When I think of her, I mostly think of her joy. When we met up from time to time in the golden age of our early thirties, she had the capacity to be giddy, flapping her hands Kermit-style and yawping in excitement over whatever we were off to - a fancier dinner than we deserved, a movie with the family, an outing in NYC or Chicago. Kat was radiant. In her last days, that radiance was sometimes all that remained - a smile pushing through exhaustion and the awful bone-thin indicators that her cancer was consuming everything now.
I find it hard, now and I hope not forever, not to dwell on how I failed her. When I was probably ten and she was probably eight (maybe we were both younger or older, everything blurs) I remember being furious at her for the cruelest reason - her wanting to play with me, to imitate whatever I was doing, to share her joy and her love with her older brother - and I shook her by the shoulders and, in my memory (I hope not in reality, but I can't give myself that grace) by the neck. In high school, in peak "pleasant in the world, shouting at home" adolescent unpleasantness, I told her never to acknowledge we knew each other in the hallways at school. I find this all alien and unthinkable now, horrifying, handily in the top five worst things I've ever done in my life.
Being who she is (or was, but I cannot imagine the universe without some sense of her carrying on through it) she somehow forgave me, even tried to comfort me when I returned to these apologies. My lungs are not large enough to contain my bewildered gratitude at us having rebuilt a friendship - one that I was, at least, smart enough to be grateful for every moment that it lasted, once we re-forged it in our twenties. We had lunch one day, a plan to give her something to look forward to after she'd told me she was dumping her crummy boyfriend. When she arrived, she nervously said "so.... I decided not to break up with him," and I - surprising her, I think - listened, supported her, told her she deserved only the best, that it sounded like she was going to advocate for herself, and that I loved her. (She did advocate for herself, and was soon single again; eventually, she met one of the best human beings on the planet and finally had someone who was worthy of her generous heart and ecstatic spirit.)
She shared our family's near-universal neurosis of immediately looking to comfort others and rationalize an upside when things were dark, even when cancer entered the picture. I joined her in that, telling others that - even as she moved home for hospice - there was a mercy in this, that the brief moment of worry that she would die in urgent care in New York had driven home how lucky we were to have time with her, that I was grateful, having lost a student suddenly in a horrible car crash just months earlier, to know that there was a window of time in which I could tell her I loved her. And that was true. I’ll never forget her eyes in moments of me telling her I loved her in these last weeks, or how her face changed when she saw I’d arrived each time I returned. It still was not, could never be, enough. Which is part of the cruelty of the whole thing - there are some people in your life who you will never be able to adequately express your love to, no matter how many days, months, years you spend letting them know.
I don't know what to do with the absence.
I don't know what to do with the absence.
I know a bit about how grief works. And I know this will become a room that I don't live inside of. That I visit occasionally. And I know she wouldn't want me to live in that room, that she would want me instead to retain the joy, the goofiness, the celebration of stupidity and weird noises and interrupting each other at the dinner table and dancing around to the Penumbra Theatre's Black Nativity recording on Christmas Eve and her yelling "Pat Pat Pat" when she had an idea or suggestion she wanted to float, and let those memories stay a cool blessing on harder days.
I have to trust that will happen. That I will cultivate gratitude for everything she was in my life, and gratitude that I know, from her having given me the gift of saying so, that I was a lift to hers and not a burden, that I repaid some of the joy and happiness she gave to me. For now, though, that's just on trust. It's mostly loss.
This is meant to be about Kat, though, and not about my grief. She was the best sister I could have ever hoped for, better than I deserved, and I am overcome with gratitude. It doesn't make it easier. Nothing really does, not yet. But I'm clinging to that massive good thing I was lucky enough to have while I had it. And for whatever part of her is alive in the world, however she is alive in the world, I hope she knows I'll never stop loving her.
I miss you, Kat. Always will.
