Here’s to the sisters.
While my wife is with her sister this week, my daughters are with each other (and with me and their brother), in cold but dazzlingly bright Denver to celebrate my sisters: Wendy, who is turning 65, and Meryl, who began the year with a cancer diagnosis and ended it with a clean bill of health.
Meryl is the big sister. She was diagnosed last December, had surgery in January, started chemotherapy in February, and continued with it all through the spring and summer. Then came six weeks of daily radiation therapy.
A no-nonsense type, she wanted neither pity nor prayer. For her, the way to get through chemo’s cycles of nausea and fatigue was “to put on my makeup and my wig every day and go out there and face the world.”
That pretty much summarizes her approach to life in general, apart from the wig.
As big sisters should, Meryl gave me sound advice at a pivotal moment. I had gotten a newspaper job as a way to house and feed myself while writing my dissertation. Much to my surprise I enjoyed being a reporter so much that I began to think I needn’t bother finishing that pesky Ph.D. — I had found a satisfying career that didn’t require one.
It was Meryl who suggested that I might be glad I had that fancy degree some day, so I cut my hours at the paper, banged out my dissertation, and earned my stripes. Sure enough, five years later, I moved from the newsroom to the classroom — just in the nick of time, in terms of the near-collapse of the news business during the first decade of this troublous century.
When we think of courage we often picture some sort of selfless decisive action, like dashing into the burning building to save the baby. But in its less flashy manifestations, courage takes the form of simple resilience. “I can’t go on,” Frank O’Hara says in one of his poems. “I go on.”
When someone “goes on,” the way my sister carried on throughout the nearly yearlong ordeal of cancer treatment, she shows us, as Richard Hugo, another poet, puts it, “this is how it’s done.”
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An unfortunate habit of family life is to assign a label to each child: the Smart One, the Pretty One, etc. — as if one attribute precludes the other, or the supply of natural advantages is so limited that each is doled out to only one person per family. Let the sibling rivalries begin!
It’s way less destructive — and more accurate — to say that we are all of us jumbles of traits, and siblings are both like and unlike in countless ways.
My daughters are a case in point — completely unalike in all sorts of superficial ways, but uncannily able to read each other’s minds (they’re pretty much unbeatable as teammates in board games), and sweetly appreciative of each other’s gifts and attainments.
That said, for the purposes of this column, I’m going to call Wendy the most loving of the three of us. Beginning with meeting her husband Andy in college, she has enfolded herself in ever-larger circles of love, from her sons, to her nieces and nephews, to her daughters-in-law and now her four grandchildren.
When Wendy said that more than anything that could be put in a box and wrapped in pretty paper and shiny ribbons, she wanted to be surrounded by her extended family on her big birthday, Andy took her at her word. So here we all are, we easterners blinking in the snow-reflected sunlight, as if we have just stepped out of a dark room.
As her little brother, I couldn’t ask for a more supportive sibling. Wendy is unfailingly the first (and sometimes only) reader to send me an “attaboy” about my latest column. To the extent that any of us non-celebrity types have fans, my mother was probably my biggest fan when she was alive. That dubious title has now passed to her middle child.
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One thing about hanging out with family: You can laugh your fool head off without any self-consciousness. Twice since I’ve been here I’ve laughed myself to tears. I’d try to tell you why but, you know, you had to be there.
OK, one of the incidents involved a fondue pot. The other involved Meryl’s adventures in dating, which, if you know anything about the single scene in New York City in the fern bar days, is almost self-explanatory.
Anyway, cold as it is here at the edge of the Rocky Mountains, I am basking in the warmth of all this family time. I hope you are, too.
Happy 2016!
