Over the Fence: Sisters

 

Do you want to chat over the fence or come sit on the porch?  Or shall we retreat indoors and try to escape the pollen?  I can't promise you peace and quiet, but I can promise you something to drink.  Peach Tea perhaps?  Or would you prefer that lovely violet tea?  I can serve them hot and not iced.  It's plenty cool enough outdoors today, not even topping 50F yet.

I've never had a sister.  I always felt I'd missed out on something special.  I had two younger brothers.  One is living still.  He prefers to keep his distance and that's fine.  I happen to understand and know why he keeps his distance even if he's not figured it out.  It's typical of the sort of parenting we had that he would prefer to not have a relationship with me.  I've shared the divisiveness with which we grew up and I can assure you had I had a sister, she'd likely have been just as distanced from me as my brother.  Nevertheless, I saw that my brothers had a special bond between them, and I very much wanted to bond with someone, too.  I always felt a sister was that person.  And that longing was reinforced by some of the sisters I've known in my lifetime.

First there was my grandmothers.  They both had sisters.  Granny had three sisters.  Her rival sister, the one closest to her in age, was probably also her closest sister.  They spoke on the phone most days.  They visited back and forth weekly.  They were married to first cousins so there was that additional closeness in relationship.  They were married about the same time.  They had children in about the same time frames.  So yes, they were close.  

Grandmother was the oldest child, but she seemed to me to be closest to the older of her two younger sisters, perhaps because the baby girl was still a baby when Grandmother left home to be married.  

Big Mama had several sisters, but I only knew Aunt Mattie Lee.  I'm still trying to track down the names of all the girls in Big Mama's family.  Big Mama and Aunt Mattie Lee were night and day from one another.  Aunt Mattie Lee was very modern in her way of dress and manner, but Big Mama was very plain and old fashioned for the most part.  She didn't want all the modern appliances and such in her home.  She got along just fine with things done the old-fashioned way.

None of my friends who were the only girl of the family ever admitted to such a longing.  Nor did they seem much enthused when I'd suggest that we might be pretend sisters.  

But over my years working in the Nursing Home, I met quite a few sisters.   Let me tell you about them.

At one point at the nursing home, we admitted a woman who'd fallen and broken her hip.  While she was with us for rehab, I had the pleasure of meeting her three sisters.   They all had rather fancy names.  Theodosia, Olympia, and Desdemona.   The three sisters were now in their 70's and 80's.  They never married.  They lived in the same house in which they grew up as girls and they were quite happy as spinsters.  And they were very close.

Their parents were educators and loved to read to the girls and encouraged them in their studies.   These three sisters finished one another's sentences, laughed a lot and were just lovely women.  

Lois and Lane were polar opposites.  Lois was prim and proper in dress and manner and very concerned with appearances.  She worked in a lawyer's office in a small town near the nursing home.   She was quiet and often wore a gently worried expression, but she was always kindness itself to the staff and made requests in a polite and pleasant way.   She and her sister cared for their mother in as loving and caring a way as you could hope to see any family.   Mama was in the nursing home only because both girls worked, but that didn't stop them visiting daily.  Lois usually came in during the week since she lived nearby.

Lane was also a professional woman.  She worked in the state senate, hence her inability to head down during the week except when the senate was closed.  I don't know how Lane dressed during her work periods, but when she wasn't working, she could have given Dolly Parton a lesson or three.  She favored pink jumpsuits, often of a satiny type of material and she had red hair that she fluffed into BIG hair. She loved makeup and had long polished nails.  Blingy jewelry, platform shoes, rhinestones.  If it flashed, Lane owned and wore it without a qualm. She was loud and noisy but as kind and polite as her sister.  

Both sisters were devoted to Mama.  I never knew their mom as anything other than she was in the nursing home, but she must have been something else prior to that residency because her two girls were devoted to her from start to finish without missing a day.  They came to her on every single Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, her birthday, and Christmas loaded down with presents.  They came to celebrate Easter and Fourth of July with Mama.  I don't guess Mama ever even knew what they were doing, certainly she was non-responsive as far as we could see, but they kept this up for years and years.  One or the other was there to visit every single day of the week.  They did her laundry.  They brought her flowers from their gardens.

When their Mama went to the hospital for a limb amputation, we were a little put out by a phone call from the two sisters.  They'd decided that they wanted to save the limb and when their mama died, bury it with her.  Their biggest concern was how to retrieve and store the limb.  We suggested they needed to contact the hospital doing the amputation but then we contemplated the whole story ourselves.  Should they store it in the deep freezer?  We all shuddered at that.  Someone else suggested they cremate the limb and then bury the ashes along with Mama's body, but we all felt sure that wasn't going over too well with anyone.  

I don't know what the end of the story about that limb turned out to be and didn't want to ask.  I don't think any of us dared ask to be honest, because some things you just don't want to know...but we certainly knew without a doubt that they were both a bit obsessed where Mama was concerned!

Hattie was a great lump of a woman with a mean looking face and a slovenly way about her.  She had been a non-compliant diabetic all her life and as a result she ended in the nursing home.  That is not to say she was totally compliant there.  She ate the diet provided but come first of the month when she had funds in her account, she was first in line at the front office asking for a bit of money.  She had three vices: Coco Cola, Moonpies, and Snuff.  Money in hand, each month she'd head down the hall in her wheelchair to find the activity director whose job it was to order her monthly supply of snuff.  That paid for she went around to the back lobby where the vending machines stood and fed in her change and gathered her moon pie and soda which she inhaled. She usually had enough money in her account to carry her about a week.  Her medications were always adjusted for that little splurge of hers and then she'd settle right down into being compliant by have to until the first of the next month rolled around.

I'd know Eunice for the longest time.  Eunice was a youthful looking woman, although she was much older than Hattie.  She was slender and fit.   She was a teacher by profession and had chosen to remain single all her days, but she was a foster parent who'd raised a huge number of children over the years.  She had a trim neat little house on the other side of town with a yard to be envied by all who passed it.  If Hattie was foul mouthed and grumpy, Eunice was soft spoken, gentle and kind in all she said.  They too were complete opposites.   But Eunice was a devoted sister.  She visited Hattie two or three times weekly.  

Truth told, it was probably 2 years before I made the connection between Hattie and Eunice.  When we first met, I was in the front office and had no clue who she was visiting.  I only knew from her word that she'd come to see her sister.   Miss Eunice and I had many and many a conversation over the five years I worked there and never once did she have a single unkind thing to say about her sister.   I took her cue and never once asked why they were so vastly different.

I recall one conversation I had with Miss Eunice at a specially called 'public' meeting.   There was a healthcare act passed that made social workers in the nursing home responsible for educating the 'public at large' about the new healthcare act.  It was a stupid addendum to a confusing piece of legislation that few healthcare social workers fully understood.  Fortunately, the corporate office that owned our nursing home had held numerous seminars and teaching meetings to ensure their staff understood the law fully.

Miss Eunice arrived early that evening, before the general public came in and she and I sat down and had a long talk.  I remember her saying to me, "I...I... Well, the truth is I believe in euthanasia!  Look at me!  I'm in my late 70's.  I've been healthy and lived a good life.  It's been hard but good.  At the end, I don't want to be hooked up to machines nor have someone trying to make me live longer.  I just want to die peacefully at home without suffering and pain."  She wasn't hysterical nor misled in anyway.  She'd really thought this thing out and told me several things more that convinced me that this was something she'd thought of often enough over the years.

Later, after I'd left the nursing home, I heard that Miss Eunice had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in her 80's.  And a week later, I heard that she'd passed away.  I thought often of her and that decision she'd made long ago, and I was sure she'd somehow had the end she longed for most.  

Miss Hattie died shortly after her sister.  She never did one thing differently than she'd been doing them all those years I knew her.  

These are the sisters that stand out in my mind.  They were all devoted to one another but so completely different.   Well, I'm not sure about Miss Hattie.  I'm not sure she was devoted to Miss Eunice, but Miss Eunice was to Hattie...but they most certainly were opposites.

The only other sister story I have isn't from nursing home days or my grandmothers but just a casual moment.  I went to a yard sale and there were two women talking, just chatting away non-stop.  They talked and laughed and talked and frankly I was feeling a bit lonely and envied them their ease of friendship. It was obvious they were very close friends.   Finally, the other woman took her leave, and I carried my few items up to the desk to pay for them.   

We made small talk for a moment and then I said, "It was lovely to listen to the two of you chat away.  You sound like you're very close friends."  "Oh, that was Kate, my sister!  We have two other sisters but it's just not the same between us and them.  But Katie and I... We're very close!  We talk on the phone two or three times a day.  I don't know what I'd do without Katie in my life."  I was amazed to hear that the other woman had been her sister.  Truly their conversation was the intimate sort between two best friends.  I went away heartened to hear that siblings can be close and truly be friends and felt once more that sting that I'd missed out on something.

I know that not all sisters are as close and devoted as the ones I've mentioned here.  I well remember two very different sisters from my nursing home days.

An old woman in her 80's came in and asked if she and her son, who was mentally disabled could be placed in the nursing home together.  I assured her we'd find places them for them both.  She explained, "My daughter is taking care of us, but she has cancer, and the treatments really take it out of her.  She really can't take care of her own household, without ours added on.  I don't want Henry to be in a strange environment when I pass.  I thought if we could come in together and settle down that when I did die, perhaps he would feel more at home and not so lost, you know?  And it would relieve a lot off Sandra's shoulders.  She's cooking and cleaning for us now and it's just too much!"

We began the application process and set a date for their admission.  Her daughter Sandra came in.  Indeed, she did look dreadfully weak and sick and guilty as well.  In talking with her I found she was really worried that her mom blamed her in some way for being sick.  I reassured her that her mother was concerned but not upset at all.   Sandra viewed the room, the laundry facilities, looked over the activity calendar, even went into the dining room and tasted the food for that day's meal.  She looked relieved and pronounced it a nice nursing facility.  After a few more questions, she told me she'd talk it over with her mom but felt sure we could count on placement.

Two days later I got a phone call from a woman whose name I can't recall.  She was nasty and hateful.  She called me every name in the book and when she was done, she started in on her sister.   The sister, per this woman, was lazy and slothful, sorry as they made them and neglectful of their mother.  It took a good fifteen minutes to get out of the woman exactly who her mother was.  I listened to this woman's tirade and then asked a few pertinent questions.  "Where do you live?"  "I live in Florida!  I can't be there every minute to tend to Mama, but I'll not let anyone else mistreat or abuse her!  I know my rights..." and don't the Karen's of this world always know 'their' rights which never include anyone else's rights.  I thought back to Sandra, who looked like the world and half another were on her shoulders, wearily battling cancer and doing, by her mother's account, nor her own, all she could do to ease the passage of these two family members.

"When was the last time you saw your mother?"  "It's been nearly two years.  I can't' just come up there on a whim!"  "Have you spoken with your mother?"  "No!  I talked to that sorry Sandra, that lazy good for nothing that will let her own mother go into a nursing home and her able to take perfectly good care of her!"  "Did you know how heavily your mother's concerns about Henry's future were weighing on her?"  "Why?  Can't Sandra tend to him if anything happens to Mama.  If you admit her, I'll sue you!  I'll sue that sorry a** Sandra.  I'll sue!!"  "Ma'am, why don't you talk to your Mama?  Better yet, why don't you come up here and see how things are for yourself.  We'll be happy to have you visit this facility.  Your mother's biggest concern is Henry and his future care..."  "You mind your own d****d business.

A week later, the mother called and said she'd changed her mind.  "My other daughter was mighty upset about all this.  Sandra says we'll just go on as long as we can as we are.  It's better than hearing all the fuss.  It's just too stressful!"

I heard a month later that Sandra died.  The mother plodded on for about a month on her own and then she too died.  And poor Henry, the center of the mother's chief concerns was placed in a nursing home and immediately sent to another because he simply couldn't adjust to nursing home life...Of course, his other sister couldn't help him at all...

Maybe, I missed nothing in not having a sister.  As I said, given the circumstances in which I was raised, it's highly unlikely any closeness between us would have survived.  Certainly, the relationships with my brothers were strained due to the other influence we had to deal with.   

That's all I have to say about that.

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