Due to the imminent arrival of visitors for brunch, the morning was spent, after waking up really late and leaping out of bed like frantic frogs, rushing about all over the house with brooms, cloths, and desperately trying to find hiding places for all the books and paper detritus which regularly litters one end of the dining room table.
And then they arrived, and there was much eating, talking, catching up, laughing and drinking around the table and later around the lovely radiating wood-stove, since it was VERY cold outside, and then it was suddenly dark and everyone watched a movie and then it was supper time and so I made our usual Sunday night fare, a gazillion pancakes (South African)/crepes (French and American) for all the people in the house, and the table was full again.
So there was no running, only a short sprint up to the beehives and back with Molly early in the day.
And we all sang to my sister who turned 68 today! Such big gaps we have in our family that when she turns 70, in two years' time, she will then be in her seventies, my brother in his sixties, and I will still be in my fifties.
My sister is thirteen years older than I am, so by the time I became a fully conscious person, at 4 or 5, she was already just about grown up, and left home to study nursing at the age of 18. I got her room when she moved out, that previously mysterious room of giggling teenaged girls, always sweet-smelling and filled with her pictures and delicate things.
She was removed from my very young life, as my brother was not. My brother was a living, breathing, large-as-life figure for me. We had a lot of physical contact, he tickled me, held me on his lap, protected me from things, picked me up and dusted me off when I fell down. He was always there, playing tricks, conducting explosive experiments, doing nasty things like recording my asthma attack on his massive Akai tape-recorder, learning poems with me, reading me stories when I was sick, getting into trouble with me.
Whereas my sister was this tall and beautiful grownup who swooped in every now and then, with or without the latest devoted and adoring boyfriend, to bring me presents, to fight with my mother, to revel in shocking us with gruesome nursing stories at the Sunday dinner table. I would gaze at her exquisite perfection, wondering when I would get those lovely bumps on the chest, when I would get to look like her. (It never happened. Except for the bumps on the chest.)
One day I was standing at the bus-stop outside the Junior School, wheezing my heart out, in the midst of a terrible asthma attack. (My mother had told me that I would never die from asthma, so I didn't ever really panic, just stood or sat stoically suffering. Of course, one can die from asthma, and people frequently do.) I wasn't allowed to carry the inhaler, because it was very dangerous if you overdosed, which many asthmatics had done, due to that terrible desire for relief. So I would frequently be stuck somewhere waiting to get home to the inhaler's antidote.
I was about seven years old, and my sister, my beautiful glamourous sister, came by on her Vespa scooter, in her official nurse's uniform, going home to her flat which happened to be near our school. She took in my affliction at a glance, swept me up on the back of her scooter like a white knight in shining armour sweeps the victimized maiden on to his trusty steed, and galloped off at top speed to a pharmacy, where she bullied the pharmacist to open an inhaler and allow me two puffs straight away. She has to use all her wiles, as the medicine was only available with a doctor's prescription, and he didn't know either of us from a bar of soap. He gave in, as many had before and would thereafter, and then, for me, this little girl with the useless lungs, there was suddenly instant reprieve, and then gratitude, and pride.
It was only when we were both adults with children of our own that we really got to know one another, that we developed that female affinity.
When my mother was in hospital a couple of months before she died, in terrible pain from a broken hip, the replacement of which had then become dislocated, lying in traction and basically losing her mind, we were all, my poor father, my brother, and I, helpless before all this suffering of our beloved wife and mother. Not my sister, who I again watched in admiration as she rode into battle, all her furious flags flying, ordering the nursing staff to do this and then that and to look sharp and do it NOW! And they followed her instructions, even as they regarded her with baleful eyes.
And as advocates for my mother, she and I persuaded my brother and my father, with the help of my parents' doctor, that my mother wanted to die. That she couldn't be put through another operation, another attempt at rehabilitation, more and more pain. And that we should respect that wish, and make her last days as comfortable as possible. My sister was very calm and collected as we explained the situation to them, whereas I was frequently just a puddle of tears. She is admirably cool in the face of chaos or tragedy, and this was no exception. And later, in one of my mother's few periods of lucidity, she explained the entire situation to her as well, and we received our mother's blessing.
So I know that she is a strong woman, still lovely in her older age, and I wish for her a wonderful year of more trips to beautiful places, of thoughtful discovery, of love amongst her extended family, and a continued bond of blood and womanhood that she shares with me. She is my moonbeam and I am her sunshine.
No comments:
Post a Comment