the ides of december, icy tears

Kay will likely be gone from this earth before morning, her tired body on its way to ashen grit and her spirit, stubborn as a Missouri mule (though she was, on a cellular level, a Chicago girl), on its way to the heaven she believes in.

She is the only sister of Mack and his two brothers, is the family’s heart and its vault, keeper of old photographs and stories, Ft. Knox of lore and truth and gossip. Since her mother died decades ago, she has been our sticky center. When she is gone, no one will take her place; there will only be a hole, with raveling edges, in our fabric.

How ill she was was known just to her and her only daughter, who was sworn to secrecy. There was to be no drama, no people rushing to Chicago and spending money on ridiculous last-minute airfares. Hints, like the smell of smoke from a neighbor’s chimney, came in sentences she wouldn’t finish, in oddly brief and infrequent phone calls. She began to contract:  folding in on herself, not eating much, her voice hard to hear and hoarse.  She slept; she made some plans; she felt both a deepening struggle and a strange lightness. She knew a door was going to open. A few of us felt the draft.

My Amy’s birthday was last week, and Kay’s card came uncharacteristically late, with an apology among the sweet handwritten things she always wrote – what a wonderful girl you are, how kind, how proud she was. The ending was a sentence she had never written before:  “I will love you forever.”

Mack and his brothers are on planes, flying as fast as they can to get to her and say goodbye, though the words will utterly fail them. I imagine a map with pins and string: one from the farthest southwest corner, one from the western plains, one from D.C., converging in the rough-and-tumble, the windy winter bonecold of Chicago, where all of them were born and one of them is about to die.

Dear Kay, we know you gave us so much more than we gave back, and we are dumbstruck at imagining any of our lives without you. We were like birds – handsome, bright-colored males who got all the attention while you fluttered, short and beige and industrious, in the background, running the machinery of the family. We hope you will be warm in your new home, that Everyone’s Favorite Uncle John has the place tidied up to your liking when you get there, and that all the windows are open. We want you to know that you were the perfect sister. We will love you forever.