By Karen G Berry
1. Develop a life-threatening health condition. This will serve as your proverbial “wake-up call,” something you despise in both the proverbial and the actual sense. You always prefer to sleep. But here you are. Awake.
2. Feel your mortality right down to your bones. You are too old to pretend you’re not going to die, and you now have a fairly clear idea of how it will happen. Let it shake you hard. This takes maybe ten seconds.
3. Take stock of regrets. This takes as long as the length of sidewalk you travel between the cardiology office and the heart rhythm lab. On this stretch of pavement, realize that aside from your relationship with your impossible sibling, you have no regrets. Accept this as the privilege it is.
4. Have the echocardiogram. After receiving the news that you will be allowed to go home rather than to the hospital, leave your doctor’s office with your faltering heart and your new resolve. Drive home.
5. Consider the richness of your own life. Contrast it with your impossible sibling’s. It doesn’t matter that she has been the author of her adult misfortunes. To be angry with her is as stupid as being angry with someone for having cancer. You could do that, but it’s stupid. You’re not stupid.
6. Consult the list. This list is fifty years long, and begins with her trying to choke you to death when you were months old, and extends through many decades of transgressions, lies, thefts and other events too painful to voice. The damage done by a toxic, narcissistic person is considerable, and you’ve made a list of every single incident.
7. Burn the list.
8. Reach out to the impossible sibling. She will be wary. She considered your estrangement irrevocable. She also knows what she’s done and fears being taken to task for it. Keep reaching. Eventually, she will reach back.
9. Realize that the impossible sibling is also sick. Practice radical compassion. Radical compassion is given despite the past, and with no expectation of the future. You can do this.
10. Help your impossible sibling every material way you can. Give her money. Dedicate space in your garage for her storage. Buy her new glasses. Pay for the expensive head lice treatment when all the other methods fail her. Take her to the grocery store and tell her to fill her cart. Text her twice a day to make sure she takes her meds. Tell her that she looks adorable. Find something about her life to envy, because she thrives on that. Sit with her. Ask her what she remembers. Piece together the tattered threads of your early years. Let her trash your dead parents. Laugh with her. Love her.
11. Tell her that you love her every single day.
12. Do these things because you want to. Do these things because you have to. Do these things because you can. Do them and do them and do them.
And, repeat.
Karen G. Berry lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in micro-societies, the heroic nature of everyday life, and expressing life’s pain in the most humorous way possible. Karen’s poetry has been published in Goblin Fruit, Fireweed, Seek It, Prairie Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. More information about Karen’s work is available at her blog, I am not a pie. https://karengberry.mywriting.network/
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