An open letter to my sister, by Sue Hendler

An open letter to my sister: 'I understand so much better now'

May 15, 2009

Dear Celia:

Happy birthday! It's been almost eight years since you died, so that means you would be turning 52 today. As always, I miss you and hope that wherever you are, if anywhere beyond the container of your ashes, your spirit is more peaceful and content than it was during your last years on this planet.

I've been writing this column in our local newspaper for almost a year. I started doing it a few months after I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Sometimes I wonder what you would say or think about my writing -- and my cancer -- both in general and in terms of specific columns or topics. I wish we could talk about it.

I'm writing to you because I want you to know that so many things about your illnesses and your behaviour make sense to me now. While I found them frustrating and irritating at the time, I have found myself doing and feeling some of the very things that I couldn't understand back then. So I want you to know that I get it and I'm sorry.

I'm sorry I got frustrated when I drove you around to do your errands. You had particular things that you wanted to get in particular stores and in a particular order. Ever the planner, I just wanted to do everything in the same place -- or at least as much as possible. Driving around southern Florida, where you lived, was never my favourite thing to do, and I wanted to do the least amount of it as possible. Why couldn't you understand and respect that, I wondered. After all, wasn't I doing you the favour of helping you get your errands done? I now know how important it was for you to retain control over at least some parts of your life.

I'm sorry I kept trying to "fix things." While there is a fine line between being helpful and being controlling, I know now that I could have talked with you about how I was experiencing that conflict. We could have come to a place where maybe both of us might have been more comfortable.

I'm sorry I was scared of your illnesses. My own fear helped make me less than supportive at times. I had always been a pretty healthy person, and being around anyone who was ill was difficult for me. That must have not felt too great to you and, boy, do I know what that feels like now!

I'm sorry I didn't make more time for you. It's true you lived far away and I had a job that was pretty demanding. Still, I wish we could have had more time together -- especially now that I see time as the greatest gift we can give each other as friends or family members.

I'm sorry I got impatient when we spoke and you repeated the same thing over and over again. And you weren't on chemotherapy so you couldn't even blame it on chemo-brain! Again, I sure know now what it means to be repetitive and have people say, "Sue, you already told me that."

I'm sorry I didn't realize that being with you while you were so sick was in many ways a gift that I could have accepted more gracefully. I think that I often regarded it more as a chore and something I was giving you instead of a more equitable sharing of time, experiences and feelings.

I'm sorry I criticized your choosing to hang out with people who were sick. While I thought it made sense that it would be better for you to associate more with people who were well, I can now understand how sometimes you wanted to be spending time with people who had experienced situations similar to those with which you were living.

I guess what I'm trying to say with all these examples is that while being really sick and thinking one may be close to death is going to be a unique experience for everyone, there may well be some general trends. Trying to maintain some degree of autonomy and control over one's life falls into this category. Accepting with grace the help of others does, too. As does needing to be listened to and respected.

While it's too late for me to say these things to you directly, it's not too late for me to figure them out and articulate them in whatever form I can. I picture us having this conversation while we are walking on trails in the Everglades. Remember when I found that eastern diamondback rattlesnake? Or when we saw the roseate spoonbills? Or when we drove north to Orange County and saw all those manatees? Those stand out to me as some of the good times we had before you died. But I now think that if we had had this sort of conversation, that would have been a good time, too.

Sue Hendler is a former member of the Whig-Standard's Community Editorial Board. She is contributing regular columns on her experiences while she travels her breast cancer journey.