The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
One month ago, I received a letter from my father that included the images in this post, "prints of snapshots taken over 50 years ago," he wrote in an enclosed note; snapshots that had been sent to him by the daughter of George Nick. "Many years ago George gave you kids each a plush toy," my father revealed. "George was the best man at our wedding." My father may have sent the same set of prints to my other sisters, but I received them as though he had reached out especially to me. He had not heard from me for awhile. He missed me. He didn't want to lose me like he lost his daughter, Karen, nine years earlier on March 14, to complications from multiple sclerosis.
Pictured in the snapshots here are my oldest sister, me and Karen. I look at them and realize how little I know of Karen. How seldom I saw her or touched her. How much I think and dream about her, but never see her entire face. How afraid I was of her when I was growing up.
Back then, she was the fiercest enforcer of my mother's code. At the dining room table -- the scene of many confrontations between my mother and me and the place where I often conceded defeat in silent shame -- Karen served as both jailhouse informant and unwitting collaborator. "Today in school, one of my friends saw Flannista with Gail. Flann's not allowed to spend time with Gail, right mom?" she would announce in front of all of us. Or leaving the table, Karen would hiss, "How many more times do we have to hear you want to be dead?" Then precisely parroting my mother, she would add, "Just look at yourself. You ought to be ashamed." Though I tried to stay clear of her, Karen always had her eyes on me.
After I was asked to leave my mother's home in 1972, I saw Karen perhaps once or twice over 28 years. We did not call each other or exchange letters. Our relationship passed from view.
Then on Monday, October 23, 1989, I received an anonymous package in the mail. Inside was a hand mirror. Scrawled on the face in pink-red fingernail polish was this message: "When was the last time you took a good hard LONG LOOK at yourself? Shame, shame, shame on YOU!" I immediately suspected that Karen had sent the mirror, as I recognized the condemnatory tone. My suspicions were soon confirmed by my youngest sister who had also received an anonymous package containing a mirror scrawled with the same message. "Is Karen my wounded child in action?" I wrote in my diary that night.
I did not see Karen again until Good Friday, April 21, 2000. She was confined to a hospital bed in her husband's study. My diary entry that day began with:
Karen is beautiful. She's really beautiful. "You're so beautiful" were the first words I said to her after so long. The second words were, "You don't bite your fingernails anymore." But of course, she can't, even if she wanted to.
Over the next 11 months, I would visit Karen when I could, determined to know and to touch the sister who for so long had watched me, but had never really seen me.
Now that Karen has -- in Charlissta's words -- "moved through the veil," does she see me in a new way? Does she see the top of my head as I write? Does she see these words? These snapshots? Will we ever see each other again? Or has she eternally passed from view? I do not know. Still, in my heart's eye, I often see her racing past me, then looking back and grinning in impish approval. She's really beautiful.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
-- "The Dead" by Billy Collins
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