![]() It’s surreal and awkward, and even if you’ve experienced it before, you haven’t ever experienced it with this particular person before. No one knows exactly what to do when someone is dying. I was lucky to be there, privileged to be there, happy to be there. ![]() Holding her hand, reading Little House on the Prairie out loud to her, helping her to the bathroom, rubbing her feet – it was the most sacred experience of my life. And yet, I’d relive it in a heartbeat, if I could. It’s not something you ever want to do, lying in bed next to your dying sister. An invisible net pulled tight beneath us, lifting and holding us, keeping us safe and wrapping us in love I’d done nothing to earn and could never repay. People stopped by with food, cookies, beer, flowers, cards, and hugs. When my mother called to tell me I needed to pack a bag and get on the train to Indiana right away, that my visit couldn’t wait until the kids’ school vacation after all, friends swooped in to care for my children, taking turns feeding them dinner and walking them to school. After our church’s Easter vigil, I would walk home alone a few hours before dawn and look up at the bright moon, wondering what was going to happen, now that nothing had gone the way I’d expected it to. Forty days later, my sister was still alive. She’d been put on hospice – when? Days before? Weeks before? – and we all knew what was coming. Sitting in church on Ash Wednesday, the day in the Christian calendar that marks the beginning of Lent and leads up to Easter, I remember thinking that my sister would be dead by the time Lent was over. Nothing happens the way you think it will Here are a few more that are still sinking in… 1. That’s one thing I guess I learned when my sister died. Life is full of surprises if you saw them coming, they wouldn’t be surprises. ![]() You imagine she’ll be there with you at your parents’ funerals, that you’ll sing something together like you used to at church growing up, and you’ll make faces at each other when all those powdery-smelling old people hug you and call you the wrong name and tell you stories you’ve heard a hundred times before. You don’t expect your sister to die when you’re both still young.
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