Truth

                        Truth
    I could’ve had a sister, but she only lived six hours. Before I was born, she’d been dead for years. I never heard anyone say anything about her, but when I saw her grave, I used to walk around it and wonder how different my life might have been if I’d had a sister.
    As much as I wondered about my sister, I never felt that I had anything in common with her until May 10th, 1976. I lost my voice as well as all my motor functions that day. I never again pursued college, a career, hunting, motorcycle racing, or anything I loved. My spirit began to experience a little of the loss her soul must feel forever.
    I began wondering how much more my sister and I had in common because her spirit appeared to me while I lay in a fever in Richland Memorial Hospital. It had said that my illness was related to her death, but I couldn’t understand how, until my mother took Granny Garner on a rushed visit to Doctor James Smith’s office one afternoon.
    While Granny Garner was in another room, my mother and Doctor Smith talked. She mentioned the doses of calomel that Granny Garner had given her every week as a young girl and he replied that it should’ve killed her because it mostly consisted of mercury.
    Almost as soon as my mother came home and mentioned her conversation with Doctor Smith, I knew what my sister and I had in common. We both had been exposed to mercury through my mother.
    No local doctor has ever supported my hypothesis about mercury, but I once e-mailed the CDC. Somebody there gave my theory credence, but she suggested no cure.
    After looking up many facts about mercury on the Internet, I finally gave up. If my hypothesis about mercury is correct, no one seems to know what can be done about it. My situation is almost as hopeless as my sister’s, but I can at least make the best of what’s left of my life. She wasn’t allowed that much.