How Things End

It is not only at the opera that we think of life as a story and wish it to end well.

      Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

Last December was the worst month of my sister’s life.  The drooping on one side of her face led to a trip to the ER.   Then, in a timeline confusing to all of us,  she was at the Kaiser Cancer Center in Redwood City undergoing surgery for three tumors in her brain.  How long was she there? Not sure.  At least a week.  The next thing I knew, she was at the Rossmoor Acute Care Center in Walnut Creek.  There had been an infection after the brain surgery.  She was attached to an IV. 

      That’s when I saw her.   I stayed a week.   Relieved that I was there, she  introduced me to everyone who came into her room.   “This is my sister, Nancy.”   She was eager to reminisce about our childhoods and kept repeating what good parents Mom and Dad were.    We exchanged bits of stories, the way you can, just by saying, “Remember when Mom would…” or “Remember that time Dad…”  A listener would hear us laugh, interrupt each other with a detail or a contradiction,  “No, that’s not how it happened!”

      At one point,  I asked her , "Do you have any recollection of that house burning down, you know, in Colorado?”  I didn’t think it was likely.  There is a seven- year difference between us.  I was born on November 16, 1941 in Elko, Nevada.  My sister was born on April 8, 1948  in Craig, Colorado.  She said no.   So I sat on the side of  her bed and told her the story. 

 “You must have been five.  I was not quite twelve. I’d say this was 1953.   Dad was managing that sheep ranch on the western flank of the Rockies.  About sixty miles from Craig, where you were born, by the way. 

 “I know that much,” she said.

 “It was August, haying season. I don’t know where Dad was.  Probably off in his pickup checking something.  Mom had to take Snooks, the foreman’s wife, to the doctor in Craig.  I remember their names– George and Snooks Voetzel.  Their kids were Darlene. She must have been seventeen or eighteen. And Don, their son.  I think he was still in high school, but I know he wasn’t around that  day.

      Our fourteen-year-old cousin, Sally Stanworth, was visiting from Canoga Park.  She was Aunt Irene and Uncle Man’s daughter.  I remember Sally was always considered to be boy crazy. That’s how I know Donnie Voetzel wasn’t there.  Anyway,  Darlene was supposed to mind us–you, me and Sally– up at the foreman’s house.  There was a puppy.  I remember that.  

      Here’s what happened.  Darlene wanted to heat some water on the cook stove.  It was a coal stove.  Literally.   In Colorado they burned a lot of coal.  Get this.   Rural electrification had not yet come through this part of the state. Kerosene lamps and white gas lanterns were all we had.  

     The foreman’s  house was on a little rise across the road from the barn and corrals. Halfway down the hill were two barrels side by side on a wooden stand.   One with kerosene and the other with white gas.  Darlene instructed me and Sally to take the gas can and go down and fill it with coal oil.  That’s what they called kerosene.  

     I  remember this scene. We came back with the gas can.  Darlene had the lid to the stove open.  She put a couple of lumps of coal inside.  She poured the shiny liquid from the can onto the coal and lit a match.  I heard a vroom!   A column of flame shot out of the stove and ignited the kitchen curtains.  The can was filled with white gas.

    It goes fast from there.   Who told me, “ Take your  sister and go down by the creek ‘case the tanks explode”? I don’t  remember.  I just did it.  Maybe I even carried you away from the burning house and the two tanks of gas.

       I remember the two of us lying close together on the narrow sandy bank by the creek.   I don't remember how long or who found us.    I don’t remember being terrified.  Scared maybe.  I don’t remember you crying. Isn’t that odd?” 

      My sister wasn’t crying when I finished the story.  Nor was I.  But we were still holding hands, the way children do.  I told her that the rest of the story was  second-hand.  The men saw smoke and came rushing in from the hayfields.  There was concern that the barn filled with hay would go up in flames.  That the tanks would explode.  The puppy burned.  The house was nothing but a charred floor and a few burnt rafters. 

        This was the first week in December. After my visit,  I took Amtrak back to Carson City.  My sister was released on Christmas Day.  She chose to go home, rather than to another facility.  She did acquiesce to  her daughter’s plea to  hire a daily caregiver. 

      We talked the first week she was home.  She sounded like someone released from a war zone, relishing small comforts–her bathroom, the sheets on her bed.  Her garden.  About ten days later,  she told me in a phone call that she let the caregiver go.  “There wasn’t enough for her to do.”  Also,  she resolved the decade-long ambivalence towards her third husband.   She had changed the locks on all the doors.  “I never want to see him again.” It seemed extreme.  It was a long story,  but I understood why she did it.

      I also felt like I understood why she was beginning to keep her distance. The calls had become less frequent.  It’s her life.  It’s her death. I kept telling myself.    The oncologist had told her  that without chemo she had about four months.  With chemo, maybe “sometime longer,” whatever that meant.  She had decisions to make that no one could or should make for her.  

            Her  behavior was even more  upsetting to her daughter, Annique, who has been caring and attentive throughout the surgery,  the recovery, and the uncertainty of planning for the future.  I sent her this text after I had returned to my home in Carson City:

      “I was thinking about you last evening and I’m surprised you aren’t having a      meltdown!   Whatever emotions are unleashed right now—from her or from you– are, in my opinion, normal and cathartic.  She is at home in a safe place and can let it all hang out.  It’s the world’s hardest pill to swallow and, in one sense, nothing is going to make it better.   If you can, just stay steady.  Her thoughts are chaotic. And I don't think she wants or needs my big sister vibe right now either.”  That was easy for me to say. 

        Then my sister called out of the blue.   My hunch was right.  She had been doing  what she needed to do in order to manage her condition her way.   She gets acupuncture. Has appointments with a homeopathic doctor.  She says, “The chemo is in pill form, but I have few side effects.  My energy level is good. Evidently, one of the tumors in my lungs is shrinking.”  She says, “ Maybe I am still a bit of a Sixties rebel.  The doctors don’t know everything.” 

    She wants to live.  She says, “I want to have sex when I am eighty.  I think it would be fun. Maybe with a musician.”   I didn’t say anything.    It seemed a frivolous remark, but I liked that she was imagining herself three and a half years from now.  That she wasn’t freaked out by losing her hair or feeling fatigued.   I know she yearns for  more time with her grandson, little Gael.  “The apple of my eye,” she says.  

                    Our conversation ended in an ordinary way.  She needed to get ready to go to  an appointment.  We didn’t need to say, “I love you.”  The medium was the message.  Since then, the  messages have been few. My phone calls go to voicemail. Text messages unanswered.  I keep telling myself that I understand.  It’s hard, though.

      Regarding my reminiscence about the Colorado fire. You know how a story can seem to be about one thing, when it’s really about something else?  I have told this story over the years, but it was always questioning my role in that fire.  How complicit was I?  Was it eleven-year-old me, down at the tanks, who said, “It's this one”?  Why have I often had a strange delight in the telling?  See who you are dealing with.  I’m dangerous.  Have you ever done such a thing?     

     As for the blame. Sometimes, I consider it simply my first bad decision.  God only knows how many there were to follow.  Sometimes, irrational as it sounds, I blame myself for not being a boy.  Dad would have taught me about the kerosene lamps and the white gas lanterns and about starting a fire in a coal stove.

      It’s a moot point, isn’t it, about who's to blame?  Maybe it was my flighty city cousin who asserted her teenage authority and said, “It’s this one.”  Of course, Darlene was in charge.   If she was the one who caught hell, I don’t remember hearing about it.  As a matter of fact, the story never became a big part of family history.  It just didn’t.  

    That afternoon sitting beside my sister on her hospital bed,  I tried not to notice her hair matted against her skull, barely covering the shaved portions. Her thin right hand was in mine and there was such  love and  tenderness between us.   The story was about us–her trust and my instinct to get her out of harms’ way.  Rather than the villain, I was the heroine of this tale, desperately wanting both of us to believe I can save her from the fire quietly raging through her body.  

     She has closed the book on that story.    She  asks for forbearance.   My beautiful sister is allowing herself to be hopeful.   My sisterly role requires patience. There will come a time–I dread it–but I will be by her side and hold her close.