Sadness

On August 11, 1993 the world lost a one-in-a-million kind of woman. Her name was Marjorie Ellen Penner and she was my sister.

We had so much in common yet so little in common. We shared our two parents and two brothers. We shared our love of children and our love of nursing, but even those commonalities weren't enough for us to maintain or even form a sisterly bond.

The differences seemed to override the commonalities. She lived a country life; I lived a city life. She followed the Holdeman faith and all that entailed, I followed no faith and made my own rules. She had seven children and would have had more, I was done after two. She married her childhood sweetheart who lived just a few miles away; I married a man I’d barely gotten to know. She was born in 1954, I was born in 1967. That we loved each other was not in doubt but I am certain it was I who made the roads of communication rough and virtually impassible.

She had a bout of breast cancer in 1987, the same year that I was pregnant with Chris. I was so traumatized by this and upset that I left a family get-together crying and went to hide in my bedroom. She followed me and gently talked to me.

The chemo treatments that followed were temporarily effective and she was cancer free until 1993. Early in the year she was diagnosed with gallstones and had surgery for same. The surgeon looked for evidence of cancer during the surgery and found none. Marj never fully recuperated from this procedure and she passed away a few months later.

My first knowledge of widespread mets was when our parents were over for lunch one day and mom told me while at the table. “She’s got cancer and its all over her body. She wanted to tell you herself but you won’t go visit her.” My eyes filled with tears and I ran from the table.

I went to visit her in the hospital that same afternoon. She lay in a hospital bed hooked up to an intravenous solution and cried with her mother-in-law and told me I’d have to find a new sister. “But I want you” I told her. She got up to walk to the bathroom and discussed whether or not the cancer had reached her bladder. Her husband seemed reluctant to leave her side while I was there.

My next recollection of her is lying in a bed in another room and she had been seeing pink elephants on the hospital curtains. Morphine didn’t seem to agree with her. They had just made the decision to not have any more chemo treatments as it was just prolonging her life and making her feel lousier in the meantime. Flash forward to another hospital room and Marj is having seizure after seizure; allegedly a result of blood clots entering the brain.

I don’t remember how I felt about her impending death at this point; it may have been sadness, or numbness. I do remember very clearly that I got very upset and indignant with a certain Holdeman minister who offended my dignity in some way while visiting my sister

When Marj was returned to Steinbach and occasionally to her home, the focus was on caring for her and making her remaining time on earth a life of quality and special moments. One such moment was a day when Marj was allowed to go home for a few hours and Kevin and I were at her place for lunch. She verbalized that this was a special meal to have her sister there.

Later that afternoon, I walked with her around the house with her and her daughters as she instructed her daughters on the care and tending of each particular plant near the house. Very clear evidence that she knew of her impending death and was preparing herself and her daughters for the same.

Two days before her death I spent the afternoon with her, she had a bed in the living room and a commode. I fed her lemon meringue pie and she attempted to drink iced tea. Her hands shook, she was unable to feed herself, but she ate the entire piece of pie. The doctor came to visit her that evening and she asked him if I was someone special to her.

Cancer was an evil mystery to me at that time, and I was relatively ignorant and inexperienced in its insidious ways of stealing a person’s identity and awareness. When I left that evening I had no clue that it would be the last time I would see her alive.

I chose “Sadness” as a title for this post because I am saddened by the realization that I lost a sister. A sister who I felt I hardly knew because I chose to not to spend more time with her in her last months on earth. My reasons for not spending quantity time with her are unknown to me. Perhaps I felt unwanted at her bedside as I had chosen a path in life that was not what she wanted for me.

While the reasons remain unknown to me now, even 16 years later, I have felt her presence with me many times since her death. She was with me when I first started my university education. She’s been with me many times on the way to HSC as a senior practicum student. Her ghost haunts the hallways when I work in Ste. Anne, the hospital where she worked many years ago. Most recently, she traveled home from work with me after hard day shift. I love my sister and I miss her.

Some may say “Oh, get over it, its been 17 years.” I have nothing to say to those people, they wouldn’t understand anyway.