Today is my nephew Damien Smrt’s 6th wedding
anniversary. About two months before the
wedding my relationship with my only sibling Terry Lee tottered on the edge of an
abyss, and it had to with the fact that my son Russ and his wife were not on
the guest list. I was told it was a
matter of economics, but instead of saying something hateful, I bit my tongue and ask how much two more guests
would cost. To this day I do not know if
Damien and Valerie knew why they received a check for $150.00 along with their
wedding gift. There were good reasons why Russ was not on the list. He and his wife are very much a twosome even
now and while they often intend to arrive at family functions, I’d never ante
on it. I could hardly blame Damien and Valerie for making the same judgment call.
But Russ and Damien were both the same
age and when they were little, they had the same yellow Dick Tracy costumes,
they watched the same videos, and they were as close as cousins living one hundred
eight miles apart can be. So I bought
him back in.
The bottom line is that Terry accepted the check and thought
that all was right in Bedlam. But I was still stewing. And if Russ and Cio had no been so happy about
getting an invitation, Chris and I may not have gone. Our absence would have been justified because
Chris is not well. At any rate, the four of us headed for a favorite Harbor
Island hotel, and had a great time falling in love again with San Diego where I
lived for thirty years, and on Saturday we went to what was a lovely
wedding. My sister was so happy to see
that all four of us actually showed that I caught a tear in the corner of her
smiling eyes.
She was beautiful. Her hair was a wonderful honey blonde that matched her dress.
Everything about her was perfect. She
was radiant. This was the last of her
kids to get married, the one who had dragged her half way around the world with
his ice hockey team. Many of the guests
were Damien’s friends she’d chaperoned
in Copenhagen on two different Scandanavian sports tours. When I watched her, I was so damned glad I
had gotten over my overdose of righteous indignation and kept my mouth shut.
Sixth months later, she was dead.
What went on between during that sixth months was almost mystical. We began emailing one another after our
spouses had gone to bed. She had just
retired from a job she had hated after working for nearly thirty years at a job
she loved. We talked about that on the
telephone, in spite of the fact that my hearing is all but shot. She was hoping to get some relief from her
carpal-tunnel syndrome that was affecting the use of her hands. Except it wasn’t carpal tunnel. It was an
inoperable glioblastoma.
She was at her daughter
Darcy’s house when she lost control of the hand that was holding a wine glass. Within days, the diagnosis was
pronounced. My husband and I were
furious when her doctors told her she might live five years. My husband is a researcher and he also is
stage four survivor of basal tongue cancer, and nothing we read about her
cancer was encouaging.
But bless her, at
least for a while she proved us wrong, and again, I am thankful that I kept my
mouth shut. Even when her emails
required a special program that let her keyboard repond to her voice, even when
her voice began to fail, we strugged through it. We sometimes talked on the telephone in the
middle of the night, Terry with her slurred speech and me with my ruined ears. My last late night call from her was an inquiry—she wanted to know if
my son Russ’s puppy Frank made the air flight from Michigan. When I told her we were getting a puppy, too,
she wanted to know what we would name him.
Names were always a big issue between us. I was the one who named her
Terry Lee, after the comic strip hero of the 1940’s.
The last time I was
with my sister was two days before she died.
She was in and out of consciousness and the family had assembled with
the hospice people. I had asked to be
summoned from the meeting if she awakened, and her son in law Mark came to tell
me she was asking for me. He stayed with
us during the visit because of my hearing problems.
Our last conversation consisted of a phrase she repeated
over and over until Mark and I calmed her.
“Linda, you’re my big sister and you have to take me home,”
she said in the manner of a petulant child. When she was four and I was eleven, I was the
one who walked her to and from school.
In Cleveland in the forties there were no buses. Sometimes when the snow had drifted on the
south side of Euclid Avenue, I carried
her. During one of her hospital stays in
ICU early in November, she had a friend of hers call me with the same
request. ‘I don’t know how to tell you
this, Linda, but she wants you to get in your car right now and come down here
to take her home.” Terry’s friend, another Linda, apologized profusely and
assured me it was the drugs talking, but I
knew what she meant. When she was
a little girl she thought I could do just about anything.
In our last visit, I told her it was too early to go home just yet, but I would try to help her get there when it was
time. Then I told her that I loved her.
She made a funny grimace, and she was five years old again.
“I already knew that, ” she scolded.
Then she said, “You
have to go home now and fix dinner for Chris.
I have to wait for Damien to come.”
Mark told her it was
all right for her to go back to sleep and he kissed her forehead.
After we left with plans to return on Sunday, Damien arrived.
She shooed everyone else away. He shared what happened with my daughter
later.
“Damien, am I dying?”
“Yes, Mom, you are,” he said.
Then she slipped quietly into a coma.
Our mother was a difficult person who often drove wedges
between Terry Lee and me. That was
another thing we talked about during that last six months. I had no idea that
our mother was using the same tactic with Terry that she used on me. We should have
had those conversations years before, when our children were growing up. But I
was busy in the courtroom slaying dragons and Terry was being the international
ice hockey Mom and a constant cheerleader for her lovely daughters. Bittersweet though it may be, at last we had that last six
months, a treasure I may never have uncovered if I’d let my temper flare the previous spring. And as I look back to Damien’s wedding, it is the
one wedding other than mine to Chris that I could not have afforded to miss.
Happy anniversary, Damien Smrt and Valerie Finik Smrt.
