Jaci Dawn

Damn. I looked over at the calendar. Today is March 2nd. Sixteen years ago, my father called me, almost in a panic. He didn’t know what was happening, but my sister was critically ill. She was so ill, in fact, that she was in a coma and on a helicopter to Reno from Ely, Nevada. She could have gone to Las Vegas or Salt Lake City – it’s all about equi-distant from Ely: a good 5-hour drive. But my family has always gravitated to Reno.

I remember how numb I was when Dad called again on the 3rd. She didn’t make it. My little sister, the one person I had a profound love/hate relationship, was gone. The one who once bit me over who got the blankets in our shared bed (she had them all and I just wanted my share, but she rolled over and bit me). The girl who purposely mimicked my clothing choices throughout my high school years (and her junior high years), often bringing out the worst in me because I couldn’t see imitation as a sincere form of flattery. The girl who drank her way through her Freshman year in high school, often stumbling home in the wee hours of the night – she was gone.

Since her death, I have been overwhelmed by the number of kids we grew up with who have messaged me and told me how much they loved her. Her laugh. Her ability to tell a joke. Her very dry sense of irony. Her one-liners. Her way of living life for the moment. Her fierce and loyal friendship.

I held her hand from a distance when she had to give up her first born to adoption. I still have all the poems she wrote about that dark time in her life, how she didn’t want to let the baby go. We cried over the phone together.

I sensed, much later in life, that her words to me were often staged: the words of a little girl who just wanted her older sister to love her and be proud of her, unconditionally. She’d detail house plans, redecorating schemes, art projects. She wanted me to love her.

I did love her, but not. How does an older sister put that into words. I was the “good” child, the do-gooder, the A+ student, the never-does-anything-wrong kid. The unintentional suck-up. Truth was, I don’t have a daring bone in my psyche. Risk of physical pain? I’ll take the easy way out. My sister (and my brother) would face the pain head-on. I am the unabashed introvert. Brother and sister: extroverts. I am the one that takes everything into some deep place and over-analyzes. I am the clumsy one.

I remember some girls picking on my sister. I no longer remember the circumstances, just that they were to the point of physical bullying. It so happened that my best friend and I happened upon a scene of them bullying my little sister. They were big girls, much bigger than me. But that was MY little sister, goddammit, and *I* was the ONLY person allowed to give her a hard time. I’d recently found my voice in life, and I used it that day, at the mouth of an alley way, to lay into three girls who had no business being bullies. me, all 70-pounds of petite, chasing bullies with her words.

Words became my weapon. My sister learned to break beer bottles over people’s heads. Not exactly a technique I would ever be good at, but she excelled at.

Damn.

The thing is, her youngest kid is graduating from high school this year. She has no memory of her mother. A few photos. A strong resemblance to me. No idea of the teenager her mother was. Huh. Her mom was a teenager until my mother died. Deni decided then that she needed to grow up. She was probably about 23 emotionally when she died. She was chronologically 40 years old and starting to look older than I am now. Life’s a bitch.

Grief comes with layers. You grieve for the lost relationship, for the things you didn’t get to say or do, for the love of the person. When anniversaries come, I grieve for the loss of my family: Mom, Sister, Dad. There’s just the two of us left now, and all of our children (my brother’s, mine, and my sister’s). I miss the laughter. The hugs. The covert whispers after dark. The secrets we promised to never tell. The looks that passed between us. The feel of her hair in my fingers as I braided it for the last time in 1998, standing in Dad’s kitchen as he and my daughter went through a box of mementos on the sun porch.

Dad’s 70th birthday. The last time I held my sister in my hands. She had headaches, she said. I told her to try braiding her hair differently: two braids instead of one heavy one down her back. I proceeded to part her hair and braid it for her.

Sisters have complicated relationships. I desperately wanted to work through ours. I wanted to figure out where and how I’d hurt her. I knew she’d forgive me: that’s what she always did. I wasn’t ready to forgive myself. Oldest sister. The bitch. Me. It doesn’t matter now. She’s gone.

And she’s come back from the dead to let me know she forgave me long, long ago. I still see her as about 10 years old.

The girl I see in my visions.

Playing dress up in the basement

“How much can I torture Jaci’s cat?”

Always styling.

I love you and miss you, Mary Denise.

Denny.

Deni.