Severed

by Nina Bennett

When I was nine years old the line that divided my life was drawn. A separation was created that determined a before and after, forever placing the events of my life on either side. My family, brash and comedic, fuelled by my mother's attentive love and my father's distant but steady devotion, was shattered. We were never to be the same.

What I remember, with the clarity of a high-resolution image bursting into my mind, is that it was me who answered the phone the night my sister died. I was watching a movie, and somewhere deep inside I believed, in the insular way that a child does, that nothing could disrupt the world I lived in. I laughed, thinking it was a joke, and handed the phone to my other sister, seven years older than I, who ran upstairs, pale and panicked, yelling for my mother.

Later, alone, I would pray, a pleading discourse while staring at the ceiling. Then, in a surge of my mother's rational, I took out her tattered pink address book and called relatives, relaying the story just as I had heard, she's been in a bad car accident but we think she's okay. Afterwards my parents commended me. And I felt proud, to do something smart within the chaos, to be like a grown up and think calmly, to believe that yes, everything was okay.

Sometime between late night and early morning my parents came to me and sat on my bed. Their faces were stark and swollen, their gestures overly gentle. They said, "Your sister died. Do you know what that means?" I did not. The occurrence of death was only semi-real to me, and its significance or permanence was completely unknown. Even when I saw her in a white and gold-rimmed casket, her hair dark and full, pink silk dress, svelte lips brushed with gloss, seventeen-years old; not moving, never to move again, I still did not understand. At that age the concept of grief was foreign to me, as was the loss, which in the days to come would be a lingering presence in our family, as palpable as a certain scent in our home, a pungent unhappiness saturating everything.

When you have lost an immediate family member their death becomes part of your identity. There is the girl whose sister died. Teachers, parents, friends, they know you by it, and the look is always the same: sympathetic, hesitant, pity-laden, and sometimes scared. I began to understand that something happens that changes who you are, something that categorizes and scripts time. It can happen to anyone, old or young, bad or good. Often you are not even aware of the impact of a single event. It is odd; like a shard of glass so minute you cannot see it but whose reflection is so powerful that it blinds.

Her death had completely severed our family, but what was most frightening is that we were all floating, alone. So far from each other that we were like strangers, together only because we had been stranded. My mother was a whirlpool, twirling and sinking. My father, bleary-eyed and irritated, controlled by routine. My sister was angry and dismissive, a glimpse of swift movement out the door and back again. And me, I was moving, running with knobby child's leg, scabbed and not yet shaved, going to friends houses, bike riding, living in an anxious, determined way. Living as an observer to my family, trying to stay out of the way, wanting to have back- not so much my sister, but the way things had been.

If I would of known how to express what I felt I would have said that sorrow feels empty, yet it filled the spaces in our home and in ourselves with a stale air that kept us from needing each other. We were afraid to falter in each other's eyes, to accept that we were not the same, to give comfort because it was an admittance of weakness. So we languished in our seclusion, growing lonelier and more lost. So many years passed this way; the dividing line that dictated my life became visible to me, and I came to know that love and pain and death are real. They are a part of our existence. They are pervasive and unavoidable, pertinent to human experience and relevant to everything that we are.

Now, looking back, I see that my sister's death did not dissolve my childhood, though it did change the cadence of it. Loss changes lives, but it does not have to completely hinder them. It can teach us if we allow it to. It can make us see that there is joy and disaster at opposite ends, pleasure and pain, miracles and mishaps, but that is what makes life precious and beautiful.

As we evolve from child to adult, who we were then is always a part of who we are now. The things we learn and see, the experiences, stay with us. We grow from our roots. Mine were tangled and torn, but they made me who I am. Childhood is supposed to prepare us for life, and it can be a disadvantage if a coverlet is always thrown over reality. To know life as it is, to know grief and pain and sorrow, to see it and touch it as you live it everyday, develops the inner strengths that carry you through life.

My sister's death was the most significant shaper of my childhood, and to some extent, my identity. Is it irony or providence that the tragedies in our life give definition to who we will become? I do not know. But I know that my eyes were opened to the truths of life, and though tough and painful, it laid the groundwork for me to understand that love and unity are the only shelters and saviors that we will ever have in this life.

Sixteen years ago my sister died. A car hit hers, a millisecond later her chest was crushed, her heart exploded. At nine years of age I did not understand death, and I do not fully understand it now at twenty-five. But I know that pieces of your family and yourself, broken in childhood, can be put back together slowly with time and the tendrils that bind us all: love, compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness. The remains, the remnants, chipped pieces of years, fear in shards, pain in waves; they can be mended. It is an act of intent, certainly, and it is patient and meticulous work, done with humbleness, sacrifice, and a willingness to forge your way through history, heartache, and hard truths. But it is the only way to press the pages of your family together, to vacate the grief and purge the pain, coming out whole again.

Nina Bennett is a freelance writer living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work has appeared in Sasee Women's Magazine, Savvy, Simple Joy, Marine Corps Times, Veterans Voice, and other publications. She is a former dating columnist for the online magazine Who is Isabella and is currently at work on her first novel.

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