This one may step on a few toes.
Since my mother‘s death in 2018, my sister and I have barely spoken. In fact, the last time we spoke was in March 2018 when her and her family returned after the funeral to claim what she and I agreed mom wanted her to have after her death.
After she and her family left here, virtually nothing has been said between the two of us. Through social media I have wished her happy birthday each year since that day and in four years she’s only done it once on my birthday.
I attempted to call her on the first Christmas after our mother died and she didn’t pick up the phone. To eliminate any undue emotion on that day I’ve only attempted that once.
It‘s said that when someone dies, particularly someone as close as a parent, you find out both the worst and the best in people. In my case the best came from my friends and the worst from my own flesh and blood.
It doesn’t need to be this way.
The reasoning for my sister’s vitriol about the situation is baseball and the fact that I took possession of the house we grew up in as my mother was headed towards the day of her death.
And I did it for a particular reason.
When my mother received her terminal diagnosis and it was a virtual certainty that she was not going to survive the cancer that was consuming her body, instead of sitting down and talking with me about how we should move forward, my sister chose to grab a legal pad and start dividing up the house between the two of us.
This did not sit well with me, for the simple fact that my sister instead of pumping the brakes and sitting down and trying to determine how to best move forward she went with dividing up the house as if mom was already gone. Arguably she was not in the best of mental capacities but she was still here at the time.
Leaving the hospital that night I decided, since I had mom‘s power of attorney, that I would take possession of the house to get my sisters attention and pump those brakes myself, knowing full well that it wasn’t going to be pretty once she found out.
It wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
Despite what is transpired over the last four years, I do have regret over taking the step but not much.
It’s interesting how things play out whenever you’re facing the death of a loved one. It’s said that when someone dies you either see the very best or the very worst of people.
In the case of my mothers death I saw the best in my friends and not the best in my family. That’s its own story, but from the outside looking in I saw a lot of my friends rally to my side in my time of need back then. They pointed out a lot of disparities when it came to how I was handling the situation and how my sister was handling the situation.
I don’t wanna get into that here but suffice it to say that though I feel I did everything right when it came to how I handled my mother in her final month I do question how it all played out and I probably will be doing that for the rest of my life.
My friends constantly tell me that I shouldn’t let this bother me because of this fact, but deep down I believe that the connection still exists between me and my sister.
Growing up my sister and I never had an adversarial relationship that you would typically see between brother and sister. Sure, her life’s trajectory was a lot more successful than mine if you were to lay them side-by-side, but that doesn’t mean that I have jealousy of how her life turned out in comparison to mine.
It’s actually quite the opposite. I’m very proud of my sister. Her accomplishments in life make me proud to be her brother. She’s way more talented in the arts than I am and that runs in her family, particularly in her children am I’m also deeply proud of. And I think that’s what hurts the most is the fact that their mother and I are at odds with each other and it spills over to my relationship with my niece and nephew.
I’d love to be able to fix this but unfortunately an apology is out of the question at this point. The old saying goes it’s easier to ask for permission then to ask for forgiveness and I didn’t really go for either one. That said though, at the time that I did what caused the rift between us I believed I did right and moreover, I feel like I earned the right to at least try to run the house that my parents purchased in the early 70s.
I don’t know if she’ll ever read this but at the end of the day I really would like to call a truce between us and repair at least to the point where we can stand each other our relationship is brother and sister because as of right now we are all that’s left of our parents family.
Sure, we have my parents grandchildren but my dad‘s wing of the family ends with my son and I have no idea if he might give me grandchildren. And it’s a good bet that both of my niece and nephew will produce some form of grandchildren for my sister and brother-in-law.
I would like as I go into my older years to at least sit down with my sister and say look, I made a mistake and I should’ve done it a different way. I won’t apologize but I will try to help her understand that at the time that I did what I did I just wanted her to sit down, slow down, and understand what was going on from my side.
Maybe I’ll get that opportunity, and maybe I won’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment