I wrote the following essay 5 years ago in my rhetoric class. While it makes me cringe to reread my old writing after all this time, I want to share it as it was originally written (with grammar errors fixed and necessary edits completed). It highlights a concept that shapes a great deal of my life; our memories are influenced by emotions more than fact. For my family, most of these stories are quite different. They remember different details. Sometimes they remember the story completely differently. Sometimes they don’t remember it at all. Memory is subjective, but it still greatly influences how we define our reality. I am not claiming these are the exact events. These are just the stories that I remember. For me, each of these stories carries a strong emotional resonance to this day; each has shaped my life and my world view. I share this deeply personal essay with you not to make an argument, but rather to share the memories that have shaped my point of view. To remember is to understand; to understand is to grow.

…

GAME DAY

My brother Mike doesn’t fail at much, but he fails at dying. He has tried and failed three times.

I was a sophomore in high school when the phone call came.

“Oh hey, how’s everything going in D.C.?” my mother said in the affectionate voice she reserves for talking to her children on the phone, or in this case Liv, Mike’s girlfriend of over six years. Mike was visiting Liv in D.C. this weekend. The room grew silent as my mother’s face dropped from an excited grin to her cold mask that only appears when she is trying to hide her fear and worry. My heart dropped. I instantly knew that something was wrong with Mike. Fear washed over my body. Please God just let him be OK.

“He has a pain level of seven? In his abdomen? Take him to the E.R. now. Roy, what hospitals in the D.C. area are covered by the insurance?” My mom’s voice shook. If Mike has a pain level above five, he probably broke something. A seven, means he needs to go the hospital immediately because something is seriously wrong. Mike has a skewed pain scale. When Mike was nine years old he was diagnosed with Myxopapillary Ependymoma, a type of tumor that grows on the tissue of a person’s nervous system.  For Mike, it manifested in the form of tumors along his spinal column and inside his nerve bundle. He was in so much pain that he could not walk, he could not eat, and he could not even laugh. It took nine months to get diagnosed and into surgery. Because of the locations of tumors, they decided only to remove the six inch tumor causing the pain. There are also several tumors in his nerve bundle, which, if operated on, would most likely cause paralysis, and an inch long tumor between his shoulder blades, which was later removed when he was sixteen. At the time, they feared the tumors could spread to his brain and wanted to radiate him. My parents refused and opted for surgery and yearly scans to monitor the need of further action.  This disease almost stole Mike from me twice and left him with daily pain. Most people would take drugs to drown out the pain, but Mike refused to take pain killers. He went through every day dealing with this pain by simply pushing the pain from his mind. Mike is a boy who wrestled an entire season with a broken collar bone. Pain level of seven? What is wrong with him?

…

I remember the year I turned eight is when my siblings began leaving home. Off to college, they went – at home, I stayed. The house got progressively quieter through the years. The noises of the frustrated boys playing computer games faded into silence.  The playful bantering and arguing ceased. The silence became a constant reminder of the missing presence of these people in my life. As they move forward with their lives, they changed from the people I once knew. The memories were all I had left and soon the legacies of their success started to overpower those scarce memories. Always comparing myself to the two engineering PhD students and the law student tore me even farther from them. I never felt good enough and I never felt like I could live up to the “legacy.” The lack of conversation prevented me from seeing them as real people; people with faults to accompany each of their accomplishments.

…

To them, I was always too young; too young to get their jokes, too young to watch movies with them, too young to play games with them, too young to belong with them. The six to ten year gap prevented me from connecting with them.  All I wanted to do was grow up so I could be one of them.

One day when I was about seven, I walked by the basement door and heard the sounds of a movie. I wonder what Sally, Mike, and Tommy are watching? I went down to investigate.  As I peered around the corner, “Julia go back upstairs. You can’t watch this.”

“But…” I tried to plea.

“No Julia you are too young. Mom would kill us if we let you watch it,” Sally insisted.

Defeated and hurt, I went back upstairs.

…

Mike went into surgery around two o’clock in the morning. My mother left for D.C. the next day. I still had school so I stayed home with Sally, who was back from college.

“Mikie gonna be OK.” The words I had spoken when I was two and Mike was in his first surgery rang through my ears. I am trying to convince myself they still rang true. He has gotten through the surgery but he is still very sick. I wish more than anything I could be there with him in D.C.  Sally and I were sitting on the floor of our living room with all my English notes spread out on the floor. Finals were coming up. Ms. Moe’s English final is easily going to be my hardest.

“Sal, would you be willing to help me study for my English final?”

She said “Sure,” with a reassuring smile.

We spent hours on the living room floor. Sally trying to explain how to remember the difference between assonance and alliteration and me trying to absorb and understand as much as possible. A realization hit me, this may be the first time Sally hasn’t treated me like a child. It was like she saw me as more than just her human Barbie doll.

The phone rang. I ran to pick it up. It was Mom.

“Hey Mommy, how is Mike?”

“He is sleeping right now. The doctor was just in, and he said that Mike’s appendix was the largest that he had ever seen. If he hadn’t gotten into surgery when he did, he could have died from the bacterial infection. The nurses won’t let him sleep though so he isn’t improving very fast. I decided to blockade the door. Mike is going to sleep. The only person getting in this room is the doctor.” A smile crossed my face as the image of my mom flashed through my mind. Mom sitting in a chair in front of the door with her arms crossed and a stubborn expression across her face as she refuses to move.  “I am going to need you and Sally to do a lot of the cooking. You know Dad can’t cook.  Can you put Sally on? I need to talk to her about when she is going to come out?”

Sally gets to go out to see him while I am stuck at home. Stupid finals. Hopefully, I’ll get to at least talk to him on the phone soon.

Through my mind’s eye, I could see the boy who used to chase me around and made it his personal mission to scare me as often as possible, lying immobile in a sterile white bed. His face almost matches the color of the sheets and the taunt muscles in his neck reflect the pain in his eyes. There is faint hue of yellow throughout his skin from the jaundice.  It was painful to imagine him like this. I wish I could help.

…

My family went on vacation in Colorado in 2004. The best thing about our family vacations was I could spend time with my siblings for an entire week. One night, I went out of our RV to get the s’more supplies that were still next to the campfire.  I was walking toward the fire pit with the flashlight pointed toward the woods in front of me enjoying the night air and looking for the supplies, when something came up behind me and grabbed me. I screamed.

Spinning around, I found Mike standing behind me smiling.  “Mike!” I exclaimed while hitting him in the arm, “you scared the crap out of me.” My heart raced in my chest. “Not cool.”  When he saw the terror and anger in my eyes, he realized that while that was his best scare yet, it may have been a little too good.

“Sorry Jewls,” he said, “I thought you could hear me coming up behind you.”

“Obviously not,” I retorted still angry and trying to get my breathing back to normal. He continued to apologize, but only half-heartedly.  He still had a stupid grin on his face.

…

In 2008, my family went on vacation in Yellowstone National Park. Ignited by missing Ole’ Faithful’s eruption, my family broke out into an blistering argument. I sat on the loft bed and watched the show. I belonged in neither side of the argument. I was not a parent nor was I a college student.

“You can’t treat us like children!” exclaimed Sally, easily one of the more spirited participants.

“But you are our children,” retorted my mother. My mother is the type of person you want fighting on your side, not fighting against you.

“But we are adults. We have our own lives. You can’t just treat us like we’re still kids when we come home,” stated the newly engaged Tommy.

The argument dissolved into passionate chaos, both sides refusing to see reason. I can’t stand conflict, especially in my own family. I started to cry. “Will you all just stop it!” Silence fell throughout the RV. They all stared at me. Once they resumed talking, the entire conversation’s tone shifted. The kids clearly stated how they wanted the parents to treat them and the parents expressed the amount of respect they still expected. We left the RV to go watch the Ole’ Faithful’s next scheduled eruption.

On our way back to the campsite, Tommy beckoned me to come over and sit in his lap. I am instantly reminded of all those times I used to play computer games with him. Once he left for college, I tried playing by myself, but it was never the same without him. He has always treated me with a certain degree of courtesy so I shouldn’t have been surprised when he asked “So why do you think Mom and Sally always butt heads?”

I looked at him and then Sally who sat across from him. They really want to know what I think? I looked at their expecting eyes. I guess so.

“I think Sally and Mom are too similar.” Sally’s face was appalled but I continued. “They both are strongly opinionated and extremely stubborn with ideas of how the other should act. Unfortunately, these ideas are also never accurate so they both end up frustrated and argumentative.”

Tommy looked at me in surprise and then chuckled. “I think she may be onto something.” This did not make Sally happy.  But it made me feel proud. My opinion mattered. I was included.

…

“Now that you have your license, you should come visit me!” said Sally in shear excitement.

“That would be awesome!” A rush of excitement washed over my body. Sally wanted me to visit; to spend a whole weekend with just me.  What a change from when we were little and Sally didn’t want anything to do with me. Then, I was just the pesky little sister who always copied her and tried to hang out with her when her friends were over.

When the day finally rolled around and I was driving down to Champaign, excitement and anticipation fought each other in my stomach.  I pulled onto the gravel that substituted for their driveway and made my way up to her front door. A smile spreads across my face. When I crossed that threshold, I entered my sister’s world for the first time as an equal.

“Hello beautiful” greets me as the door opens.  Let the weekend begin.

…

“Julia you have a letter,” my mom yelled down the stairs.

“Can you bring it to me? I am working on chem homework and really don’t want to move. Thanks.” Behind me, I could hear the footsteps descend down the stairs.

“It’s from U of I.” I spun around and looked at my mom’s face. Her cautious eyes watched my reaction. My eyes slowly fell to her outreached hand. In it was a large envelope with the University of Illinois insignia. My heart began to race. A large envelope means you got in, right?  I grabbed the envelope and ripped it open. “We are delighted to inform you that you have been accepted to the University of Illinois,” I read in disbelief. A smile spread across my entire face as I tried to hold back tears.

“Sally told me to give you this when you got in.” She handed me a small wrapped package with a card taped to the bottom. “I am so proud of you.”

“Thanks Mommy,” I said as I gave her a hug. As she turned and went back upstairs, my eyes fell to the present in my hand. I tore it open and inside sat an i-clicker. I took the little device in my hand and looked at the old scratch and sniff sticker Abbey, Tommy’s now wife, had put on it when she was bored in Physics. The corner covered in ink from when a pen exploded in Mike’s pocket. Sally’s doodles sketched into the plastic. Every one of my siblings has used this i-clicker since Tommy first bought it ten years ago. I clench it in both of my hands and held it next to my heart as tears stream down my face. I am finally one of them.

…

It’s game day and I get to see my siblings again through a Google+ Hangout. Thank you Bears for providing my family an excuse to see each other. The distance collapses and they are once more present in my life, in my world, in my room.  I get to see them all again and once again they become real people to me, not just memories and legacies. And even more, the game allows me to create new memories with my siblings, even though they are all over the country. Every game day, I get my family back. For these scarce moments, I have the chance to share in the emotion of the game. I have the chance to dissolve into silliness. We always share in the inevitable pet competition. We talk of weddings and futures. We are together. I belong. Suddenly this foreign dorm room feels like home.

…epilogue…

Ever since Mike first suggested the game day Google+ Hangouts, my relationship with my siblings has transformed. They don’t seem quite so inaccessible even though they are far away.  Mike has become my go-to whenever I don’t get my Physics or Calculus homework. Every time we talk, I learn something new about him. Since Tommy and I are both in Materials Science and Engineering (MATSE), I have spent hours asking him questions about MATSE, touring his lab and hearing about his research. In the resent years, Sally and I have grown extremely close. She has become my best friend and confidant. We share a love for art and even though we have two very different styles, we appreciate each other’s work.  Each time we talk, they become more real. This winter, I flew out to California by myself. I spent a couple days just hanging out with Tommy and Abbey. Then Mike and Sally came out to join us and we spent four days skiing on Mammoth Mountain. This was the first time the kids went on vacation together, without the parents. I no longer felt like the little sister who was just tagging along, more of a burden than companion. I felt like an equal.

 

 

Photo Credit: Liz Brinckerhoff took this photo of my sister and me about 7 years ago and it remains one of my favorite pictures of all time! Thanks again Liz! You all should follow her amazing photography on her Instagram at liz_brinckerhoff! Also, you can email her at brinckerhoffe@gmail.com.

 

*Names have been changed for privacy. Please respect their privacy because this is my story, not theirs. 

 

To read more about how my perspective has been shaped, you can read my previous (aptly-named) post, Perspective.