I Wish I’d Known
Lies and other things my sister taught me
I’ve been thinking a lot about living and dying this week.
Fifteen years ago today, my older sister Terri died. She was younger than I am now, driving home just how much life she missed. I imagine being gone myself at her age. Too soon. That’s way too soon! I judge my recent ingratitude and fear wasting the gift of time. It’s one thing to be alive. Another to truly live.
Terri had a choice to fight her cancer again or die. But bankrupting the family with medical bills was out of the question for her. I think she just feared the pain of treatment more. Some twisted logic within convinced her letting go is easier than holding on.
But once Terri made a choice, she finally started to live.
Not long after the June prognosis proclaiming death by Christmas, I found her on hands and knees in the doorway of her son’s old bedroom, hacking out the carpet with scissors. A small stack of ugly shag squares grew nearby. Her hand was blistered and bleeding.
“I always hated this crap,” she said without looking up.
Her struggle exposed beautiful hardwood underneath, original to the house where her husband grew up. She didn’t like living on his family farm so far from town and people. She never felt at home there.
We stood in the hallway marveling at the discovery. With much prompting, Terri decided to redecorate and make a sanctuary for reading and healing. Hope still hovered that summer and we believed she could recover.
She emptied the room bit by bit the following week and found removing hated or unneeded things opened more than square footage. Overwhelmed, she called me. How do you create something new when you don’t know what you want?
Start with a picture, I suggested. Conjuring nothing, Terri took inspiration from a painting we picked up at Target during one of my earlier visits — a narrow street through what looked like a Mediterranean village. Warm and bright with ochre, red, and green hues.
It looks like a place I’d like to visit, she’d said when we bought it.
From there, she matched a new paint color — Bakelite gold — to mimic the earthen buildings in the painting. We shopped when I came to visit. A trunk for the foot of the bed. New bedding and curtains. Uncharacteristically, her husband surprised her with a brass headboard and dainty nightstands for her space.
Having more moved beyond her room. She pulled down the “good” dishes from the high shelf to use every day, no longer waiting for a special occasion. Her pale frumpy wardrobe, old and now far too big, went to Goodwill. It seems the Chinese medicine doctor I took her to for a second opinion was right about no dairy — the weight she carried for years melted from her petite frame without it. Though rumor spread around town that she was sick, no one believed it. She hadn’t looked that healthy in years.
By fall, her room was complete — beautiful, cozy, and warm — just for her. Despite loving it, she quietly admitted she never spent time there.
“I don’t want to mess it up.”
Late that year, Terri made her last trip with our sister and me to the Wichita airport, where I flew home to California. Her lungs were closing with tumors from the breast cancer that never really went away, making it harder to breathe.
As usual, we allowed time to stop at the Hobby Lobby on Ridge Road. Instead of buying things for her sanctuary, we now shopped for her funeral service. She agonized over the stark funeral home chapel, wanting it to look nice, though she said more than once probably no one would show up to notice. But at least it would be the way she wanted it to be.
We stood in the candle aisle, picking out what would go at the front of the chapel with the silk flowers in our hands. Terri was drawn to the burgundy, deep green, and gold ones — the same colors that filled her room. She picked them up, set them down.
“Will they look too fall-ish?” she worried, knowing she would die another season.
“Do you like them?” our sister asked. Terri nodded slightly, still staring at the candles.
“I wish I’d known,” she whispered.
We stood in silence, letting her truth settle around us.
She wished she’d known who she was. She wished she’d known what she liked and how to choose it. That she could ask for what she wanted, even demand it, and have it. She wished she’d known that she mattered.
She wished she didn’t have to be so close to death to understand how to live.
Terri made it until the following summer. It was standing room only in the chapel.
She taught me more than I realized that year about living and dying, and how it’s just as easy to fear one as the other. I think now they go hand in hand. How easy it is to avoid all the little kinds of deaths from failure and disappointment. How often am I afraid to live?
Denying ourselves and quieting the voice of our true self eventually catches up, eating away at our soul and often, like my sister, the very body it inhabits. We’re meant to live out loud. Be honest. Feel feelings. Decide what brings us joy, inspiration, contentment. To ask for what we want or need because when we do it from a deep, soul-centered place, it often serves the greater good.
Like it or not, we are dying every day. It is the way of nature. But we do have a choice to live more fully, even if simply appreciating each breath we take without struggle.
I’m dying.
There, I’ve said it.
Excuse me now while I get busy living.
