My sister is 20. She is beautiful and quick witted, and can be angry and insecure at times. She often feels lonely and scared, though she acts fearless and self contained. But mostly she is alive. Nothing about her is more cherished by me than that.
When I first knew my sister she was serious and separate from me. My parents had divorced and I fitted perfectly into the family my mother constructed with her boyfriend. She felt discarded, too old, too bitter a bad fit for this new situation. I remember being slapped and teased and her doing everything that she could do to make me feel her pain.
And then, with puberty, I felt her pain too. But she felt pain that was deeper, a remote cousin to the darkest depths of mine. She stole …show more content…
I stuck my head into my sister 's room at some point in the evening to say goodbye, for I was off for the night. She was turned to face the wall and looked like she was asleep. My mother came home late. She went into my sister 's room and found the note. I don 't know what it says. My mom still has it, filed away safe, for our protection rather than for posterity. I can 't bare the thought that it exist, let alone contemplate reading it, etching the words into my head, to be conjured up whenever i think of her. I know that it mentions me. Perhaps more than anyone else.
Then my mother saw the needle. My mom shook and shook and shook her. In the ambulance my sister didn 't come back to us. she laid still and silent, just a heartbeat away from death. She started convulsing, her eyes rolled back into her head, my mother started screaming for help, thinking my sister was on brink of …show more content…
I just shook my head, I couldn 't find the words. the therapist asked me if it was something i wanted to share with my sister. I managed a nod. “look her in the face and tell her why you are crying,” he said. I looked up at my sister, her face stony, her little foot tapping a frantic beat. “if you die, it is going to kill me, it is going to destroy my life and I am terrified” I managed to gasp, looking down at the floor. I looked up and we were all in that moment together. Me, my strong determined mom, my drunken father, my emotionally detached sister, we were all there sobbing together united by the same fear.
My sister didn 't stop trying to kill herself once she was discharged. One night she left home and went to a bridge over the highway, she climbed over the edge and sat, staring down at the cars rushing away just a deaths distance beneath her. Someone saw her in this contemplative moment between a painful tomorrow and a peaceful no more. They called the police and she was talked down.She had also continued to use drugs and abuse alcohol. The warning was stark; it was only a matter of