slow math: 3 minus 1

Last week was Sibling Day or something, prompting the excavation and sharing of the gem at left -- a photo of Martine, my father Jean-Paul and me. I'm the one with the cascade of blonde curls. My father is the dazzling one.

And while it made me enormously happy to see this photo and remember this time, also I was sad.  This is a photo of me with only one sister, the first one, my favorite one.  

Very soon now I will only have that one sister.  We'll go back in time, 44 years plus, to when we were only two.

Seeing the photo, I felt the memory viscerally -- it seems like only yesterday, really, that we lived on Alta Vista Way in Daly City, in the starter house before we moved to Liberty Street where we belonged. It seems like only yesterday that we had those particular chairs, or that my sister was a tiny toddling darling with dimpled knees.  And that there were only two of us sisters, in the time before Carla, the baby, was born.

She must have been around at the time this was taken.  Martine looks about 2 herself, I couldn't be more than 6, so either Carlita was an infant or my mother was pregnant.  She was already with us, and yet not in sight.

Which is how she'll be very soon -- with us in spirit, but invisible to the eye.

* * * * *

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but sometimes the sporadic text messages I receive from my bother-in-law about Carla's condition are truly puzzling.  I can't decide if he's in throes of the world's biggest denial or what his story is. Like the message from him two weeks ago, in response to yet another one of my tentative "Is my sister still breathing" texts.  "No improvement," he wrote. Improvement? Really?  With end-stage terminal brain cancer, when my sister's been bed-ridden, not eating and essentially paralyzed for weeks, how does this notion of improvement even enter the conversation? 

Yesterday was an actual phone call.  When I realized that he wanted to talk to me, not just text, I feared the worst, that this was the call I've been waiting for, to tell me Carla was, finally, after all these years and months of suffering, gone.

But no, instead the slow subtraction continues.

Instead he wanted to tell me that the muscles in her neck are so atrophied that as of Saturday, her head is tilted to the right and turned down, making it impossible for him to give her sips of water to drink or ice chips to keep her hydrated. The water, and the ice, just fall out of her mouth. He is keeping her hydrated with little sponges.

Any time now, he said. Any time.

Meanwhile her daughter, our six-year-old niece, cries every day, scared to enter her mother's room (my sister is dying at home), but more scared to go to school, in case her mother should die while she's gone.  The good nuns at her parochial school let her call home to speak to her father when she's particularly sad at school. This part of the story makes me desperately, quietly furious.

I wish Disneyland for that poor child -- princesses and cotton candy and blue skies -- instead of this terrible, excruciating merciless end of her mother. That's the part I suppose is the hardest for me to accept. 

* * * * *

 Someone asked me the other day: Is there any way you could, since you have his ear, ask him, beg him, to give her permission to finally slip away?  Couldn't he up the morphine just a smidge?

In the interest of maintaining a connection, any connection at all, to Carla, to our niece, I hold my tongue. After months of no contact, I don't say what's on my mind. Instead, I think of Elizabeth at Sleeping Beauty's castle some day, with mouse ears on, grinning from ear to ear. I think of my niece's smiling face and keep my fury to myself.

And so the slow math, the slow subtraction continues, every day a little more, every day a little worse, but every day a little closer to freedom for all concerned -- for Carla to leave her earthly form, for her husband and child to pick up some semblance of a life beyond her in the wake of her tragic death, for all of us who have been holding our breath for so many years, waiting, counting.

XX