In Transit

In transit. In the past couple weeks, that’s a phrase that’s popped up often.

My mail. The planets. My sister.

I left Rhode Island in a hurry. My sister would be coming home from the hospital; the doctors said there was nothing more they could do. I joined my family to prepare her home for hospice. To prepare for her homecoming–and her homegoing.

Every day I would check the United States Postal Service website, inputing tracking numbers for packages I’d sent or packages I was expecting. The nifty timeline graphic would show that the package had been shipped, then it would stop moving, indicating the packages were in transit. For days. For weeks past the expected delivery date.

For a few nights around December 21, my mom and I searched the twilight southwest sky for the transiting planets, Jupiter and Saturn, as they approached each other. This rare celestial event was visible to the naked eye and last seen 800 years ago, in the time of Marco Polo. Little Saturn was on the left of big, bright Jupiter the first night we spotted them. Hovering at high noon the next night. On the right the last time we checked. The Great Conjunction, the Christmas Star.

My sister took a turn for the worse in the days before Christmas. And Christmas marked four months since our father had died, of the same illness that is killing my sister.

Christmas was my dad’s thing. He would get the tree. He would string the lights, spaced just so. He’d troubleshoot for the inevitable blown bulbs. Each year he’d make sure that Mom had lots of packages under the tree. He always wanted Mom to have a lot of packages to unwrap. Over the years, we’d gotten creative, triple boxing a package of golf balls. Putting gift cards in dress boxes. Mom would sit on the couch with a pile of packages next to her and a pile of wrapping paper and ribbon around her feet. Dad would sit in the recliner next to her, wearing his battered loafers with the backs crushed to the insoles. Dad never fussed over material things. He was happy with a weathered pair of shoes and a few favorite shirts. He did like my mom to have nice things; and, he took a quiet joy in giving her gifts, simple and extravagant, over their years together.

This year there was no tree. No pile of packages. No Dad.

I’ve been angry, sad, exhausted this Christmas season.

Most days I take my mother to visit her daughter. It’s about an hour-and-a-half roundtrip by car. We are doing a delicate dance, making sure to spend time with my sister without taxing her strength.

This journey–the literal and the spiritual journey–is taxing all of us. As I have traveled from angry to sad to exhausted, I’ve realized that sometimes I’m all three at once.

One night, I made a second trip to visit my sister. She has 24-hour care, though I wanted her to know that her family was with her, by her side in the dark night. I sat in the bed next to her. I told her that I’d seen Dad that day, for a brief moment. I told her that I had held my breath, tried not to move or blink. I didn’t want to lose sight of him.

My sister said that she had seen Dad, too. He was a raven. I said, that’s cool; ravens can be messengers. She said, he had a message. What message? No response. She was out again.

The next time she surfaced she talked about our grandfather. The next time, about putting tomato sauce on pasta.

My sister is in a storm in the open ocean. She’s carried to the crest of a wave, breaks the surface, breaks briefly into words, then slips down the face of the wave into the trough, back into the abyss of her dreams tinged by morphine and searing pain.

I’m scared, she says at one point. I don’t understand the chaos in my body.

Down to the trough again. Up to the crest.

You haven’t been my sister for most of my life, she says, as I lie next to her, holding her hand, listening to the oxygen machine click in the darkness.

I have always been your sister, I said. I was always there for you, until I made a choice to take care of myself. We’ll have to disagree, she said, as she slipped back into the trough.

My sister. Same sharp mind. Same sharp tongue.

When I visit with my mother, we take turns sitting by her bedside, holding her hand. She’ll surface, opening her eyes each time we make a switch. She thinks we are leaving. I say each time, we are not leaving. We are taking turns.

Depending on how my sister feels, I sometimes put lotion on her hands and legs, gently massage her feet. Sometimes I’ll give her a manicure. She chose bright red polish for Christmas toes. One day she surfaced while I was applying lotion and said, we could have done a spa together. You’re good at this.

That’s my sister, too. A kind heart and generous spirit.

In the last couple days, my packages have arrived at their destinations. One took nearly a month to reach me. Another took three weeks to reach my friend.

The planets have continued spinning in their orbits, hurling farther and farther apart. My mom and I stopped looking for them a week ago.

The hospice nurses have told us that in their experience, women hold on longer. When my father died, I had the impression that he turned sharply and headed for the light. He had hung on so long. He had always said he didn’t want to leave my mother. He didn’t want to go first. But he did.

And now my mother, in her still-raw bereavement, is sitting at my sister’s bedside. We are facing an event that mirrors the rarity of the celestial grand conjunction, those planets passing so close to one another as they spin through our wide sky. My mother’s husband of 62 years and her youngest daughter have faced the same hard choices against an inexorable disease. My sister diagnosed just days before our father’s death.

We are just days from crossing into a new year.

We are all, always, in transit.

Copyright 2020 Cheryl Hatch ALL RIGHTS RESERVED