Claiming My Sisters

Kate on Bainbridge Island, c. 2000 - a glorious day!

written 2/8/06

A quiet, unassuming, and kind person – friends from a shared interest in writing, expressing, being vulnerable, being Iowan cat lovers, Claudia. Claudia I see you happy for your release from a body, broken and no longer serving. Kate, Kate, Kate – we play together in the words of the Scrabble Board – neither of us has other words to post to the other, just this sad game where the points flip the scale with – every turn, an evenly matched competition – well, she usually has a 10 pt edge on me, knows how to play those 2 letter words for double/triple points. Kate, living with cancer, living with bi-polar, which, has almost been more deadly, the downs worse than the highs which drove away all the friends. How we became friends – I gave her a counseling session after she moved here, shaken too much by the 89 quake and seeking solid ground in the Midwest. I let her dance and move in her session, gave her permission to be the ballerina the 3 yearold never got to be and is trying to be. She can dance now, move, breathes – shakes a little too loose at times for the comfort of others. Some need that kind of freedom. Some need to break those boundaries. My kids don’t believe she is my sister. And keep asking my brothers if they have another sister, thinking they caught me in a lie. It isn’t a lie – she is my sister, Claudia is my sister, too – I’ll claim her – she deserves me more than she deserves Sylvia. In this circle of women, she has a real home and family.

The Need for Coffee

written 11/30/2001

Kate's sister Linda asks her "Do you really want to die"? Every decision for her at this point becomes an existential question. Whether to drink coffee or not may or may not be a matter of life or death. The sister, trying to be rational – your hormones, sis – think of your hormones, and Kate just wanting the taste of Java, the taste of this one small pleasure of life in the sucking vortex of stage whatever breast cancer. She tells me about her retreat for breast cancer survivors and how they tried to coach her into a decision. That decision of their agenda – get the radiation, they say, is a decision of a knife slice in hard rock, goes nowhere, against the surface with a dull thud, doesn't get to the broken wall of pain. Kate says all the women there had too much to lose, families, children, wealthy baubles of houses in Darien, Connecticut, but she has nothing to lose – can't get behind the belief that there is even one good reason to live, except for the occasional coffee at Starbucks, sitting in the sumptuous chairs staring out at the rain with a friend in conversation waiting for the rain to stop.