My Sister’s Negligent Suicide
There is some question as to whether negligent suicide is defined as follows: dying as a result of knowing that in order to stay alive you must take a certain medicine and choosing not to take that medicine. That’s my own definition; committing suicide by intentionally not taking care of oneself.
One day in 2013, my sister Annie walked into her kitchen and stopped living. It had been her kitchen for thirty-five years, in the dairy barn that her husband had converted into a house years before they met. Cooking was one of Annie’s considerable talents, and for the three and a half decades of her marriage she’d produced sumptuous food for groups of people from small to large. So, by my calculations she had walked into that kitchen at least sixty-three thousand times. But this time she walked into her kitchen and died.
If that seems like an insensitive way to say it, you may rest assured that Annie would have said it exactly like that. She often startled people with her dramatic choice of words.
In some ways it’s perfect that one of her many talents was cooking and that she died near the restaurant range her husband had bought her, at her request, as a wedding gift. But I think Annie might have preferred to die in her voluptuous, wild gardens, her last smell that of the rich earth, her last sight that of the sturdy, green stalks to which she’d given long life, with the grave of her beloved Rottweiler close by.
Annie had had enough of this earthly life. Deep depression takes us to Hell psychologically and she was in that relentless darkness, took no more pleasure in things and could see nothing to look forward to. We were told afterward that she’d been a ticking time bomb of ragingly high cholesterol. Her statin had given her intolerable side effects and so she went off it, keeping all of this to herself. In the last years of her life she kept everything close to the vest. The week before she died her husband had come into the dining room and found her, very uncharacteristically, standing at the french windows, staring into the distance.
Are you alright, Annie? he had asked. Yes, she had said, although she knew the end was coming.
And a few days before she died she sent me a heartbreaking poem* about an old woman who is disappearing. Only afterward did I realize that it expressed her own feelings that her earthly life was almost gone. She wasn’t trying to tell me something; she did tell me, in her way. But not because she wanted anyone to step in and stop her from leaving.
My sister Annie was a force of nature, larger than life, with a capacious intellect and an outrageous sense of humor. She was a lover of music, a pianist, gardener, visual artist, self-taught chef, and she was haunted by deep, dark, inherited depression that resulted in self-loathing. Annie called that terrible place in her psyche, The Blasted Heath, a cinematic phrase that for me prompted vivid mental images of her crawling along an endless plateau in the relentless sun, with no relief in sight, not a drop of water, not even a mirage.
The first time I went all the way to The Blasted Heath in a terrible depression, Annie saved my life. I was not suicidal, but I told her that I felt as though I might just sit down in a corner and quietly subside. Die. She told me to head for the airport where there was a ticket waiting to bring me home to her. The next morning, after sleeping for the first time in days and days thanks to a sleeping pill prescribed by Annie’s husband, I awoke to the faces of their children and dogs and various cats circling my bed, and I was mostly healed. I remember the vision of the children and the dogs’ faces and the relief and joy and gladness that washed over me, and after that I don’t remember anything more about that visit, and the days following my near implosion.
I wasn’t there to try to save Annie’s life when she collapsed to the floor, but I don’t think she would have wanted me to. She was tired, so very tired, from caring for a much older husband who we never thought would outlive her. She was out of fuel because she’d been driven so hard for so long. Annie had had enough and so she chose not to take care of her heart and it quit in mid-beat, one moment motoring her through life, the next moment, Poof! Explosively ripped apart and then as still as a dead battery, not rechargeable.
Because sibling DNA is apparently the strongest, and Annie was like me times ten — or I am like one tenth of her — I have imagined what her death might have been like. Not for us, but for her. Did she know, in that instant, exactly what was happening? Did her hands fly to her chest as a fast-motion film of her life shot by? Was she sorry, or relieved? How long did she lie on the floor before her husband found her? I wish I could have been there, run to her, held her head on my lap, told her how much I loved her, asked her to keep in touch when she got to the other side. But none of us were given that.
I do know what Annie’s death was like for us. We kept thinking that it was all a tragic dream, or a strange warp in our reality, and that we just have to struggle through it somehow and Annie will walk into the kitchen and resume dinner preparations. She’ll be chopping and pureeing while I sip an ice cold chardonnay in between cramming bites of some amazing cheese down my gullet as the marmalade cat, Shmuckers, dozes on a thick towel on the warming oven.
But Annie as we knew her is never going to walk into that kitchen again. Ever. And the thought that I won’t see her any more is unfathomable to me. So, if I can’t see her at her house, I’m fairly certain that I’ll see her as soon as I go to that Great Big Kitchen in the Sky.
When Annie died, her children were all sure that the priest would say all the wrong things at her funeral. Apparently he was known for doing so. Annie’s husband was an Irish Catholic and so, although she had her share of reservations about Catholicism, Annie had recognized the need for the positive aspects of a church community for her children. And so her son and two daughters were brought up within the Margaret Roper Forum; a liberal, open-minded version of Catholicism. Once the children were grown, Annie joined the choir at the traditional Catholic church in the center of their town. This is how it came to pass that her funeral was there, which in some ways seemed very not her. But the music that morning was unusually, heartbreakingly exquisite, and that was her.
However, when the priest began to speak, I felt the tension in the air. Directly in front of me Annie’s older daughter sat frozen, shoulders up defensively and probably glaring. I couldn’t see her face but the priest kept looking nervously over at her as though checking to make sure she wasn't going to rise up and stab him with her stiletto. In between my loud, undignified weeping, I waited, as did our sister Lizzie, quietly beside me, for the priest’s grossly off-the-mark tribute.
But lo and behold, what the priest said was beautiful and personal and perfect. He spoke about Annie’s life-long thirst for knowledge, her love of literature and her quest for the larger answers of the universe. He said that Annie was at last in a beautiful, place where she could find all the enormous answers. Lizzie and I breathed sighs of relief as our niece put her stiletto back on.
Without speaking for Annie, which she would not have liked, I envision Annie’s Heaven as an eternal and lush garden full of all the flowers and trees she loved, a huge library — with actual books that one can hold and feel and treasure — and a cafe that serves really excellent teas or better yet serves High Tea. There will be classical music or Oscar Peterson jazz playing, and a big, light-filled kitchen with the world’s largest restaurant range and the finest edible ingredients, a daytime view of endless, fragrant gardens and, at night, an infinite view of the universe.
The week before she left, Annie sent me an email reminding me that decades ago I sang her the Bugs Bunny song, “Oh, carrots are divine, You get a dozen for a dime, It’s magic!”
How we used to laugh, all those years ago!
*What the Old Woman Said, by Eileen Sheehan
from Song of the Midnight Fox
Doghouse Books, Tralee, 2004
