Sister

(to everyone who has sent comments to me regarding this narrative.... thank you....and please note - this happened to my best friend, not me. She told me about the identity confusion she felt after Wendy's death. I couldn't NOT write it down. This was written at a writers' conference in a Poetry session. The assignment was to write a piece of narrative poetry in 30 minutes. Maybe it took only 30 minutes to write, but I still weep every time I read through it. Wendy was diagnosed with Lupus when she was 16 years old. She died of AIDS at age 28. Her parents had cured her of the Lupus using natural remedies. When she died there was no Lupus left in her system. Here is what they had to say.... http://www.green4health.com/george.htm

Also, I have just published a book, "Who Will Feed the Chickens?" Email me if you'd like a copy: [e-mail])

Deanna Selinger
Sister
(a narrative poem)

You know, I hated her, my sister. I really did.
Although she had one year on me
We began first grade together
But she left me behind by the fourth grade
When I was held back and she proceeded on to the fifth.
Mortified, I made her my mortal enemy.
Our friends became Her friends.
They passed me by, walked ahead of me
In exclusive, whispery circles.
She wore my clothes without asking,
And abandoned them in soggy piles on the bathroom floor.
She danced home with seven red ribbons on track meet day in the sixth grade
While I stumbled disparagingly over my long spindly legs
And drenched my cheeks with tears of fury and humiliation
In the carragana hedge.

In junior high she was the first to don stockings, heels and lipstick
The first to wear a bra and be excused from gym over menstrual cramps.
In high school I think there was not one boy she did not date
and leave bulging by the lockers.
It couldn’t get worse.
But it did.

It began with a butterfly rash across the bridge of her nose
Which the doctors supposed was an excess of sun
And sent her home with expensive creams and lotions.
Nothing was too good for Wendy.
What Wendy wanted Wendy got.
Wendy this. Wendy that.

But it spread, over her face, down her neck, across her breasts,
Spidering out over her back, her legs, between her toes.
It crawled into her mouth and seeped down her throat
Till she could barely swallow.

The house was mortgaged, some furniture sold.
They took her to the Mayo Clinic, homeopaths, naturopaths, specialists, astrologists.
She had three blood transfusions.
Cards and letters abounded. Posters, gifts, flowers, praise…
And I got lost in the Wendiness.

It ebbed and flowed. At times she merely looked awful.
Other times she was unrecognizable as a human being.
And still I hated her, my sister. I really did.

She used my hair brush when her hair was falling out in clumps
And she didn’t bother to clean it out.
She smelled of rotting flesh and antiseptic
She didn’t wash out the bathtub.

So you can imagine my secret and horrible glee
When a bout of shingles turned out to be the first symptomatic stages of AIDS.
More trips to the hospital. Less trips home,
Until we had moved her entire bedroom to the AIDS ward

She began sharing her secrets with me, her emotional wounds,
Something I had never bothered to consider.
Her friends, one by one, dropped away and quit coming around.
One day I found myself staring into the frightend eyes of someone I didn’t know.

I began to drive to the hospital after work.
We’d talk of all the years gone by, of school, work, illness, of possibilities,
And now of impossibilities.
We laughed at our antics of childhood, our quarrels over who
Was wearing what and which boy belonged to whom.

The attendants cared for her
In a systematic manner, with gloved hands and masked faces,
Meticulously disposing of, or sterilizing anything that might have come into contact with her, my sister.

I began to lay with her on the hospital bed, caressing her angelic lesion-infested hands.
I wet her cracked lips with my fingers, moistened with my own saliva.
I massaged her bleeding feet, rubbed ointment into each abrasion
with the devotion of an artist on sculpture.
I trimmed her nails. I set her on the bed pan and cleaned up afterwards.

When her tongue was so swollen she could no longer speak,
I listened to the voice of her breath, heaving in strained deliberation.
I pulled the words from her large tranquil eyes and uttered them from my own heart.
When dementia set it, words were no longer necessary.
I quit going to work
I lay at Wendy’s side.

I picked out the panties she wore at the funeral.
I chose an old dress of mine she had once worn without asking.
I washed her hairless head, gave her a brunette wig.

You know, I loved her, my sister. I really did.
Yet I have never been anyone but Wendy’s sister,

Who am I now?