Amy was seven years old when I was born. My half-sister. I never met her dad. She helped raise me because our mom suffered from depression and used a variety of pills to ease the pressure of trying to live up to the image of a good, young Mormon mother.
Dad was always at work. Probably to get some distance from whatever my mom was going through.
He would be gone for three days at a time, writing programs for living room sized computers, using punch cards to organize actuarial tables and maybe to justify staying away from home. As much as possible.
My big sister. She had a job when she was twelve and spent most of the time away with her friends or hiding out with them in her room. She had a waterbed. She had lots of vinyl. She moved out of the house as soon as she was able. I think she was thirteen. She was basically mom but we were never really close. Not then.
A lifetime later after my near suicide by whiskey (let's be honest; it started with whiskey but ended with the cheapest vodka) somehow I got sober. How I did this is a mystery. The short story is I asked for help from a God I couldn’t see and didn't believe in and I got help. That'll fuck with you. There's more I want to say about that but this isn't the time or the place.
I hadn't seen my sister, hadn't really been in touch with her at all for almost thirty years, left Seattle and came back to Utah, and we became drinking buddies for a brief time before I finally stopped drinking in 2018.
She had broken her hip in a drunken fall and I would come by and help out with the dogs, Max and Charlie, taking the garbage out, mowing the lawn.
Her husband had died a few years before so she had this big house to herself. I was living with my dad, my brother and my alcoholic wreck of an uncle in a very tiny, dreary, condominium, so when my sister suggested I move in, well, I didn't need much persuasion.
My hope was that I could be a good example to her and maybe she would quit drinking. At the very least, I could maybe be useful, something I could never do when I was drinking. Now, I couldn't diagnose her as an alcoholic, but I figured two fifths of Barton's vodka a day probably wasn't great. That was how I drank, too. I get it, Aims.
We lived together for two years.
At first I tried to talk her into getting sober, thinking I could change her mind about things with logical arguments and persuasion. A hypocrite, I judged her. Once I stood behind her car as she was getting ready to drive to the liquor store, threatening to call the cops because she was drunk. She threatened to run me over. I believe she wanted to.
I finally got her out of the car somehow. I don’t remember.
"You just got out of the hospital. You can't drink."
She stared straight into my eyes, "oh,” menacing but deadpan, “I can drink."
I drove a wedge between us. I tried to force the issue.
She had tried to get sober. Several times. Fits and starts. She was too proud to ask for help. Her drinking just got worse. There were regular, near-monthly trips to the hospital- a bloody nose that wouldn't stop- more broken bones.
Her license got suspended when she got arrested in her own driveway, so chauffeur was added to my list of duties. There were moments where it seemed she really wanted to stop but she was very proud and very stubborn, she wanted to do things her way. I believe that's what finally killed her. She was too proud to ask for help.
At some point, something in me broke and I surrendered. I dropped the judgment. I stopped trying to stop her. I did not question or lecture. She was headstrong and determined. She was able to stop drinking the hard stuff and switched to beer. I was impressed. That was more willpower than I ever had- I went the other direction; when the beer didn't cut it anymore I started in on the cheapest vodka. “The kind in the bottles that bounce when you drop them,” I heard someone say once. She would go to meetings with me occasionally. She even got a sponsor. Didn't last long.
We finally became close for the first time. I was able to be there for her as her brother and I just tried to be helpful. We laughed a lot.
She often told me how grateful she was to have me around and that I was a wonderful roommate. She told me she was glad to have me in her life again.
It got really bad towards the end. It's difficult to describe because I want to be respectful to her but I feel it's important to be honest about what it was like.
She just wasn't herself anymore. Her mind was going. When she'd walk she'd shuffle like a zombie. Her speech was slow and simple. Often she couldn't make it to the bathroom quickly enough. I can't imagine how such a once-proud woman felt having her younger brother have to clean her up.
I came home one night to find Max had fallen on the floor (he does this sometimes; he can't get up because he's old and slips on the wooden floor). There was shit everywhere and it wasn't his. I think my sister had tried to pick him up when he fell and she just lost control of her bowels when she tried to pick him up. It looked like a goddamn murder scene. Max was covered.
There were no words. I just grabbed a bucket with warm water and a rag and got to work.
The day she went to the hospital for the last time she had been crying out "ahhhhhhh". It was weird, it wasn't like she was in pain- more like a little kid who had forgotten why they were crying but knew there had to have been a good reason.
"What's the matter? Why are you yelling?"
“No,” she would say in monotone.
Or she would just stare back at me –vacant.
She hadn't been able to walk without screaming out in pain so I was baffled when I found her trying to walk through the front door with her walker. She wasn't trying to open the door, she was trying to walk through it. Like a ghost.
"What are you trying to do?"
"I want to go home"
You're home, I thought.. no, you want... chills up my spine.
She died in the hospital on November 20th, 2021. An alcoholic death. Everything failed. Liver, kidneys, pancreas, fluid in the lungs. The grief process was long and drawn out and happened long before she died. I had watched the slow and inevitable decline over 2 years. The 2:00 a.m. phone call from the hospital was just the sad period at the end of a sentence. Not a surprise but a shock nonetheless.
We all sober up eventually.
And sometimes love means calmly cleaning up the shit.