Philip Newman Lawton has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest
My sister Margaret is dead. Her body has gone to cinders, her pain, blown away like smoke. I want to remember her as a child, go back far enough to trace the whole arc of her existence, make sense of it, figure out why she lived and died the way she did, but we grew up in a dysfunctional family, an alcoholic father, a hand-wringing mother, and I was prone to lose myself in books and daydreams. My memories are in shards. A little blond girl, big eyeglasses with pale pink frames, wearing a blue plaid parochial school jumper. A fifth-grader, with a pony tail, smiling shyly on a three-speed bike. A teenager, bundled up against the cold, skating unsteadily, flirting with the boys on the pond at Elizabeth Park.
We grew up mackerel-snappers in the 1950s, lace-curtain Irish, with a solidly middle-class meat-and-potatoes diet, brisket, meatloaf, stew, punctuated Friday nights by fish or soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. The evening meal was formal, white tablecloth, crystal pitcher, sterling silver coffee pot, gravy boat, salt cellar. On a good day, quiet conversation, suppertime more sacrament than celebration. But if the old man were “unwell,” in Mother’s phrase, if he were “not himself,” then his deep discontent would bubble up, his sacrilegious anger spill out, and dinner would end in tears. Eating in that house was not a joyful, convivial, life-affirming activity.
When we were in junior high school, the old man got an electronic organ with beginner music books in the lidded bench—teach yourself to play—and white plastic switches conveniently placed above the keyboard to add audio effects, staccato, vibrato, tremolo. Chords and melodies at full volume woke us late at night, oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes. Mother told me, many years later, that she’d heard about music therapy for alcoholics, suggested he take up an instrument, but we were offered no explanation at the time, it was just one of those things, wrathful organ music after midnight, nobody mentioned it in the morning.
I got away whenever I could, leaving Margaret to fend for herself. I rode my three-speed everywhere, made money delivering the Courant, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and, for a few years, when the scenes were unbearable, I had an emergency exit, I could spend a few nights, even a week, at the home of a classmate whose parents took me in as though it went without saying, didn’t ask any questions, treated me like one of their own. Margaret had no such avenues, she didn’t read to escape, didn’t bike outside the neighborhood, abided by our parents’ strictures against sharing private family business with outsiders. She waited for me to come home.
Later, in that time of young adulthood before the compromises mount up, patterns come to light, and habits take hold, we shared a house, the two of us. In August 1969, when I was hired as an instructor in philosophy, Margaret went with me to a small Catholic liberal arts college on the coast of Maine. We rented a yellow two-bedroom cottage across the road from the beach at Fortune’s Rocks. Rescued a dog, called him Socrates, a mutt, mostly terrier, who would disappear for days, finally drag himself home, eat, sleep, dream, twitch, gather his strength for a new sporting adventure. Margaret defaulted to a major in sociology, kept house, cooked light meals, hamburgers, soft-boiled eggs, the only requirement simplicity, the only restriction, no seafood. The eggs were runny; she said some water must have gotten into the shell, and giggled. I had to go out for clam chowder, codfish, lobster.
I was not the only young instructor on the faculty that year. My peers included an economist, Marcus, a California native unaccustomed to New England weather. And it was a hard winter, there was a nor’easter at Christmas, the snow piled up, drifted, we tramped in the woods, threw logs on the fire, got high, listened to the music of the counterculture, watched the war in Asia on the nightly news, talked politics incessantly.
By springtime, Margaret and Marcus were a couple. He had Hodgkin’s disease, but it was in remission and he was strong. They married on a glorious day in West Hartford and took Socrates with them to Los Angeles. Marcus found work as an econometrician for the telephone company, they thrived, an apartment in Pacific Palisades, friends, wine and cheese, the bright California sun. I have a photograph, they’re on a picnic, Marcus stretched out on the grass, propped up on an elbow, Margaret sitting, long hair, tinted eyeglasses. She is self-assured, looking directly at the camera, smiling at something he said, so pretty, so healthy.
But the world was off kilter, the brooding disease rose up, bent on restoring order, and the benevolent ones blew in with their fatal remedy for happiness.
Margaret went to work as an admin at an insurance brokerage. Socrates succumbed to old age; a few years later she got another dog, a Shiba-Inu, Miss Haniko. Margaret retired, made an effort to start again, moved to the Gulf coast of Florida, bought a two-bedroom villa in Clearwater, grew close to Andy, a neighbor in poor health. They took Haniko to a park, the dog disturbed a copperhead, the snake struck, the dog perished on the frantic drive to a veterinary hospital. Andy’s illness turned mortal.
In retirement she drank Chardonnay on ice, smoked Virginia Slims, drank and smoked morning to night, but I understood that kind of addiction, it was familiar. I did not understand why she starved herself. She wasn’t an adolescent or a teenager, didn’t seem dissatisfied with her appearance, didn’t exercise to excess, in fact, after Haniko died, the most she’d do was housekeeping. And fasting doesn’t fit the pattern of addictive behavior, quite the contrary.
She agreed to look for a place near our home in central Virginia. She stayed less than a week, flipped through an apartment guide, decided that the terrain in our part of the country was too hilly. She went back to Clearwater, and over time her world got smaller, she finally left the house only to walk to the mailbox, drive to the Publix, carry a light garbage bag to the dumpster, and even these errands were effortful, she was tired, winded, relieved to get home. Sit, have a glass of wine, smoke a cigarette.
We made an effort to stay in touch, the way aging brothers, sisters, cousins do, yet she became guarded, as though I were no more to be trusted than any other stranger, our long-distance conversations were brief, factual, banal, she kept her distance, mastered the art of fluently disclosing little about herself: “I’m all right, thanks, sometimes a little trouble swallowing, now tell me about the kiddos, the dog, the new job.” For years, until she pled poverty, we exchanged modest Christmas gifts. There is a pewter Celtic cross over the front door, an Irish blessing in the kitchen, an ornate copper plate, in my study, engraved with a quotation ascribed to Thomas Carlyle: “May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, or the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.”
Margaret called the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, said she needed help. She had fallen and broken an arm. We found her emaciated, her right arm in a sling, the forearm and hand dark blue. Her account was confusing, she had fallen on the 30th of December, gone to the emergency room, seen an x-ray of her arm and shoulder, adamantly declined surgery. I found a medical report in the kitchen; it showed her height (5’2”), weight (73 pounds), BMI (.13), said she had a compound fracture of the right arm near the shoulder. I went to the bedroom, stood in the doorway, tried to think. She caught my eye, said she loved me.
We stocked the fridge, looked into rehabilitation, then, at her insistence, arranged for home care. At first, she thought it would be enough to have a nurse’s aide come to the villa for two four-hour shifts, morning and evening, but later she admitted she needed someone in the house full-time. After a week, she sent us away, said she would reconsider living in our neighborhood once she was whole.
We’d only been home a few days, though, when she called to say she had fallen again and injured her foot. Three toes were broken: anorexia saps the bones. From that point, Margaret’s health declined quickly, at least, it seemed a fast slide to me, a couple of weeks, but I was not the one in misery. She went to the hospital, chiefly for pain management, then to a hospice, where she slipped away before the end of the month. We found instructions in the house: scatter her ashes in Los Angeles.
So many questions. The ones that keep me awake, of course, what we could have said or done to save her, but there are other questions, too: how this happened, why she never sought therapy, never, to my knowledge, went to an AA meeting, never even tried to stop smoking. Why, good Lord, she ate so meagerly, why she let herself get so gaunt. The common-sense explanation—cigarettes suppressed her appetite, wine supplied her calories—doesn’t sit right, it’s too shallow, I want more.
For my part, food has long been a functional requirement, a mildly regrettable necessity, inopportune, like sleep, an inconvenience, an interruption, there were books to read and papers to write. I did not master the basic life skill of preparing a modest meal, thought cooking a waste of time, generally preferred to eat by myself, in a restaurant, with something to read. These days my wife sees to it that I eat well. If I lived alone, as Margaret did, balanced meals would not be my highest priority. Yet I wouldn’t be malnourished. How can anyone with the means to buy food go hungry in this country, where four in ten are obese? Was it too much trouble to boil an egg, grill a hot dog, microwave a frozen meal?
Maybe so. Anxiety takes a lot of energy, depression makes the simplest tasks arduous, she might have been too tired, might have felt, unwittingly, that she wasn’t worth caring for, wouldn’t be missed, didn’t deserve to take up so much space. It isn’t Margaret’s fault, how she lived, how she died, she is not to blame, I’ve no reason to be angry, not, at least, with her. Alcohol can perversely seem medicinal, the use of tobacco a reassuring ritual, restrictive anorexia, a way, perhaps, to exert some small measure of control in a disorderly world where parents fail, dogs get snakebit, people fall sick, and God is incommunicado. She said, “I love you.” That is enough, it has to be enough.
Share this post with your friends.
