My Sister

Some of my frequent readers will have noticed that it's been awhile since I've posted a new blog. I like to have at least one new post a week and I'll admit to being slack these last couple weeks. But it's an odd time of the year for me. It's closing in on my sister's birthday, her thirtieth.

On my own thirtieth birthday I bought myself a tiara and a purple feather boa, mixed up a pitcher of margaritas and sat outside on the deck all day reading a romance novel. Beth called me to tease me about being "old." She's five years behind me so I only told her I had five years to plan my revenge for her own thirtieth if she didn't leave me be. She wasn't worried. She laughed and told me that she was never going to turn thirty.

Beth and I always had a contentious relationship. We had a brother between us and one sister five years younger than Beth, but it was the two of us who were mortal enemies growing up. I recall once throwing a shoe at Beth, her ducking out of the way, and it hitting my father in the chest. The fact that the shoes were hers in the first place and she was perfectly justified in making me give them back was of no consequence. She and I fought about anything and hated each other with a passion. It was only after Rich and I moved our little family to Raleigh that Beth and I realized we hated each other so much because we were just alike. It was quite a blow for both of us but we took it in stride and began a friendship that sustained as much volatility as our past hatred. I thank God all the time for that friendship because precious as it was, it was also very brief.

On June the 8^th, 2003, Beth died in a plane crash. She was a pilot with a good job lined up and the only requirement left was for her to take a weekend course and get her multi-engine license. She came to stay with us here in Raleigh, arrived the evening before her class started, left early in the morning and never came back. To this day I beat myself up for not getting out of bed that morning to hug her goodbye. Can't get the idea out of my mind that she was dead while her cell phone kept ringing as I left her messages to let me know if she would be home for dinner. And I can't even think about the day that I had to go up to the airport and pick up her car.

It was after her funeral before I could go get the car. And when I did, it was out of gas. I put a little into the tank and drove home with the radio blaring, singing at the top of my lungs and howling crying like a lunatic. But it wasn't just the gas. When I gathered up her things, all of her toiletries were empty or very nearly almost empty. Bottles of hairspray, conditioner, lotions down to the very last bit. Eye shadow used down to the last crumbly little corner. Lipsticks worn to a perfect flatness and then feathered into with brush lines. Perfumes nothing but a whiff of scent. Everything was used up. She had no money in her checking account and only nineteen dollars available on her credit card. No cash was on her and none was in her car. Not a cent. That utter finality still gives me chills. She just wasn't meant to come back that day.

But, much as I'd like to eulogize her properly, it's hard to think of Beth with sadness. She was a force of nature and though she was only twenty-six when she died, she had done more than many people do in a lifetime. She lifeguarded on the Atlantic Ocean when she lived in Myrtle Beach, she waited tables in a nightclub in Providence, she was based out of Syracuse when she was a flight attendant and she traveled to Puerto Rico for vacation and went to Europe twice. She's seen the Eiffel Tower, the Arch de Triomph, Anne Frank's home, and Notre Dame Cathedral. She dated an Italian man who brought her back Italian stilettos from Italy. She dated a fellow pilot, an Irish man who brought her to meet his family who lived in the Netherlands. She dated a minor league baseball player who had his team sign a baseball because she wanted one to give her nephew as a present. In twenty-six years she squeezed in a lot.

She had a fierce loyalty to her friends and inspired loyalty in others. Her wake was packed with people who flew in from all over the place to offer condolences to us, her family, whom they had never met. She had been scheduled to be a bridesmaid in a wedding the weekend of her funeral. I remember calling the bride and telling her Beth wouldn't be able to come. And the whole wedding party drove eight hours to show up at her wake, a day and a half before their wedding took place. Rich tells me he had never seen anything like what happened at her wake. Mom, Dad, Scott, Kristen and I were lined up, greeting people and apparently it went on for hours, hours and hours. There was a line outside and around the block of people waiting to come in. I heard it was on the news.

What else can I tell you about Beth? I've always been a Christian but it's only been since she died that I feel absolute proof of an afterlife. Sometimes her presence is as heavy as if she's right beside you telling a joke or telling you a secret or telling you that your new red hair dye is too bright. When I dream of her, I can smell her and once when I was wearing a shirt that used to belong to her, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw her face in place of my own. That was strange, but not nearly as odd as the next day when my baby sister Kristen called and told me about a strange thing that had happened to her the day before when she looked in her mirror. See? That's just Beth through and through, making jokes from Heaven. Probably just taking a break from teaching a little group of angels all about leather pants and the lyrics to "Sin Wagon" by the Dixie Chicks.

May 14^th would have been her thirtieth birthday. I made up a bouquet for her mausoleum marker and I wanted in the worst way to make it black and funereal and all grim with the sentiments of a thirtieth birthday. Mom and I laughed like loons over the very thought and how mad Beth would be about it. But we knew it would be awful for any other visitors to her site and so I went with pretty spring colors and her favorite green for ribbon. It's been almost four years since she died and sometimes the pain catches me by surprise and takes my breath away, but next Monday I'm pretty sure I'll be smiling at the idea of her grinning down from Heaven with an "I told you so" look as I shake my head and think of how weirdly right she was that she would never turn thirty.