For My Sister, Elaine Altman

1.
RFK and JFK, a bridge and an airport, but in another part of NYC, I leave my sister in the ground, it wasn’t a heart attack, just some ploy Death used to lead her away quickly like a hardball bouncing from a cement wall you can’t return at 145 miles per hour and lose the match.

I am flying over the Great Lakes with Jet Blue, and my movie console is black, a baby whimpers several seats behind me, people without a mask stand in line and wait for the bathroom, coughing, unclear whether we are in or out of a pandemic or just walking on air, watering the numbers as they grow and multiply, but now my sister has been subtracted from me, no longer part of an equation, where there were once three sisters, now there are two.

She was the oldest, the matriarch, the bravest of us all, the one who kept the family secrets and remembered all the birthdays. But we never got to share giggles beneath the bedcovers or laugh about our boyfriends, before I got my period she had taken her first trip to Europe, a grown-up more than a friend, we knew each other’s lives from afar, a play of shadows across a three-hour time distance. Now she’s done an acrobatic trick and jettisoned herself into the clouds.

2.
You died on the 5^th day of Chanukah, always the shammash sharing your light with those around you; now we’re left standing, an atmospheric river keeps pitching another downpour; my plants have floated off their saucers.

3.
We didn’t need another earthquake for this to be declared an emergency. The Guadalupe is rising past its banks, asperitas clouds dapple the sky in ripples, and I think of you in Valhalla, a cemetery in Westchester County, and how I longed to hold you one last time before you’d dropped to the floor of your bathroom. What did you see in that last look into the mirror? We were joined by telephone calls across country, our weekly recaps and recipes, always on your way to the latest movie, a dinner party, meeting with your grandchildren and attending every soccer event, later, to your doctor’s appointments, railing about that man in the White House, foaming with expletives, surprising me with your vehemence; this week I heard about a first-grader who has shot his teacher with a hand-gun, but you are not here for us to talk about our children’s futures.  And why not? Sister, you always had the answers.