An Open Letter to My Sister on Halo Eve

So here we are on the edge of March 4th, and tomorrow the halo finally comes off. Hopefully this means all of those messed-up vertebrae in your neck are healing like they’re supposed to and you’re ready for the next big step in your recovery.

I was experiencing a good amount of denial about the seriousness of your accident right after it happened, and I couldn’t understand why. Even after the first day in the hospital when you couldn’t elevate the bed more than a few centimeters without extreme pain, and Dave and I were taking turns feeding you soy milk a few drops at a time, I figured as long as you were still alive and the prognosis allowed for optimism, things would be okay. But it got more real when the numb wore off and we had a better picture of how lucky you had been. I clearly remember Dave telling me how someone had said that for every eleven thousand people who sustained the same kind injury you had, eleven thousand of them usually wound up either paralyzed or killed. You being the one to make it past those kind of astronomical lottery-ticket odds was too much to think about. I began to internally flinch away when those near-miss fact examples came up, because hiding in denial was so much easier.

During the first days in the hospital when you had to constantly see the fresh shock on the faces of the people who came to visit you, your blunt and defining pragmatism (not to mention your sense of humor that can out-darken mine at times) rose through the painkiller haze even then, when you’d simply reply to their commiserations and genuine pity by saying, “Beats being dead.” From that point, every tiny benchmark was a celebration: She can move her fingers and toes; she can sit up; she can stand on her own; she can walk; she can go home; she can go out for Christmas Eve; she can go shopping; she can knit again; she’s getting better.

Now at the end of this part, I find occasional moments when things are catching up with me. I don’t know, maybe everything we had to endure with Erin taught me to be practical in the moment and store the emotion for a more convenient release -- it likely did. But tonight I am so very happy for the day you have coming tomorrow when you finally get that thing taken off. And I am especially happy that you didn’t die. Because if you had, I would have been completely, irreparably broken.

When you were given March 4th as the official halo removal date, I knew it was time to start putting together the celebration some of us had talked about back at the beginning, and now the party is only days away. If anyone needed proof of how happy I am you’re still around, remember that I am allowing you to bring both Karaoke and cilantro into my home.

Just be sure that when the party is over, you take them with you....