The Day l Killed My Sister

l killed my sister.

Finally.

At least in my head.

This happened two years ago, but things had begun long before. See, l never had a good relationship with my sister. My father died -was killed- when I was ten and she was five, so we didn't really have a father figure as we grew up. My mother was an uneducated housewife, and she raised us the best way she could, but she wasn't intellectually equipped enough to mentor us. As for me, I was too easygoing as a brother with my sister. I was never much interested in her or in how her life was being shaped. I guess I didn't know how to be a brother, or I was busy finding myself. So, my sister and I were forced to find our own ways, and my mother had nothing to do but hope and pray that things would work out for us. Luckily, I found my interest in life and ended up with a job I still like after twenty-one years and a wife I still love after nineteen years. My sister, though, had a more bumpy road, and she ended up making many bad choices and friends. She barely finished high school and dropped university after a year. She abused drugs and got in trouble with the police. She got married without telling my mom, who learned about it a year and a half later. She never had a decent job. She had two daughters from two marriages, both of which ended in divorce.

The trouble was I never witnessed any of the bad things she had done. I kept learning about them from other people or whenever she contacted me when she had screwed things up so badly that she needed my help. I was always there for her when she needed me, but we didn't get in touch if we didn't have to. We never had a proper sister - brother relationship, and I never liked her. There had been countless times I wished she never existed. Even though I never said it out loud, I saw her as a parasite living off my mother and me, and I knew she felt the same about herself, but she never seemed to be doing anything about it. At one point, I broke all my relationships with her, but my mom asked me mend things up. “You only have each other,” she said.

Then, my mom got diagnosed with cancer. I made an agreement with my workplace and changed my teaching hours to the evening so that I could take my mom to the hospital for her daily treatment and tests. My sister, her second husband and her two daughters moved in with my mom to look after her during the treatment, which I felt she did because she wasn't able to afford to live on her own.

When my mom died, my sister almost lost her mind, or whatever was left of it. She was left with two kids, a dysfunctional husband, and no financial aid. Once again, I was trying hard to pull her together, so hard that I didn't have time to deal with my own grief over my mom's death for two weeks. In the meantime, I helped my sister to settle in my mom's apartment and got a credit card issued to her name so she could take care of her kids’ needs until she figured out what she wanted to do with her life. I even found her a job as a clerk at a friend's school supplies store. She quit after about a month.

Six months later, I went to Saudi Arabia to teach at a college, and just a few months after that, my sister was diagnosed with a type of skin cancer. I got news about her through emails and through my wife and a cousin, both of whom kept an eye on my sister. A few of my mother's close friends and a few relatives were in close touch with her. I also knew that they were helping her financially without telling me about it. Every time I went home, I visited her. She was quite secretive about her disease. She just kept telling me that her treatment was under way, the drugs were doing their magic, and she was soon to start getting chemotherapy. She had shaved her head, though. The doctor told her to stay away from the sun, and from what I gathered, she got tired very quickly and needed help with the housework and asked a few young relatives to come over to clean the apartment now and then. What bothered me most, though, was the photos she shared on Facebook in which she was on a picnic with her family on a sunny day. She was wearing a tank-top in the photos. She was still being the irresponsible herself.

There was one more thing. When my mother got sick, we had to carry a fat folder of documents around on our daily visits to the hospital. My sister never showed her documents to me when I asked. She just said, “Never mind,” and I was OK with that because I didn't feel very comfortable to talk to her about something she had that had killed my mother. Then my cousin, who also had lost a mother to cancer after fighting it for several years, started talking about how she really doubted my sister's illness. Besides, I began to hear from a few people, including my wife, about how my sister was complaining to some others that I was ignoring her. Well, summer was close, and I was to go home on a two-month break soon. The truth could wait a little longer.

So, before I visited her that summer two years ago, I decided to pay a visit to her doctor to learn about her health. I had a printout in my hand, from an email sent by a friend who had access to the national medication records. I had asked him to send me a list of the medication prescribed to my sister's name. There wasn't a single thing even remotely related to cancer on the list. When I arrived at the hospital she said she had been going to for her treatment, I went to the reception and asked for the doctor she said had been treating her. There was no such doctor there. I asked the receptionist to check what my sister was being treated for. She gave me the answer that I half knew by then. My sister had been to the hospital a few times, once for a cold, once for something small related to dermatology, and once or twice for some lady-issue. She had visited neither radiology nor oncology.

I experienced a chain reaction of emotions! I felt great relief first — not because I had learned that she didn't have cancer, but because I finally, after many years of doubts about her, had hard proof about what she was doing behind my back, which I had acquired myself. For so many years, I had given her the benefit of doubt, but now I was feeling like a gigantic ball of fire, ready to burn her into a tiny heap of ash! She was this disgusting little bug, and I was now ready to do what I had wanted to do all along — to get her out of my life forever. On the way from the hospital to her apartment, I kept thinking about how I would go about the confrontation. I am an extremely calm person in nature — extremely calm. No one has ever seen me burst out with anger in the forty-eight years of my life, let alone raise a fist against someone, but I wanted her to know how I really felt about her.

The confrontation was brief and way calmer than how my emotions urged me to act. When I told her I told her about what I had found out, she was just rendered speechless. She couldn’t say anything but a few nonsensical utterances. I let her know how I kept everything I had heard about her to myself, that I knew about the things she had been saying about me, how angry all the lies she had been telling made me, that I would tell everyone who had been trying to help her out all that time that she had been using their good intentions, and that she should get professional help. And I told her I didn't want to see her again. As soon as I left, I called the two people I knew had been supporting her. I knew the news would soon spread to everybody concerned. They needed to know who they were dealing with. They needed to learn how they had been manipulated for long.

So, this is how I killed my sister.

Finally.

At least in my head.