MY SISTER KATHY'S DEATH

I will eventually get back to Jay Leno but let me digress for a bit. One month ago my sister Kathy died unexpectedly of a heart attack; most likely complicated by a pulmonary embolism, immediately following a chemical cardiac stress test.

 I was and still am in denial. How can Kathy no longer be in my life? She was thirteen months younger than I was and we were polar opposites. She was the introverted, stay-at-home reader who did not date or marry and never had children opposite to my very extroverted life as a sales consultant with husband and children.

 She was so good to my children and to me. Shortly before she died, actually less than 3 weeks, she and I were riding over to my sister Jane’s to help her make curtains. On the trip over, we stopped at Starbucks and she asked me to get her two extra-large lattes, which I did. 

While we were meandering thru Rock Creek Park out of nowhere I started talking about my feeling that humans operated much more in their irrational spheres than their rational. I added that the rational thoughts we do have are often a rationalization of a feeling that we are having based upon our irrational interpretation of life’s events.

Kathy said immediately, not me, I am rational 99% of the time. I said, “what about these lattes, they don’t seem rational to me?” She looked over to me and said, “They are rational, I know exactly what I am doing.

As we continued whizzing around the Capital Beltway from Chevy Chase to Alexandria, I startled at my realization that she meant she did not care if they killed her. I said, “But what about your back pain?”  

She told me she did not want to talk about it and became angry with me for continuing. I reminded her of how often I listened to her diatribes and she apologized for her tone.

As we got to Jane’s I was still holding the lattes. Getting out of the car with them, the tray they were in literally leapt out of my hands and fell to the ground spilling. Kathy looked at me and said, “Well I guess you really didn’t want me to have those lattes". I said, “I guess I didn’t”.  How much awareness did we have about the nearness of her pending death. I look back on the spilling of the lattes as my body's  expression of my acute but unfathomable, unknowable distress - of Kathy’s approaching death.  It was and is too big a loss to really understand in the day to day.