This post took a long time to be finished. Months, to be exact.
I guess I couldn’t just write about too many things and I was waiting for the right push to let it go. It’s a long post.....
Some Scasters kind of pushed me along the way:
Daily posted about her friend K’s incident and brought back the sting and the missing. She asked me if it was right for her to be mad at her friend because she was feeling K has wasted herself and never let anyone help her.
I told her: it’s natural. It’s healthy. You love her.
I told her: I still hate my sister. I love her.
Then Moonriver wrote about taking the right time to write and to write first of all for our own closure.
I told him: this is for my personal closure for sure.
Then TealDragonfly wrote a painful post about her suicidal cousin. She was talking about feeling guilty for not having seen, listened, and helped. And then Actorguy cried the loss of his friend and his guilt too.
I told them: I understand you. I know what it means feeling guilty.
Then Quietone wrote a post about coming back to her sister’ home and feeling how empty it was without her.
I told her: I know this feeling too well. It hurts.
And recently Secret wrote a painful tribute of love to her sister.
I told her: I have been spared to see my sister suffering.
So this is my story.
Thursday 11th will be the first anniversary of my sister’s death.
So this is her story too.
Be kind.
When last July I went in Italy there was a house waiting for me.
It was the house that used to be mine during the first 3 years of my marriage (now over).
It was a very happy home for what (at that time) was one immensely happy couple.
A home with spacious rooms and high ceilings and very thick walls, so that it was cool in the summer but warm in the winter.
A house with big windows with dark wooden shutters facing the blue of the ocean and the open sky above.
A harmonious place, full of vibrant colors and fresh flowers on the coffee table, specially big African lilies, intensely perfumed roses and orchids. My favorite flowers.
The home was airy and often filled with music. The kitchen had dark wooden exposed planks on the ceiling, lovely white and blue Tuscan tiles all around the walls and a long wooden table always ready for any friends who would have come over to share a meal with us.
The home had a big arch in the middle of the two living rooms, an arch that my father commissioned because I had asked for it. So much he loved me.
We accessorized the rooms with a huge white modern styled couch (it was shaped like an S), lots of black shelves, a black modern and stylish table and 8 chairs, lots of bold colored paintings and posters on the white walls, big plants and books everywhere.
The bathroom had black and red Versace tiles from floor to ceiling.
It was a house polished and shaped by our love. Friends would come over for dinners, for coffee in the afternoons, for New Year Eve parties, for quick lunches between job hours.
And everybody immediately would fall in love with her.
But then we had to leave the house for moving in another city because we couldn’t stand to be constantly separated. At that time my ex husband was on duty, stationed in other city. It took him 2 hours and half to come back home to me when he would finish his shift. So we left for another city, taking with us only the absolutely necessary, and we gladly allowed my sister to move in. We gave her the house, everything inside it and the happiness we had shared in it.
Why am I describing this house?
Because when I went back and I opened again that door........all the things I told you about it.....the clean, good smelling rooms, the airy fresh feeling and the colors, all that beautiful home was not there anymore.
With my sister, even that home died.
Homes have a soul. They talk to you. You can listen to them.
The process of her decay is a shameful and painful family story and happened like in slow motion.
We started to think that something bad must have happened to the house 2 years before my sister passed away, last October. It’s not easy to pinpoint the exact period of time. But it happened clear after a while that my sister had started to forbid to all of us the access to the house. We discovered later on that not even her closest friends from that moment were allowed to get in.
Nobody.
She closed that door and to be extra sure of its inaccessibility, she also took the spare keys from my mom.
I went visiting in the summer of 3 years ago and I asked her to let me go thru my books, my beloved books that I had to leave behind when I moved here in the States. She had promised me to take care of them. And I believed her.
I really wanted to go thru them and bring some with me. See, we are talking about hundreds of books.
She already told me that she had moved the majority of them in the big closet at the end of the hall. I said ok, as long as they are neatly stacked.
Don’t let them lay on the floor, please, they are my babies.
She said: Sure. Don’t worry.
But when I asked her to get inside.... she flatly but firmly told me no. I asked why, she said maybe another day, not today, the house is such a mess, and changed the topic of the conversation.
I didn’t think much of it. And after few days I had to leave. In the rush of the last minute goodbyes I forgot about the books.
Another year passed by and then I went back again.
This time my daughter asked her to go to her house and play with her dog. No, she said again, shortly. The dog doesn’t feel good and I have to go.
At this point the situation became obviously uncomfortable, strange, and bizarre.
My mom told me that she had asked her already several times to enter but my sister had always refused with this or that excuse. After a while my mother had dropped the request. She doesn’t like to force anything on anybody. But she started to feel concerned.
We were sure at this point that the dog must have done some huge damage in the house maybe digging holes in the walls or chewing the furniture (all of them still mine) and that she was ashamed of it.
The house still remained sealed though, shut, closed, with a veil of unfinished and disturbing feeling floating around it.
How should we have behaved? Force our way inside? In this indecision lays the guilt that all of us still feel.
At the end, it took something unstoppable like the death to solve the mystery.
We finally had been able to know the truth about her odd behavior only the day my sister slipped in the coma from which she never woke up again.
This happened last October.
I was still here in the States, still not knowing the exact gravity of her conditions. They didn’t want me to worry.
She didn’t want me to know and worry.
Then it happened.....
.
The morning in which my mother knew the truth has also been the last time she had been able to talk with her. My sister had been in agony all night. She was fighting her last battle. Yet she told my mom (with what would have been her last words):
“Wait, mom. Take this”.
“This” was the key.
My sister knew she was leaving her conscious life behind. Being trapped in that bed, she knew it was time for her to let her deep secret out.
There was nothing else she could do.
Nothing else that she needed to cover up, to hide to the world, to us. She was dying and she knew it.
The secret of the house could finally be opened and revealed. Like an underground secret cell hidden inside a beautiful cathedral.
My mom took the key, surprised of her decision. Her heart sunk even heavier because of it. She felt my sister was giving up, not only the house but her life too.
But still, when she finally stepped in the house later that morning, she had only the goal to grab some clean pajamas for her and drive back to the clinic.
I still feel a deep and painful pity for her and I will always have it for her.
For what she had to see.
For what her eyes had to witness.
If she could have been left blind right there, before entering in the house, I would have preferred that for her.
Loose the sight, mom, don’t watch.
Don’t enter, mom. Don’t look.
But she turned the key and stepped in.
She looked. And she saw.
She saw it.
She saw......that the house was filled from floor to half of the walls with garbage.
Picture this: my mom is forced to push the door in order to open it because something is pressing against it....... she doesn’t know it yet but what she is pushing aside are piles of plastic bags filled with garbage.....that’s what is pressing against the door.
Imagine her finding a narrow path between these high piles of garbage, a path that leads to the living room. She walks trying not to touch these horrifying, out of place, guilt filled walls of garbage made of empty bottles, cans of dog food, dirty clothes, cigarettes, old cartons of pizza......everything....
She cautiously walks (in disbelief....still...) and she arrives to the couch that once was white and now is dirty gray, his half portion covered by yet another pile of plastic bags.
All around the couch stand, like sinister guardians, high pillars of grey, filthy bags.
A dirty blanket is on the couch.
She can barely move ...the path is forced by the garbage.....she can only see the top portion of the shutters......the windows are open....there is no way to reach them and close them so my mom understands in a sudden realization that my sister has been sleeping on that couch for months, in the cold of the past cold weeks ....with those windows open.
She can only trace back the path. She can see where my sister had already stepped on, days after days, weeks after weeks, and months after months..... the garbage has been flattened by her shoes on those points, the plastic bags are flat too...
But she can’t go anywhere else......
Not in the second guest room, not in the other living room, not in the hall closet, not in the bedroom. Not even in the kitchen or in the bathroom. She can’t go in any of these rooms without literally climbing on the garbage.
She has her open eyes that look.
She can’t stop looking.
Her nightmares are already shaping while she looks.
The nightmares that still are waking her up.
She looks and can’t believe what she sees.
She didn’t say it but I know, I am sure she started to cry, right there in the middle of that house where my sister had been accumulating all that garbage for all that time.
And while she cries the horrible secret is out.
But my mom knows she has no time for crying.
She has a dying daughter waiting for her so my mom leaves the house and goes back to the clinic.
When she is there the nurse runs toward her. When she feels her arms wrapped around her in the anticipation of her fall, my mom knows: my sister has slipped into the coma while she was in the house.
She will never wake up from it. My mom feels guilty because she wasn’t there wither. The house again had separated her from her.
Don’t fall, mom, don’t fall.
I am not going to fall, figlia mia (my daughter.)
This is the day I will receive the dreadful call and I will take the first flight to run home.
Still not knowing that my sister is in irreversible coma, I seat on that plane so cold and slow, and think of her.
I think about her voice when she had called me the week earlier. Her voice just a little shaky, just a little fatigued.
You will be ok, understand? You will be ok. You are strong and still young.
Only half an hour after my arrival to her bedside my sister will die.
Two days later I demand the key.
My mom doesn’t want give it to me. Don’t go there.
She begs me, please don’t go. I have watched enough for you too.
But I have to go.
I have to go, mom. I have to see like you saw.
I turn the key and push the door.
And, like my mother before me, I look.
My eyes see.
I see my sister’s life and I see her pain, her demons dancing in front of me, obscenely free to roam those rooms.
The house is filled with such devastating sadness.
I can’t believe my eyes. I simply can’t believe my eyes.
I cry.
I cry and curse myself and my distance, the life I was living without having any clue. I curse each one of her friends and all the careless lovers who used her and left her. I curse each drug dealer who consigned her to death. I curse my father, my mother and my brother. I curse myself too. And the man who took me away.
Where have we have been?
Why they didn’t see? Why I wasn’t here?
I curse our family that has not been able to save her.
To see thru her.
I know it’s not completely fair...we did see, we did try to talk, we did explore alternatives.
And I know I had the easy side of the story: my mom, my brother and my sister-in-law who loved my sister as a real sister.....they had to live watching her going down and down in her hell each single day.
And instead I was here.
They had tried to fight with any possible way to break the wall around her.
I was receiving her calls regularly and during them she was always laughing and reassuring me she was fine, that she was ok.
.
My eyes will never forget what they have seen.
My sister died last October. Next month will be already one year.
I had this story buried inside myself since then.
Only recently (and slowly) I started to write about it.
And still I can’t completely elaborate this story.
I can’t.
So I keep remembering.....
The house was silent and amazingly without any odor.
I saw the piles of bottles everywhere. Vodka, gin, whiskey and wine, lots of cheap wine. Beer, tequila...anything she could afford.
I could see between the garbage piles all her beloved CD’s, all black for the dust. Everything was black or dark grey for the dust that accumulated for so long, the shutters were full of tons of webs. The bathroom sink, the tub and the shower were brown and grey, the toilet was filled with black water, the mirror was gray, I couldn’t see my face.
I had seen it. I had no more tears for that day.
I have no words. I have to leave.
So I left and shut the door behind me.
The house returned to be hollow, like a grave.
This is the story of my happy and beautiful home transformed in a dungeon where my unhappy and beautiful sister locked her life and her destiny.
She was hiding inside it like in a protective womb against the world. But her demons took over and possessed her.
She thought of herself as a piece of garbage. Her fragile self esteem just collapsed one day.
Who know under which offense, which injury of the heart.
And when you consider yourself less than garbage you live in the garbage.
A crew of cleaners entered the house after her funeral and cleaned what it was possible to clean.
My mom and I went thru what was left of her belongings...we had to throw away most of her clothes. Beautiful dresses never worn, some with still their tags on.... I don’t tell you what we have found in her drawers. Her wardrobe was full of dust....gone her beloved collection of round glass balls, her colorful vases, most of her movies tapes.
And my books.......my books were all scattered on the floor...some broken, some full of dust. They must have collapsed some day because of their own weight and she never cared to check on them. Probably she forgot to have them there. And then one day she couldn’t simply reach the closet anymore.
Then I opened a cabinet and I found what broke my heart in two.
My guilty heart in two.
She had prepared for me and my daughter a small cutely wrapped package that she evidently intended to mail us last Xmas .....she simply forgot to send it ...her mind was probably working in strange ways.....or she probably couldn’t find the package anymore.
In the box there were little cute presents wrapped up in her usual unique gift paper......and a Xmas card. She had written there how much she loved us....how much she was hoping to see us soon.
Since it was behind a pile of book inside the cabinet the package was still clean, probably the only clean thing, the only intact thing in the middle of that devastation....
I felt like she had sent me a last present...a last smile....a last thought...
I read the card and I cried.
Thank you, little sister. I got your present, see?
But I had to wipe my tears, I didn’t want cry in front of my mom.
After all...this is what our family has always been doing.....we have been hiding ourselves to each other.
Why now makes sense if she hid herself to us in that way?
My mom confessed me to still have nightmares about the house.
About my sister.
I know she feels helplessly guilty about everything.
She was after all living only few steps from that door (you see, mine and my mom’s apartment occupy the whole second floor of our building) and only a wall have been dividing her and my sister........my mom was sleeping in her bed while my sister was falling in her drunk hallucinations chasing her demons on that dirty couch.
My mother will be living with this guilt until she will die. I know it.
There is nothing we can say to her that can alleviate this heavy stone from her heart.
I feel guilty too. I have to live with it too.
When last month I saw again the house the garbage was all gone, the house was empty and bared....: my mom has been spending any single free moment she has had this past months cleaning and scrubbing. I don’t know how many bottles of cleaning products she used, how many rubber gloves she broke, how many times she swept and washed and scratched and rubbed.
The house wasn’t anymore that garbage filled dungeon I saw last October.
My mother dedicated this amazing, tiring, painful work of cleaning to my sister, to her memory, to placate her guilt toward her daughter.
I take care of the house for all the times you didn’t let me take care of you, daughter.
I believe she needed to do it. She had to clean, inch after inch, tile after tile, wall after wall, because she needed to believe to have still a connection with my sister.
It has been a therapeutic way for her to accept my sister’s death, her choices in life, her tragic destiny, her being so different and not enough understood.
But my sister has been loved.
I loved you very much, sister..
But I thought it was enough for her to know it without hearing it too much.
I was wrong.
I should have told her more often.
I should have hugged her more often.
She was frail and vulnerable.
But we were sisters in a strange family where nobody was hugging, nobody was saying ‘I love you” to each other.
Sister, I am sorry I scared you that day on the beach when I shoved under your nose that net full of little black crabs. You were terrified by crabs. I knew it. But nobody was around to slap me on the hand. I thought it was funny. You run away screaming. I was laughing of you.
.
I tried my best.
She tried her best too.
But sometimes it seems love just can’t reach out.
I only wish my mother will be able to make peace with her guilt.
And me too.
