The Longing for My Sister
I was in the kitchen when my uncle came over and said, “Oh my God! Have you seen Brynn’s eyelashes? Well, take a look. You should see how big they are! They would be able to catch a fly.”
As I entered the dining room, I saw her eyelashes and wondered why anyone would do that. Why have eyelashes that fake and so big? I guess I don’t understand. So I asked her about it. She says, “Oh, Aunt Dana, you are so behind the times! You and Uncle Ted just don’t get it. This is the “in” thing now.
Uh-huh. Brynn is 20, and I must admit that she is always so dramatic. She says, “Doesn’t anybody care about how I feel?” Everything is always revolved around her.
My sister was 24 when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer; my niece was only 2. I remember my sister getting chemotherapy two days a week and radiation treatments three days a week. Luckily, my sister had a support system to take care of Brynn and someone to drive her to the hospital for these treatments because she became so ill and could not drive.
I had many sleepovers with my niece to help my sister recover or even shop for Christmas presents for my niece because my sister did not have any money and was not working after she had received the diagnosis. The chemotherapy caused my sister to lose her hair.
My sister approached me at my mother’s house and said, “I must shave off my hair.” My sister’s hair was very long and auburn and was placed into two braids. Her hair felt like hay, the drugs killing it. It was falling out. She said, “Shave it.”
I replied, “I can’t do it!” Tears filled my eyes. I told her, “Ask mom to do it!”
She said, “I don’t want mom to do it. I want you to do it!”
So I did. I got the scissors and cut the rest of her hair off. And then we had to show Brynn that her mom had no hair. My sister was so worried that she would scare Brynn with her new look, afraid she wouldn’t want her mother anymore. But we put a towel over her head and spoke with Brynn about mommy’s new haircut, and Brynn was okay when we removed the towel.
I could not hold back my tears, crying and thinking about what if my sister didn’t make it. My sister called me on the phone and said, “If I don’t make it, I want you to raise Brynn.”
I was shocked. At the time, I was 26 years old, thinking, how am I to raise a child? I was not married and had no idea how I could do it. Brynn’s father wasn’t in the picture, which worried my sister greatly. But I agreed and comforted her, “Don’t worry about Brynn. You will be able to take care of her.”
It was 2005, right around Thanksgiving, when my sister was diagnosed. My mother called me at work crying and said we needed to have the family together and create a plan to help my sister get through cervical cancer.
The doctor wanted to do a total hysterectomy and wanted to schedule the procedure for the following week. My sister was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to have any more kids. While we met with the oncologist, she mentioned that she wanted her eggs frozen and that I could be a surrogate for her later in life.
I was shocked to hear this news for the first time. My jaw dropped, and I said, “We never talked about this! You never asked me how I feel about this!”
Those words Brynn said to me in 2022 took me back to 2005. But here Brynn is. She is all grown up, and she acts just like her mother.
But this is a complicated story in which my sister survived cancer but has decided to leave our family and move to South Carolina without her daughter or any family member. I haven’t spoken to my sister in 8 years.
So Brynn lives with my mother now. I discuss many conversations with my mother, not understanding my sister’s choices and mostly saying, “She survived cancer. She had a second chance at life. You would think she would live life to the fullest.”
My mom agrees. But she chose to leave. My niece and I are close, but now that she has graduated from high school, she has many emotions coming up, like the feeling of abandonment and anger at her mother, and yet she wants a loving relationship with her mother.
This has been a difficult road, especially last Thanksgiving, to feel gratitude that my sister is alive and yet despair that I do not have the relationship I would love to have with her. I would love a sisterly relationship where we phone each other daily, come over for dinners, shop together, and whatnot.
But I do not have that and only know little about my sister. She lives in SC, and that’s about all my family knows. My niece does not remember the days when her mother had cancer. She was so young.
And who would have thought all these years later, we would be discussing her eyelashes at the dinner table and laughing, yet not forgetting that there were now three empty seats at the dinner table, one that should be for my sister, one for my step-father who died in 2020 and one for my grandmother who died in 2020 at the age of 95.
I look at my niece and her long eyelashes and say, “Life is too short. Whatever floats your boat!” I look around the table and feel gratitude for my family and yet sorrow for something I desperately want but cannot have, a relationship with my sister.
