Sad news

The phone call came at a decent hour.  Perhaps it was noon.  It certainly wasn’t the middle-of-the-night phone call that we all dread.  But the news would have been more appropriate for 3 a.m.  My niece’s voice.  Casual. Almost happy.  But maybe it was merely nervousness.

“Aunty, Judy, Mary has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”   I felt a moment of shock.  Then a second of relief.  Followed by shame.  For more than a year whenever I’d called my sister, Mary, she was quiet.  No gossip about our mutual friends.  No funny stories.  She responded to my questions with a simple “yes” or “no”.  I suspected that the four thousand miles that had separated us since Alex and I had moved to La Paz in 1996 had finally dissolved our relationship.  That she had become indifferent or angry.  But this wasn’t about me. 

I booked a flight and as I flew from San Diego to Boston, my mind and emotions flew faster than the aircraft.  I grabbed my pen and on my napkin I wrote:

Big sister where have you gone?

Each day you travel further

To a world I cannot enter,

You’ve been handed a one-way ticket,

Photo ID required – just in case

You can’t remember who you once were.

Older sister, where does your mind travel?

To a vanilla ice-cream, sugar-cone world?

Where you lunch with long-dead friends,

And you remember how to use a fork?

Big sister, what memories do you carry aboard?

Your childhood cut short by Depression?

A marriage killed by cancer? And indifference?

Your only child paralyzed by anxiety?

Maybe forgetting isn’t so bad.

Dear sister, you’re my little sister now.

How can I

                   Ease

                             Your

                                      Trip?