Decade

Just days ago I finished my first class read-aloud of the year, Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. One plot point in this book has the main character, a young girl named Opal, wanting to know more about the mother who abandoned her and her father when she was very young. In the early chapters she tells her father she wants to know ten things about her mother, “one thing for each year I’ve been alive.”

After some thought her father provides the list of ten things, many of which are referenced throughout the book, making the mother an influential presence in the story even though her character never actually appears. This caught my attention since in my own revision work right now I’m looking for new ways to give voice to an absent character: What do I need to show to make him real? How do I do it with the economy and balance that will help readers know him well enough to care, but leave them with a vague sense of loss for not knowing him better?

Opal deciding on the number ten for her ten years of life also connected with me on an entirely different level, since it was ten years ago today, October 5th, when my sister Erin died. It’s easy to encapsulate that amount of time and label it as the unit “decade” without thinking about how much time it really represents. Ten years means her death predates the Obama presidency, every version of the iPhone, Taylor Swift’s entire recording career, Hurricane Katrina, and the time before Facebook evolved into the ubiquitous thing it is now. On a more personal level, I’m slightly astonished when I think of how many people have entered my life in the past ten years, and therefore wouldn’t know much about Erin outside of things I might have mentioned at incidental moments. Some of these people have even broken through my most preciously guarded introversion barriers and are now central to my life, yet they know next to nothing about her or why her death was one of my defining events.

So today I’m going to share ten things about my sister -- one for each year that has passed since we lost her. Hopefully these ten things will make her seem more real for people who never knew her, but will also bring back memories for those who did. And all of this is to say nothing about my lesser agenda, of practicing how to make an absent character seem more relatable and present. This works nicely here, because Erin was undeniably a character.

1. She loved dogs. We’ve always been a dog family; if my count is accurate, we’ve had a total of fifteen in my lifetime. She dearly loved all of the ones she knew, and they loved her back for it. Making friends with dogs was just as important to her as making friends with people. Our cousins' dogs, neighborhood dogs, any dog she saw passing on the street -- they were all precious to her. If she had ever read Because of Winn-Dixie, she would have laughed at the times the dog Winn-Dixie smiled his way into a sneeze, since our former neighbor’s dog Annabelle had done the same thing.

2. She was a natural leader. She was the captain of her high school soccer team, and took that role very seriously. She once had to escort members of the police department and their K-9 unit through the creepy basement of our father’s drugstore when the alarm went off late at night, and was only about sixteen years old at the time. When she and Jenny both worked at the drugstore she made Jenny wear the white pharmacist’s jacket, because customers noticed the way Erin carried herself and assumed she was in charge, then would ask her for medical advice she couldn’t give. She once invited our family to a pancake breakfast event she had organized at the assisted living center where she worked, and clearly had everything running exactly as she had intended.

3. She had a big sense of humor. She had a variety of laughs that ranged from loud and brassy to an oxygen-deprived silence followed by a croaking gasp. She was her truest self when sharing late-night laughing fits with our cousins in our aunt and uncle’s kitchen. It sounds slightly off to me now when I hear them laughing like this, without her, like a song intended to be performed as four-part harmony that’s missing the one voice needed to make it perfect.

4. She loved older people. She had settled into a career as the activities director for an assisted living facility, and formed close friendships with many of the residents there. She was never patronizing but treated them with genuine dignity, respect, and warmth. When our grandmother moved out of her final house and into a senior apartment, Erin organized everything for her, making things easy for her to find in the most logical manner. She even once made the driver of a train wait until she could make sure an older woman she had just met was seated and had the walker she was using situated before the train departed.

5. She loved her nephews more than anything else in the world. She clearly would have done anything for those boys. For years she’d be greeted with wide smiles and hugs and an excited “Hi Doppy!” The nickname evolved from her constantly prompting one of the boys to repeat a nonsense word he would sometimes say while learning to talk, and him coming to associate her with it. She could always make them smile for pictures, usually by entertaining them with one of her silly and often-requested mouth noises. The oldest was the only one to visit her bedside in her final hours. He was mature enough to understand the permanence of what was happening, but too young to be emotionally equipped for it. It was the only time in his now twenty years I’ve ever seen him break down crying.

6. She was a superfan on many different levels. Once she found a new interest, it didn’t take long for her to develop an unabashed enthusiasm for it. She followed college sports at a level that didn’t make any sense to me. She had a bookshelf filled with “Star Trek: The Next Generation” novels, and even attended a convention. She had a deep knowledge of musical theater and a collection of cast recordings to go with it. She really had a thing for Thomas Kincaid paintings. She was so deeply into the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” Christmas special that she owned a set of character ornaments and multiple holiday CDs by Burl Ives. If my phone ever rang during a commercial break of “The X-Files,” I knew when I’d pick it up I’d hear her gasp “DID YOU SEE WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!” only for her to abruptly hang up the moment the show came back on.

7. She was fiercely protective of her individuality. It had been a goal of hers to go skydiving by her 30th birthday. She invited our aunt and uncle to come along and watch from below, but didn’t tell our family about it until after it was over. I remember being struck by conversations I had with some of her friends and our cousins in the days surrounding her funeral, about important moments they shared with her that had been so completely separate from me, and I know it was the same for Jenny. It wasn’t so much that she worked at actively distancing herself from us but was intent on finding a way to define herself, which was something she had to do on her own.

8. She had a highly competitive streak. Maybe being the youngest in the family and participating in the sibling rivalry that came with that started it out, but it was always there in some form. She took the wins and losses of the teams she followed very personally. She mixed it up with our older cousins her whole life, trying to keep up with them through so many games and sports when she was little and often putting them (us) in their places when she grew up. She had side bets each year in my aunt’s football pool, leading to opportunities for good-natured knife twisting when things went her way. She played twelve years of soccer at a level of intensity that would have guaranteed the need for knee replacements if she had lived long enough, and stayed involved in the sport with some coaching long after her playing days were over.

9. She was a committed friend. When she took someone into her life, she went out of her way to make sure they realized how important they were to her. She looked for opportunities to help them or ways to include them in whatever she was doing. She was the kind of friend who would just agree to help carry boxes for someone when they were moving, but she’d volunteer to drive the truck as well.

10. She died well. Spending her last year living through her illness and facing her unavoidable death could have turned her inward and bitter, but instead it self-actualized her. She put up with more general discomfort and acute pain than any of us could ever really understand, but still managed to maintain a version of her humor throughout. Sometimes it wasn’t much more than a mask to conceal her anger and fear, but she held onto because not doing so would have been out of her nature. Knowing she was going to die allowed her to put aside the insecurities and pretense which define so many of us and instead become the best version of herself, with an awareness of everyone around her and an intent on molding a perception that would endure after she was gone.

Toward the end of Because of Winn-Dixie Opal believes her beloved dog has run off during a thunderstorm, so she makes her own mental list of ten things people should know about him. In doing so she realizes that such a list “couldn’t even begin to show somebody the real Winn-Dixie, just like a list of ten things couldn’t ever get me to know my mama.” But right before this, she tells the readers her reason for memorizing the list: “...so if I didn’t find him, I would still have some part of him to hold on to.”

Sometimes the list has to be enough because it’s all we get. Luckily though, my list doesn’t have only ten things, but ten times ten times ten things. I don’t need a box of photographs or residual pain to remind me of her, because I have that to hold on to. And as long as I do, I know I’ll be able to honor her dying wish and stay true to the words I wrote ten years ago in closing her eulogy:

My little sister is no longer here, and this has happened much sooner than it should have. But I don’t think it would be right for me to spend the rest of my time thinking about the things she was never given the chance to do or become, so I will try my best not to do that. That isn’t what she would want. Instead I’ll remember Erin for who she was, and why she was so important to the lives of so many people.