Grief Essay: Knowing Mary will Die
Knowing Mary Will Die: The pain of losing another sister to treatable uterine cancer for the second time.
Published to public media, August 29, 2021 7:00 am.
I’m going through her scattered belongings, the only things left of my once exquisite sister Mary. Full name — as my eight Catholic siblings and I were all given five names — Mary Clare Jaclyn Lee Griffin.
It is July 17, 2021 and mind numbingly hot in beleaguered Portland, Oregon.
We are on the second floor of a three bedroom house in southeast, and I begin by gingerly picking things up from an antique writing desk. I examine a small rectangular china tray, painted with pink and orange flowers. It has a fine antique look to it, is edged in gold trim and in pristine condition. It is filled with plastic bouncy balls; a thin layer of grey dust lines the bottom, intermingling. Next to the china tray I find a clear glass dish, shaped like a seashell and filled with metal paper clips. Alongside the glass shell is a little china Koi fish, white and red, a pretty trinket one could place on the top of a bookshelf or on a writing desk. As I handle these delicate objects in my hands, I know I will take them with me.
Bouncy balls are on the floor and they collect in the corners of the room, round swirls in bright primary colors of red, purple, green and blue. What did she do with them, I wonder? Did she toss them against the walls? On the floor? Did it help her feel less alone to hear the soft thud as they bounced nearby?
Or perhaps she used them as toys to play with her one cat, Cookie? Perhaps he liked to chase them around the room? Mary had an uncanny ability to attract stray cats. They would just find her, one found her by climbing in her bedroom window, in a small apartment she lived in, in NW Portland. This cat, Cookie, also found her and became a cherished companion. Perhaps the bouncy balls were for him?
The desk belonged to our father and I’ve seen photos of it when it was gleaming, polished and new. How Mary ended up with it, I’m not certain, and while it’s still solid, it has scratches on the top surface and the four legs. Mary has thrown away the slender drawer for some unknown reason and the hollow space where the drawer should be seems awkward and wrong. I make a mental note I will take the desk with me and see it fully restored. It’s one of the few things left of my parents from the 1950s, from before I was born and the oldest of my siblings were small.
These are the last of Mary’s possessions left behind after she wandered into a Portland hospital eight weeks before, complaining of a mysterious pain in her abdomen and asking for help.
My younger sister is with me and she tells me what we need to do. She oversees the process of clearing out Mary’s bedroom because the room is in her rental property. Mary lived there several years rent free. With her meager income, she couldn’t afford an apartment and my younger sister didn’t see the point in charging her even a small sum. My younger sister is forced to do all of this so she can get a new renter the following day and bring in needed income because the mortgage won’t pay for itself.
Mary will never return to this small sunny bedroom with the south facing window, or cuddle her grey tabby cat, Cookie, in this room either. She will never again hear the Mexican family who lived just beyond the back cedar fence, or the happy sounds of their children laughing and playing, or the mother calling them in for supper as dusk falls.
I sort through boxes and bags on the floor and in the closet, mostly the contents are things to be thrown away. Old clothes of no value like tattered black sweat pants, grey tee shirts, and paper and plastic bags she’s collected here and there.
We make the bizarre discovery of her clippings, stored in an attractive cedar chest, but this is not something we don’t know about. Mary has been doing this for years. Dozens of clear plastic bags of all sizes are filled with strips of paper, cut with scissors. The bits and strips are so minuscule and thin, they are barely centimeters thick. They look more like confetti than anything else, but there are bags of them, big bags, small bags, tiny bags, all stuffed inside the cedar chest, with other bags of the clippings scattered in nearly every corner of the bedroom.
I see the books and magazines she’s been slowly cutting up. Two large novels with most of the back pages pulled out are tossed in a garbage bag. Some of the bits in some of the plastic bags look like photographs. The tiny strips that resemble photographs concern me. Which photos are they? Which memories did Mary want to annihilate for herself or for someone else? Which photographs did she take with her own cameras or which photographs did she steal from family members so she could destroy them, as she was known to do?
As I gaze up at the high shelves in her closet, near the ceiling, I see neatly stacked paper bags pressed together. Inside the bags are hundreds of catalogs — catalogs of all sorts, but mostly Neiman Marcus. Mary loved high fashion and always had good taste. But there are others, too, Christmas catalogs, Easter, Halloween and Valentine’s Day catalogs. Sadly, I see her collection includes wedding and bridal catalogs, with bright white and bone colored wedding dresses splashed across the covers. The beautiful young models are smiling. They have glossy lips, wide interested eyes and perfect teeth.
The catalogs speak loudly to me. I know what they mean and why Mary has collected them.
I remember the dozens of catalogs my daughter and I used to look at in the evenings before she went to bed, sitting next to each other on the sofa when she was a child and even a teenager. It was a hopeful thing, a fun thing we used to do, to speculate on what we would buy once we were finally rich.
Looking at Mary’s enormous collection of catalogs I see the longing that the collection represents. And it breaks my heart, though I don’t let on. I swallow the feeling and continue to sort through her things. I pretend like it doesn’t bother me, even though it does.
But I want to save them. I want to save every last one of Mary’s catalogs so I can glance though them, to honor her in my own inexplicable way. But there are too many. There are hundreds and it’s hot and sultry and my younger sister and I are sweating and silently cursing the heat.
Glancing back at the catalogs on the shelf, I know Mary will never be a bride. She will never have a wedding. She will die a single woman in a hospice bed along with her maiden name, the only girl in our family never to marry.
This also is something I always knew would happen and something our father knew would happen as well. He told me years ago in the late 1980s: “Mary will never get married. And when she dies, she’ll die with her maiden name.” I remember how certain my father was and how sad when he said those words. And though I didn’t want to believe it, I also knew he was right. Again I marvel at how my father just seemed to know things. So many of his predictions came true that it made me wonder about him — how did he always seem to know?
I gaze up at the high shelves in her closet. There are boxes of brand new shoes, elegant high heeled shoes, never worn. They will go to a beloved young niece, one of the only people Mary wants around her, and her favorite person in the world right now. I know she would want the shoes to go to our niece and so they will.
There is a pile of yellow polka dot fabric tossed on the small futon bed where Mary slept, a velvety soft Microfiber blanket the color of a bruised plum, and a smattering of books, placed here and there. The titles interest me. I scan them with my bad eyesight, leaning forward to see better, desperate to unearth anything that will help me understand the enigma of my older sister Mary.
I am searching for clues as I rummage through the remains of her life and I feel keenly like a thief.
She’s still alive, can’t this wait till later? But my younger sister and I both know, without even having to say it, that it cannot wait until later. Yet I still feel like a thief as I rummage through my sisters things, taking what I want, throwing away what has no apparent value.
I focus on her small collection of books. I know I will take them with me. There are several good cook books, one on how to cook using butter milk called Better with Buttermilk, and another called 500 Cupcakes: the Only Cupcake Compendium you’ll Ever Need. There is a book on alternative medicine called Total health Turnaround, and two novels which throw me — a paperback copy of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, heavily annotated by Mary, and a paperback copy of East of Eden by John Steinbeck, with no annotations.
Both of the novels are enormously thick and I try to imagine my sister reading them. I try to imagine her turning the pages, and careful not to damage the fragile spines as she lays on her back or her side on the futon bed pressed up against the wall.
I remember when Mary was much younger, in the middle 1970s, the kids in our neighborhood told her she should be a model because she was that pretty. “You could be a model, Mary, easy!” they would tell her. At one point, she had a perfect Farrah Fawcett shoulder length haircut but the attention her looks and beautiful hair brought her made her uncomfortable. She would smile and say nothing in return.
But now Mary is 56-years-old and the days of her youth are over.
Sometime after Mary graduated from PSU in 1988, at the age of 22, with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, she told me her favorite book was a novel by William Faulkner. She’d said it reminded her: “Of our crazy family.” I remember how proud of her I was, that she had graduated, the first of the siblings in our family to do that. And by virtue of her graduating, she had given me the hope to do so myself one day.
That day, when I asked what her favorite book was, it was hard to get an answer, as she was so inscrutable and equally indifferent to what other people thought, and I by way of contrast was relentlessly curious and always asking questions. It seemed ever since Mary turned about fifteen, she stopped confiding in people. She became secretive and evasive and getting a straight answer from her was never an easy task.
I pestered her that afternoon, sometime in 1989, when we had gotten together for lunch and a movie. I asked her three different ways what her favorite novel was and finally she sighed and smiled and told me the title: As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner. It was not at all what I expected.
“Why do you wanna know what my favorite book is?” she asked me, slightly annoyed. I laughed lightly and made an excuse that I was compiling a reading list and was always interested in what people read. But that wasn’t true. I only wanted to know what her favorite book was, not anyone else’s, because maybe then I might come closer to understanding what made her tick. Even then, I was trying to uncover the mystery of my sister Mary.
The book centers on the dysfunctional Bundren family of illiterate and mentally ill rural Mississippians. Their task is to honor their mother Addie Bundren’s wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson Mississippi. As she lies in bed, dying, she watches impassively from her bedroom window as one of her sons makes her coffin.
When Addie finally does die, several days later, the family begins the journey to take their dead mother’s body to her hometown and along the way they encounter one calamity after another. They are all damaged people and the journey is rough and filled with struggles and meltdowns and drama, as they travel dirt roads and cross raging tumultuous rivers, doing this one last thing to honor their mother.
As they travel through towns, on their way to Jefferson, one sister discovers she is pregnant and tries to arrange an abortion but fails repeatedly. A brother breaks his leg and rides on top of the coffin as it is pulled by horses. The coffin is nearly lost twice on the journey and by the time the Bundren’s get to Jefferson, the stench emanating from the coffin fills the air and horrifies the townspeople, who wonder who this family is, and what do they want?
The story is told from the perspective of 15 characters points of view and is called Modernist, or Southern Gothic. Mary had laughed that day, telling me how the book reminded her of our family — the Griffin family. “But why does it remind you of our family?” I asked her. “Oh, I don’t know — just how crazy we all are?” she said with a gentle smile. I nodded my head. I understood exactly what she meant and took no offense at the comparison.
I promise her I will buy it and read the book one day, nodding my head affirmatively, satisfied that I’ve finally gotten an answer from her. Mary seems amused I wanted to know what her favorite book is as we step forward to pay for the movie tickets and buy unbuttered popcorn and two bottles of spring water. She is strictly careful about what she eats or drinks, telling me which foods I should avoid and which foods are good for me.
Mary is slender and three full inches taller than me, standing five feet seven inches. I am her shorter and overweight younger sister. She gives me advice on how to lose weight and what I should do. I nod my head and agree. She looks at me slightly disapprovingly, but with an understated affection, the way someone gazes, appraising a misbehaving kitten or puppy. I pretend not to notice and look into my bag of popcorn. I am her younger sister and she is reminding me of that but there seems to be a faint light of love in her eyes, or perhaps it is pity.
Mary’s voice is always soft and feminine and refined as she speaks, and she is intelligent and well-educated, but even then, I know my sister is hopelessly mentally ill. I remember her teenage years in our family home on NW Thurman Street, near 23rd Avenue, where we lived with our over-worked, stressed-out mother. I remember all the things that happened there. I cannot forget those years. I remember the journals I secretly read in her bedroom, while she was out shopping one day, and the horror she described in them. The horror she experienced in 1967 when she was almost four, and I was 18-months-old and we were all put in foster care. This occurred after our mother had a breakdown due to exhaustion, and the family was broken up for six long irrevocable weeks, which would leave their imprint on nearly all of us, but Mary most of all.
Mary calls every few months during the 1980s and 1990s. We have halting conversations on the telephone. If I’m busy or preoccupied, I stop what I’m doing entirely and whisper to my husband that it’s my older sister Mary and I’ll have to take the call. I walk into the front guest bedroom for privacy, the beige cordless house-phone pressed firmly against my ear. I give her all my attention, focusing only on her.
On the day of our movie outing, I let her lead the afternoon, the way I always let her lead. Some of my other siblings ask why I bother. They say she’s controlling and difficult but I already know that. I also know I can’t say no when she calls asking if we can get together for coffee or a movie, because I know how isolated she is and that she has no one.
I think Mary thought once she graduated from college, her life would be complete and successful and happy. That’s not what happened though, and I feel sad for her. Because of this, I can’t say no when she calls. I can never say no.
She decided where we would go, first to a café for a tuna sandwich and salad, and then to an art house theater on 13th and SW Taylor Street. She muses on what we should see and pretends that we decide together, but it is Mary who decides which foreign film we will see — an Italian film, a comedy, with the affable actor Marcello Mastroianni.
I know that control is important to Mary, since she had so little control over what happened to her as a child and I don’t protest or argue. I go along with what she wants for her; because I know it will make her feel better and I just want to get through the afternoon and go home. I know she won’t call for another two months or so, and then I’ll have to consider going through the process all over again. But I will.
I do this for my sister Mary because I love her.
As my younger sister and I continue to go through Mary’s things, I find a cheap wall hanging. It is a canvas painting of bright pink, white and purple roses, an explosion of exuberant color. It’s probably factory made and has a thin plastic veneer covering the image of roses in a striped vase. The image reminds me how much Mary loved roses and would often spend time in the front yard of our old family home smelling the bright red roses or the small pink Cabbage roses that always wilted so quickly. The roses spent decades clustered together near the sidewalk, blooming, neglected and wilting, but hanging on anyway — rather like our family.
Later, under some clothing on the futon I find a fat hardcover novel that looks like it might be a romance novel. It’s entitled ROSES by Leila Meacham. The dust jacket is covered in pink and red rose petals. The heroine is a girl named Mary.
Near the same clutter of discarded clothing on the futon, I find a TIN HOUSE Summer Reading Issue from 2015. There is an essay called ROOM, by a new writer named Mary Barnett. Somehow, I know there’s a connection to the names, Mary, and why she has the books, though I doubt Mary would ever admit that.
I find a pink fabric cosmetics case, brand new with about thirty perfectly good lipsticks inside. Lipsticks of all colors, red, pink, mauve, burgundy, peach. Never used, with the caps still on. I look through the colors and marvel that Mary has never used even one of them.
So many of the things I find are objects she purchased but left in the packaging — whimsical, girlish things. There is a high quality little girls metal tea set, a Wonder Wand, filled with glitter and shimmering colored stars, a decorative sparkling purple butterfly, the kind you affix to a wall in a little girls bedroom. There are four sets of new identical pumpkin salt and pepper shakers, painted bright orange and covered with glossy varnish. I take two sets and my younger sister takes two.
Thinking back I remember this was something Mary used to do as a child and teenager. Opening the toy or package would “spoil it” she would say, so she would leave it untouched in the packaging, always new, always hopeful, unspoiled by not being opened.
In a brown paper bag, in her cluttered closet, I find a white bank envelope with $69 cash inside, two twenty’s, a ten, three fives and four one dollar bills. I am so broke I pocket the money, stuffing it hastily in my purse as my sister walks downstairs to dump more odds and ends into the garbage can in the driveway. I hate myself as I do this, but I hate myself even more thinking that on the day Mary walked out of this bedroom, never to come back, she forgot about the cash she had stuffed in the brown paper bag. Somehow that makes me feel incredibly sad and empty inside. I wish I could just call Mary on the telephone and cheerfully tell her: “I found $69 in your room! Do you want me to bring it to you?”
But I can’t do that now, because Mary is dying of cancer.
I think of my younger sister. She saved my sister Mary, provided her with a place to live rent free for over five years when no one else could and tolerated her mood swings, her paranoia and her inability to appreciate anything that anyone could do for her, lost in her mental illness, incapable of connection or even the simplest moral awareness.
I sit down on a brand new grey metal folding chair to rest. It’s in the corner by the window and I can’t help but wonder if Mary bought it or found it somewhere. I contemplate the many years since I last saw my sister, before she cut me off and virtually everyone else in the family. For years, I wished I could call her but I haven’t had her phone number in over twenty years and I knew if I had called, she would hang up on me.
The last time we spoke or sat next to each other was the summer of 2007, in the hottest part of early July, the day after the 4th. It was then I told Mary our older sister Margaret had died of uterine cancer — the same cancer that is consuming Mary in 2021, filtering through her with relentless tenacious fingers, like a spiders web, penetrating her flesh, the parasite that cancer is, replicating, pitiless.
I was walking to my bus stop on PSU campus, after a class, and I saw her. I waved brightly, and smiled. It had been years since I’d seen her, but she seemed to be in a good mood and allowed me to approach. We walked to a brick bench, near the top of a nearby water fountain and sat down. As I dipped my fingers in the water, with floating feathers, dry leaves and grit on the surface, I hesitantly told Mary that our older sister Margaret had died New Years Eve 2006, seven months prior. What I was saying didn’t seem to register though, and she laughed nervously, and looked away. She couldn’t seem to believe that Margaret had actually died, but of course it had been over twenty years since either of us had seen our older sister — twenty long years since Margaret had run away and left us all behind.
“She died?” Mary asked me, quietly incredulous. I nodded my head solemnly. I explained to her that uterine cancer runs in our family, on our mother’s side and that we all need to be tested, “All the sisters that is,” I told her. I told her of the memorial that had been done for Margaret, at St. Mary’s Cathedral near Burnside Street, next to the Catholic grammar school we used to attend. And then I explained that I’d tried to contact her but I didn’t know where she was living. She smiled and listened and offered no explanation, glancing away.
She would not tell me where she lived nor share her phone number, if she had one, and she would offer no opinion on our sister Margaret’s death.
The conversation lasted perhaps ten minutes and she was pleasant, but noncommittal and vague. She smiled and she listened. When I asked how she was doing she said the right things like: “Oh, I’m fine” and “I’m just doing the same old thing.” She asked about my young daughter and I told her she was in middle school. She smiled at the thought and told me to tell her she said hello. I nodded my head and said that I would.
Then after a long moment of silence Mary said she had to go. She got up, and it was as if she hadn’t heard anything I said. As she began to walk away, she smiled and waved and began wandering down the street, looking back at me only once. I waved to her and told her it was so good to see her and we should get together again, like how we used to do, my voice drifting into the wind. She smiled, waved again and kept walking, saying nothing in response.
I stood there, bereft, knowing my sister Mary was as mentally ill as she had been since she was a teenager, knowing that nothing had changed or gotten better for her.
I watched her as she walked down the street, missing my bus but not caring as I contemplated my still exquisite older sister. Mary meandered down Broadway Street, a woman in her early forties that no one seemed to notice and it felt as if my heart was breaking as I watched her disappear from sight.
That was the last time I sat next to Mary or spoke to her with anything close to normalcy. After a few more years had passed, she would no longer speak with me or anyone else and shunned any and all contact from her family members. I saw her downtown a few more times and remember three occasions in which she saw me but hurried in the opposite direction, almost as if she was afraid I would see her and perhaps see how time and age had changed her.
Mary, like many who are Irish and from families with multi-generational histories of schizophrenia became convinced that her family members had done things “on purpose” to torment and betray her, which of course was not true.
I had known Mary was mentally ill since she was a teenager during the summer she came home from being gone two weeks. It was a time when Mary was searching, wandering the city, dropping acid and hanging out with questionable characters. It didn’t last long before she returned home after being reported a runaway to the police. We all knew what had happened but we didn’t talk about it. No one in the family ever talked about it. We just sighed a collective sigh of relief, glad that she was home and left it at that.
That was the Griffin way. If you pretended that nothing had happened, you wouldn’t have to face the ugly truth of it. Pretending away the truth made it all go away. Or so it seemed.
What I had heard later, from others in the family, was that she’d done numerous hits of acid and gone to wild parties, one where she was assaulted in some way by a much older man who was pulled off her. When she came back home Mary seemed shell-shocked. She retired to her bedroom and stayed there, sleeping for several weeks. That was the summer she began to take a different turn. She was never quite the same after that, which was the same year she began high school.
The change was gradual but I noticed she began buttoning her shirts to the top. She went to church every Sunday, mostly by herself and took school more seriously, never being late, never once missing a class, even if she was sick. When she could have dressed in a way to draw attention to her long legs and nearly perfect figure and when she could have enhanced her beautiful oval face with rose lipstick, or a flattering haircut, which would highlight her blue eyes and golden blond hair, she did everything she could to become plain and invisible. She never wore makeup anymore, or flattering clothing, and her posture and walk seemed to change overnight. She became hunched over, and timid, and clutched her school books to her chest, almost protectively, where they became some sort of barrier. She became silent and secretive, to the point that I didn’t know who she was anymore.
My sister Mary became like a ghost.
In a family of nine Irish Catholic children, you learn to contend with mental illness. It seems large families like mine are not spared The Irish curse and as the years progress, you accept it; that some of your siblings will be normal or at least functional and others won’t. In our family, four of the nine siblings suffered with severe mental illness, from paranoid schizophrenia to garden variety bipolar disorder.
But the number nine was reduced by one in 2006, when we lost Margaret to uterine cancer and now Mary will be our next loss, again from uterine cancer — preventable uterine cancer.
Mary ignored serious symptoms, thinking she could self-diagnose and self-treat rather than seek out a medical professional. I discovered that when I found something else in her room — a receipt from 2020 from a chemical company that sells flower essences. She was trying to treat herself with flower essences rather than see a medical doctor.
When Mary was seen at the hospital, when she came in complaining of pain and asking for help, the ER doctors gave her an ultrasound. They found a large growth, the size of “a small baby” and when they explained that she had uterine cancer and that there was not much they could do, not even surgery because the cancer had spread and it was now too late, Mary calmly told them they were wrong. She did not have cancer, she said. She had just become ill from “bad water” and all she needed was a few weeks of bed rest and she would be fine. When they tried to impress upon her the fact that she really did have cancer, she again repeated they were wrong. She did not have cancer she politely told them.
Mary now stays at my younger sisters home high up in the Oregon Mountains. She sleeps most of the day, and is on pain medication. She still does not believe she has cancer, as she gets weaker and thinner and is consumed by the cancer that is rapidly spreading throughout her body, the cancer that will kill her. She tells my younger sister that she just needs to sleep more. That by sleeping she will eventually: “Get over this illness.” My younger sister smiles and agrees, repeating what Mary says. “Yes, you just need more rest” she tells her, as Mary takes more pain medication, drinking it down with apple juice, her body now weighing less than 100 pounds.
My younger sister cares for Mary and does things in that capacity that she shouldn’t have to, but she does them anyway and without complaint. She does not want Mary: “To die among strangers.” She says that this is the only way, that it is: “The right thing to do,” and of course she is absolutely correct. When Mary repeatedly thanks my younger sister, saying: “Thank you for taking care of me,” her words are met with gentle smiles and reassurance. But after long days, my younger sister goes for walks in the woods nearby to grieve, so no one can see her and my heart aches for her when I think of her weeping alone in the woods. I wish I could share her pain and take it away from her completely.
* Then there is the sacrifice and notable loyalty of my oldest brother, who has arranged the purchase of an expensive crypt for my sister in one of the most respected cemeteries in Portland. The crypt is next to a sunny window and is in one of the best locations in the entire Mausoleum. He has taken this large financial burden on of his own free will, and I wish I could express to him how very grateful I am. The one positive thing I can say I’ve seen from my older siblings, arising from this difficult situation, is how readily they’ve stepped up to the plate. They are eager and ready to help in ways not all of us can, all in an effort to give my sister a respectable burial and this awareness fills me with gratitude.
A few days after my younger sister and I cleaned up Mary’s old bedroom, I see a photograph of a beautiful wooden casket. My only remaining older sister has purchased this casket for Mary, and she sends me photos to my cell phone that I can see. As I look at the pictures, the reality of Mary’s death comes at me in a visceral rush and I dissolve into tears, leaning over my laptop keyboard, silently weeping with my head in my hands. The casket is painted a light, delicate pink, Mary’s favorite color and is lined with pink satin. It could not be more beautiful.
As I look at the photographs of the casket, I think of Mary’s entire troubled life and of how stoically she struggled. I think of how she never learned to swim, or ride a bike, or drive a car, how she never had a boyfriend, how she may well die a virgin. But I also think of how hard she worked at menial low-paying jobs, jobs in daycare centers, jobs in stationary shops, and in Bed & Breakfast businesses and corporate offices that didn’t pay her half of what she should have been paid, and this after she had graduated from college.
I think of her shy nature, of her struggling to learn a new job, of her rushing to get to work on time, of being tired as she walked or bused home. I think of how she worked her way through college, graduating in four years, how she paid her rent for so many years with her own meager income. I think of all that she achieved, graduating from Lincoln High School and Portland State University, applying for graduate school and being turned down. She had wanted to become a psychologist so she could help others.
I think of how long Mary struggled to be self-sufficient, how she suffered alone, and never complained about the isolation that must have troubled her. I think of how very alone she must have felt during all those decades and how eventually she could no longer contend with the struggle, how she began to lose energy, stamina and how ultimately, she began to give up.
Because Mary’s struggle never really ended. In her bedroom I found an appointment slip, with the details of an appointment she had arranged with Cascadia Mental Health. She was seeking help for “anxiety” she was experiencing. The date on the sheet of paper read late 2020.
My other older sister is also destroyed and heartbroken by what is happening to Mary. They used to be best friends growing up and were always together, playing, laughing, sharing secrets. Marcia and Mary — Mary and Marcia. Until Mary’s mental illness and what appears to have been Sudden Onset Schizophrenia annihilated that connection forever.
The emotional anguish of watching a sibling you love slowly self-destruct and die of treatable cancer is agonizing and unlike anything else. Your helplessness is the hardest part to reconcile — realizing that no matter what you say or do, they will never comprehend what you’re trying to get across and will simply die anyway, lost in delusion, lost in mental illness and unable to advocate for themselves in any healthy way.
One of the objects I found in my sisters bedroom was a compact, a small mirror compact for a woman, to check her lipstick or powder her nose. It was new, still in the package. The outside face has a bright blue image on it, like a water color painting and over that are the words PASSION FOR LIFE emblazoned across in flamboyant white script. The compact is new and I can imagine Mary buying it and smiling at the positive message. I pick it up and hold it. I look at it and wonder what thoughts were going through her mind as she bought it.
All I can do now is wait, that’s all any of us can do, while looking through the few remaining objects that are all that’s left of my sister. Her scattered belongings that I’ve managed to save, gathering them together in my own broken effort to honor Mary’s life and her memory are all that I have left of her. But I will keep them safe, perhaps as she would have wanted.
Though Mary is not dead yet, I lost my sister a long time ago, to mental illness. But for now, I hold her possessions in my hands, and I touch them, remembering that her hands held them once, too. I will try to hold onto her by keeping her things with me.
Mary’s sparkling trinkets and books are all that is left to me now. The nine books I was able to save sit on one of the bookshelves in my office. There are nine, like the number of the Griffin kids we used to be, before we all scattered throughout Oregon and Washington, falling out of contact with each other, going our separate ways. Sometimes it feels that scattered trinkets are all that is left of our fractured family, the family Mary compared, while laughing wistfully, to the fictional Bundren family of rural Mississippi.
In place of holding Mary’s tender hand, stroking it and comforting her as she lies dying, as I wish so much that I could do, I will hold the few possessions she left behind, instead.
~Theresa Griffin Kennedy
******************************
Mary passed away peacefully, on morphine and listening to Clair De Lune high up in the cool mountains, in Mist Oregon September 2nd, 2021. With all the pain of this heavy life behind her Mary was set free.
RIP Pretty Mary.
A Poem…
Indifferent Time
For my sister, Mary Clare
Published, July 5, 2007
Our hands touched water as we sat next to each other, two sisters in their forties contemplating the huge span of indifferent time that stood between us. While the sun poured down, warming our legs and burning my face, urging us to put our fingers in the fountain water, with leaves and feathers turning circles on its surface, I realized with nostalgic certainty just how much you are a part of me and me a part of you. Later, I had to tell you, with my eyes looking nowhere, that our oldest sister had died. I sat and debated whether I should, but I knew it was something I couldn’t keep from you. Seven months before, Maggie quietly left this world, without letting any of us know. She will never smile upon us again. Her death will be forever. There will be no going back to touch her strong hands or admire her perfectly filed nails, silky golden hair, or fine voice, so uniquely hers. And as we sat next to each other, I knew that you saw the decay in me, as I saw the decay in you. Still, when you smiled, when I made you laugh, I could see the girl you used to be, with the perfect teeth, the beautiful oval face, the girl all the boys loved.
You are and continue to be my sister-
My blood,
My heart.
~Theresa Griffin Kennedy
Theresa Griffin-Kennedy: I am a freelance writer of creative
nonfiction, a poet, fiction writer and contributing columnist for The online Portland Alliance Newspaper and for the website GoLocalPDX. I am a social activist fighting for social change through writing as a social act. I paint abstract with mixed media and am a writing instructor and writing coach and am the published author of a crime history book and a book of poetry, modern free verse. Learn more.
THIS INTIMATE PERSONAL ESSAY, COPYRIGHT 2021, MAY BE REPRODUCED OR DISSEMINATED ONLY FOR ACADEMIC USE IN A CLASSROOM SETTING, PERMITTED UP TO AND INCLUDING WEB BASED OR ENHANCED CLASSES WITH APPROPRIATE ATTRIBUTION GIVEN TO THE AUTHOR THERESA GRIFFIN KENNEDY.
Online since 2007