Monday 7 November 2016

A love song for my sister Sheri



It wasn't until my late teens that I was grown up enough to be friends with my oldest sister. Born one day before her seventh birthday, I joke that I've been stealing Sher's birthday thunder for as many years as I've been alive. If she minded having her birthday overthrown, she never let me know.

She's always been kinder than me.

Before we were friends, I worshiped her from across the hallway in our house. Tall and impossibly thin, she had better legs than my Barbies, thicker hair and a bigger grin. She wore make-up and white-musk perfume and listened to metal and Meatloaf and the Rolling Stones. In an entirely myopic household, she had contact lenses. They made her humongous green eyes blue.

I wanted to be her.

Sher got me my first job when I was 15, working with her in a fish and chip shop in the mall. She taught me to work. I taught her to be more reserved when it came to filling job vacancies with family members.

She never fired me.

The first time I was went to a bar was with Sher. Bored and on Christmas break, we tested our father's patience to the point where he gave us his blessing to head off to the bar in a light snowstorm. We drank beers, we talked to boys, we went home.

It was spectacular.

As I got older, our friendship solidified. In my university days, her household was my safe place. She was light of heart, a free spirit, always up for adventure and never one to complain. Her daughter and future husband were of the same mind. I counterbalanced that with the doom-and-gloom angst of a liberal arts education.

The free spirits always won.

Our family has polycystic kidney disease (PDK). It's hereditary. Sher was diagnosed with it around the same time our father was having a transplant. It was never much of a concern when we were younger, there were four kids in our family, two with PDK and two without. There were enough healthy kidneys to go around.

My brother came up first. The thing I struggled with the most was knowing that if I gave up a kidney, I wouldn't have one for Sher. He was my brother and she was my BFF long before there was such a thing as BFFs.  But Sher's kidneys weren't failing and my brother's were.

I gave him my spare.

After my surgery, Sher and her husband came up to visit with their not-cat-friendly malamute. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis five years before the transplant. At the time, she was in a wheelchair and I was laid up on the couch. Our spouses were off somewhere. We agreed the malamute could eat my cat if it lacked the survival skills to stay where Sher could wheel to defend it from her chair. She was an adept wheeler in those days.

The cat made it. Split open, the laughter nearly killed me.

It's bad enough to have one life threatening disease, but to have two is too much for one person. I feel it is too much for one person to witness from the sidelines, let alone to be that person. That I couldn't give her a kidney became a moot point. Multiple sclerosis ruled her out as a transplant candidate.

But we endured, because she endured. Spectacularly.

And she has spectacularly endured. Through the endless invasive tests, through the loss of mobility that had me smiling at her in her hospital bed until I could go home and howl with grief over shin bones poking up like razors in what used to be better than Barbie legs. Through injections, seizures, infections, dialysis, paralysis and a mind that gaslights itself, she has spectacularly endured.

She taught me that grace and dignity are a state of mind.

She has enriched the lives of everyone around her, and even saved a life or two.

The head nurse at the home told me late this summer that they were refocusing Sher's care from aggressive treatment to a regime of comfort and compassionate care. She was quick to point out that Sher's still Sher. She is light of heart. She is free of spirit. She does not complain.

A little while ago, my brother-in-law asked her how she felt about the possibility of having to stop dialysis. She said she thought everyone would be okay. He asked her how she felt for herself. She said she was tired. She said on the upside, she would get to see our father soon. Also, her obsessively devoted dog Lucky.

Sher is is my sister and she is my friend and she is my heart. Wherever I've been she's been my safe harbour, she's been my home. Given a hundred years I will never be as strong as her, but I am strong enough to let her go.

Dialysis has ended and palliative care has started. My heart is breaking, but keep telling it that Sher is tired. There is no one more deserving of a rest.

I love you Sheri.

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