Saying Goodbye to My Free-Spirited Sister
By Katherine A. Sherbrooke
Photo from Katherine Sherbrooke's mother's wedding albumWhen I was seven or eight years old, I stumbled upon my parents’ wedding album while playing “office” in an attic storage space. I stopped my pretend filing and phone calls and stared wide-eyed at the flower girl in the photos, maybe four years old, who looked suspiciously like my sister Barbara.
“Mom! Is this Barb in your wedding photos?” I yelled while charging down the stairs toward the kitchen.
My mother froze mid-stir at the stove. I don’t remember all the questions that likely tumbled out of me—How can this be? Isn’t she my sister? Isn’t Dad her dad?—but I do remember her stony reply.
“I was married once before, a long time ago. But your father adopted Barbara. He is her father. That’s all that matters. Now please go set the table.”
She sprinkled oregano into the marinara sauce and closed the lid. Something in her posture told me that there would be no more conversation about it.
Barbara and I were the bookends of a family of five kids. The three in the middle made up a typical nuclear family—two boys and a girl, all two years apart—with Barb nine years older on one end, and me five years younger on the other. I was born during Barbara’s freshman year of college, and so we never lived under the same roof.
I’m ashamed to admit that I might not have thought of her much at all in my younger years, were it not for the photographs above the little red couch in our sitting room—five black and white portraits mounted identically on wooden blocks, one for each child. In the place of Barbara—who was likely in Thailand or India or the Philippines studying Transcendental Meditation on the day the photos were snapped—my mother had chosen the photo of a bird, our free spirit, wings flung open to the horizon.
It wasn’t that Barbara was never there—I vaguely remember one Christmas when she arrived in a VW Bug with a cocker spaniel at her heels, one summer when she showed up with a fiancé who didn’t stick, another when she taught us all how to meditate. She carefully picked out a walking mantra for me because I was too little to sit still. I was more interested in visiting the family of bunnies that had taken up residence in our backyard, and too mesmerized by the whirligig of my other siblings to find value in a quiet mind.
The four of us were a loud and busy crew, elbowing each other at the dinner table for airtime, my brothers reciting Father Guido Sarducci skits from Saturday Night Live, my father cracking up at his own Rolodex of jokes, my mother nudging me to tell how I’d been chosen to lead the first-grade class to lunch or coaxing my sister to share her perfect report card. We’d all scarf down my mother’s gourmet meals before scurrying off to our separate rooms to crank Pink Floyd, memorize lines to Godspell, study French, or read aloud to an audience of stuffed animals. Noise was happiness in our house—silence was a sign of unease.
When I was twelve and Barbara was thirty, she moved back to the States, and I remember anxiously picking out what to wear to introduce her to the person I was trying to become. Navy corduroys or brown? Fair Isle sweater or flannel shirt? What could I wear, or do, or say to make sure she’d like me? What if she didn’t?
What I hadn’t considered was how anxious she must have felt walking into a house she’d never lived in (we’d moved there when I was a toddler), a territory completely foreign from her foreign freedoms. She was the one staying in a guest room, and I’ve only recently begun to understand how lonely it must have been to fly above our family nest for so many years, how in all our squawking and preening we rarely took the time to look up into the skies for her or wave her in.
As we all moved away from home, it seemed to create a little more space for Barbara. She began to circle in closer, or maybe we had the good sense to meet her out in her wilderness—I suspect it was a little of both. As she got reacquainted with this other family my parents had created, she seemed to recognize that we’d considered her part of it all along. But by then there wasn’t enough time to share all our different experiences, to absorb enough of her nearly seventy years of spiritual learnings, to replay the totality of the parallel lives we had lived. Cancer had come knocking. She named it the “dark beauty,” because it cracked us all wide open and allowed our love for her to shine through.
Near the end of her life, just shy of her seventieth birthday, Barbara showed me a photograph from my parents’ wedding, different from the ones I’d found in the attic: a tender moment when my mother bent down to give her a reassuring kiss. She pointed out her tiny hand, clenched in a fist. Barbara told me how terrified she was that day, how she thought she was about to lose the one person that was all hers. To Barbara it was a kiss good-bye—to their duo, to their undivided focus on each other, to the only source of unconditional love she’d ever known. It’s as if that little girl had already decided to go off in search of abiding love elsewhere, even if it meant soaring into a distant horizon to find it.
How I wish I could speak to that little girl. I know what I’d say.
Don’t go. Don’t leave us. We’re coming.
++
Katherine A. Sherbrooke is the award-winning author of three novels and a family memoir. Her third novel, The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly from Pegasus Books, published April 4, 2023, was inspired by the lives of her sister and mother. Visit her website at www.kasherbrooke.com