Dear Gina,

a letter to my sister

[I wrote this piece a few months ago but wanted to share it on the occasion of my sister’s birthday yesterday, the first since her death this spring.]

Dear Gina,

It’s 6:20 AM on July 14 & I’m back in bed after letting Jesse out and feeding her. It sounds like I’m telling you the date & time b/c it’s some kind of milestone since you’ve been gone–almost four months now–how is that possible–but there’s no momentous occasion, only this being another day I get to be alive, and I’m thinking of you. 

Jesse’s curled up at the bottom of the bed, her weight pressed against my feet. She’s covered in the camp blanket Elizabeth and I bought when we were camping in Mendocino, sleeping on inflatable mattresses in mummy sleeping bags, the kind where you put on a knit hat and fit your head into the top of the bag to keep heat in. The way the bag slips on the mattress makes you aware of every small movement you make. Mine was summer weight and still light for the cool nights in those redwoods so we found this blanket on the second day. Those few degrees made such a difference. Elizabeth knows alot about staying warm, and tells me things like, make sure you pee so your body doesn’t waste energy trying to keep your pee warm, and reminds me to pull up my hood on a windy beach, and puts her hand at the nape of my neck and says, isn’t that so much better? But she’d never covered Jesse in a blanket until she met me. 

I love to drape Jesse in a blanket when she comes back to bed because she goes into such a deep sleep. She’s snoring now. It’s the best. I want to send you a picture of how deeply she’s sleeping. That was always what I was wishing for you in those weeks. 

Elizabeth is opening a mason jar of granola. The sound of the the metal ring of the lid opening is pulling Jesse from her sleep. Her breathing is changing and she just opened an eye toward the kitchen. She’s always assessing to see if something is worth investigating. If I take out a cutting board, I’ll sometimes hear her start coming upstairs but stop to discern if this will be worth the trip. We no longer keep her treats in a mason jar because we keep too many other things in these jars, and it felt like constantly subjecting her to a sound that signalled one thing for her, but turned out to mean many things. Like if “fire” meant actual fire, but also meant “the bus is coming.” Why do we even use these two part lids if we are not actually vacuum sealing something? We just all went along with it. I did buy some one-piece lids, and every time I use one instead of the lid and ring I feel like I'm taking a small step toward cohesion in my life. 

And now I’m thinking of you sitting in your recliner under the blanket Jeff brought you, the weight of it spread evenly over you. It was so nice to just get to hang out with you and Lora. It felt almost like a regular evening, except I was dismantling your kitchen, stepping into the living room to ask you about what to do with certain items, holding up these tools predicated on ongoingness: an immersion blender, a food processor. And things you’d stocked up on not long before all this. A package of 100 coffee filters. 100 filters! Can you imagine.

For some things you’d just sweep your hand and say, those can go. I created a drift of them and offered to them to health aides, who came back at the end of their shift to get them. I love the little fluted glass bowls you gave me. I wrapped them in a sweater and took them home in the center of my suitcase. The other day I soaked some peas overnight in one before planting them for Jesse. She loves them, and can harvest the tenderest shoots at the ends of the vines cutting them clean between her front teeth without pulling up the plant.

Later that night Lora walked me through some steps in the nighttime routine. I followed each of the steps she’d been taking each night, staying late after the health aides had transferred you to bed. There is a kind of expertise that comes from care and from listening closely that comes through in a kind of articulate ease and she had become this kind of expert, her graceful hand slipping under your head to raise it just a few degrees, working together with you to get the pillow at the most comfortable angle.  

Now Elizabeth is eating granola in the next room. The sound of the spoon on the bowl was too much for Jesse and now she has gotten up. The camp blanket trails behind her like an emperor’s mantle. I can still feel the warmth where she was lying. 

The morning you died it was very early here and we were still sleeping, but sometime in the middle of the night Jesse was in her own bed and she rolled onto her sloth toy and it made its long squeak and woke us all up. Not really a squeak, more of a long plaintive cry. Not like Lambie. Jesse herself holds the sloth carefully in her softest retriever mouth so she doesn’t activate it. Usually we don't have the sloth in the bed with her but she must have brought it there the night before. She likes to sleep with alot of animals in her bed. 

My first thought when the sloth woke us all up was that you had died. But I thought, just go back to sleep. And then when I actually woke up a couple of hours later, I got Geri's text: Call me. 

So I did, and she told me what I already knew. You’d died a couple of hours before. 

Nothing about yesterday told us it would happen today, Geri said. 

She was with you all night. I asked her if she’d slept at all. Didn’t plan to, she said. 

In the early morning she heard your breathing shifting and she called the aide who told her the on-call nurse would get there soon. Then she was alone with you. She kept telling me how useless she felt, waiting there with you. You know her. She does things. I didn't know what to do so I just knelt at the foot of her bed and held her feet. I felt sure you were guiding her to do what you needed. And that she could do what was the hardest thing for her, to do what she thought was nothing. That is perfect, I told her, you did the best possible thing. You held her steady. You helped her through.  

Jesse’s back. She rests her head on the side of the bed before she steps up onto it. Now she’s stretched along the side of my body. Can you believe we have flannel sheets on the bed in July? I’m writing this at a weird angle but it’s worth it to be nestled under two quilts with Jesse stretched along my spine. To lie still under the weight of blankets is a way of preparing for the action of the day. Elizabeth just came in to say goodbye because she’s leaving to go on a 15-mile hike south of here, where it’s 30 degrees warmer. She’s wearing shorts which we never do here. It’s funny to see her in them. 

Maybe you’re already starting out again in a new body, getting used to bearing weight again. I know in your last weeks, almost every form of suffering could be traced to gravity. It took two people each day to transfer you from the bed to the chair and then from the chair to the bed. Maybe gravity was what you were most relieved of. Even to lift a spoon was difficult. You asked for a plastic one because it was lighter than the metal one. 

Is it too early for you and gravity to start fresh? Would you want to try again? 

Because you are so newly gone it's not clear to me what you would need to know, or like to know. So I’m just telling you these really mundane things. This bed. These sheets. This dog, who is now at the window, and ready to go out. So I’ll close, and say, as you said to me, bye, for now. 

More soon. Love, G