was talking about them.

She was beautiful, the fairest of the four of us. She looked the most Norwegian after our father’s Scandinavian mother. She was tall and willowy and once she got over the emaciation of her early childhood, she developed a beautiful figure.

She’s funny, and rueful, and ironic. Kurt Vonnegut is her favorite writer.

She’d indignant, a bleeding-heart liberal just like our mother was, or at least a liberal in the classic sense. I don’t know what the liberals are up to these days. It seems they’ve gone as crazy in their own way as the far right.

I mean, she’s a supporter of the worker.

Oh, and Billy Bragg. My God. Billy Bragg, whom she’s loved like a lover for years and years. She’s been to as many shows as she could muster, and she even connected with him a couple of times. I mean, I think she talked to him at a show (highlight of her life) and maybe he responded to one of her fan letters or posts or some-such.

She wanted to be happy, like all of us.

She was terrified of being homeless. I promised her once she would never be.

But as her addiction grew, she became even more untenable.

When our aunt died earlier this year, our cousin R. bought her a plane ticket so she could attend the funeral. She was to stay with me. I was excited. I just knew we’d have a great time. I had all kinds of ideas.

What was I thinking?

I forgot. Again. What alcohol is, and does.

I was actually on my way home from Buenos Aires where I’d been studying tango when my aunt died. When I changed flights in Florida, I called my sister. It was the middle of the night here in Oakland. She was all hopped up and angry at my son who was living with me at the time.

“R. took the dog into his bedroom!” she screamed.

Her story was that R. was taking the dog from her, when the dog preferred her. Who knows.

But she was railing, livid. I could hear her taking sips of her drink and long drags on her cigarette as she hollered.

I thought to say, “Where are you?”

“ON YOUR PORCH WHERE ELSE”

I said, “Please go inside. It’s the middle of the night. You’re waking up the tenants.”

That triggered a hailstorm of abuse directed at me.

And so on.

No need to belabor the point.

If you have an addict in your life (or an insane person), you know the drill.

I was only able to stand two days. She was here in my home for two days. She nearly hit me in the head as we were driving home from the funeral, where, by the way, she carried several open bottles (corked) of wine in a backpack. They clanked around.

You can’t make this shit up.

As usual.

She lost it when we were driving home, over some trifle I’m sure. She felt persecuted. Nothing made any sense. I can’t even remember what set her off, but within minutes she’d nearly hit me and was calling the police.

My son pulled over. He thought he could sternly tell her to behave.

That didn’t go well.

The drive home was terrifying.

My son was flabbergasted.

The next morning, he said to me, “She can’t stay here.”

I said, “I know, but…”

He said, “No, mom. Really. She can’t stay here. She has to go.”

And I knew he was right, and I was flooded with relief.

It dawned on me for the first time that I had a right to peace and quiet and cleanliness and freedom from suffering in my own home, to the degree that I was able to make that possible.

It hadn’t occurred to me I could just say no.

I called my brother, who had also come for the funeral and was staying at a hotel. He bought her a room and an Uber, and she left.

Wow.

My son began cleaning the apartment, like really scrubbing it, and airing it out when she was gone. We both felt the place had been absolutely toxified.

Belligerent, aggressive, scary.

Also, hurt. Scared. And terribly lonely.

She’s never had a friend in her whole life.

The memory that will haunt me forever was her cold, blue, waifish hand slipping into mine when she was a little girl. I also remember her trying to take our mother’s hand multiple times, and our mother pushing it away. She couldn’t stand to hold K.’s clammy little hand.

It reminded her of all she hadn’t done or provided, I am sure.

It was vaguely embarrassing.

It was touching, it made us feel something.

It still does.

I think K. tried harder than any of us to remain human, and tender. To have needs and make them known.

The rest of us hardened early. We went into survival mode early.

K. was different. Her need for connection was yawning and total.

She was a “problem.”

Our mother once said to K., Someone should kill you before you kill someone.

But, when she was dying of cirrhosis, before she’d been transported to her final hospital stay, our mother’s nightstand was chock-a-block with framed photos of K. Only K. None of the rest of us.

She was making amends in her own way.

She was afraid.

She knew what she’d done, the life she’d assigned to K.

She knew.

She was sorry.

I am too. I am so sorry.

My cousin said, helplessly, “I tried to help her…”

I said, “We all did. We all tried to help her. Multiple times. Don’t blame yourself.”

Now, we send her $200 when she hasn’t had a cent for years.

We wanted her to hit bottom. We didn’t want to be enablers.

Now, we just want her to have a shred of dignity as she goes into the abyss of the next stage of her life, which will be pain and trauma and sorrow, and maybe sobriety.

And it is all so sad. And I don’t know what else to say.

But that I dreamed about my dad last night, my dad who I lost a few years ago, my dad I adore.

He wasn’t there to protect us or K. when we were little because he was at sea. A merchant marine gone for nine months at a time. For some reason, I never blamed him for that.

I dreamed I told him about K. and that it was bad. I had to call him over from some distance. He came reluctantly. He took it well, stoically, as he would have. I said, I’m so sorry, Dad.

I also dreamed of a little baby who had the most brilliant smile. I loved this little baby so much, I mean, I was utterly delighted by her. When she smiled, her teeth (she had a mouthful of them though she was the size of an infant) were filled with metal. She had, like 25 fillings, and I didn’t care. I was amused.

And then I dreamed I was playing with a bunch of children. I was the only adult. I was having a grand old time. Then, one of the kids, a girl, led me to a hospital room and shut the door. The stench was incredible. Of sickness and rotting flesh. I turned on the light. There was a bunk bed. On the bottom bunk was a man, suffering, moaning, emaciated. As I looked at him, his bed collapsed, and he fell to the floor.

I fled.