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Left Unsaid (continued from preceding page)
I hope every day he heard me and understood.
~
Honora, 2015
My closest in age sister, Honora, and her husband, Toye, flew to New Jersey for a final visit. It was Hallow- een. Donny would be dead in 20 days. Trick or treat- ers rang the doorbell and his girls dressed up amidst oxygen tanks and the burden of impending death.
Later, Honora sobbed to me, “I was such a wimp.” While saying goodbye, she found she could not look him in the eye. He also averted her gaze.
I get it. Siblings can’t say goodbye. Won’t.
No matter how many times I go through this, despite my mind’s insistence on acceptance, my eyes will always want to look away.
~
Mary, 2019
Her 60th birthday, in November, would be her last.
In July, beneath fairy lights, accompanied by the warm sounds of a Latin band staged on my patio, she told me what she would like for her party: “Karaoke and dancing.” I told her, with a semi-conscious air of gravity, “If that’s what you want; then that’s what you will get.” She smiled, exchanging a quiet knowledge of why this one was im- portant. It could be because it was her 60th. It could be because she was told at 43 she would not live to see 45. But the quietest reason was that she was failing. Visible by her gait, her color, her pain, her spirit.
That night on my patio, she seemed, as she often did dur- ing the eighteen years of her stage four breast cancer, the younger sister; before she was always quite the oppo- site. She was eleven years older than me. She helped my mother care for me when I was a baby, taught me, inspired
Lowcountry
oil on linen 80'' x 168'' By Brian Rutenberg