Most of what I know about my sister I know because other people have filled in my memory for me, and I know because I feel it in my chest all the time. I know it because I cry, still, over little things, like smells that remind me of the hospital, or the sight of children whose brown hair reminds me of her brown hair. I know my sister by the smell of the dried lavender in the little pillow that someone made for her when she first went to hospital, and the smell of the disinfectant they used to clean the floors. I know her by taste and texture: the crunch and sting of those salt and vinegar chips from the hospital cafeteria, the soft stewed apples and apricots and pears. I know her by the songs that were playing on the radio when she was alive, like Supertramp’s ‘Dreamer’ and ‘Let It Be’ by The Beatles, songs by Bob Marley, Nana Mouskouri, Simon and Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, the Play School theme. I know her by colours: by the light satin blue of her Holy Communion ribbon, the speckled brown and cream tiles of the floors in the hospital, the lime green and gold of her dress-up scarf, the cream of a cabbage butterfly in summer, the yellow of the cafeteria custard, the red of her fingernails, the white of her Holy Communion dress, the one she was buried in.
I did not go to her funeral, as was the common wisdom of the day. They thought I was too young, that it would upset me. With hindsight, it’s clear that I should have been there. I needed that funeral as much as everyone else. I needed to know for sure that she was gone, and not just hiding. Instead, Mum and Dad came to my kinder and we had a ceremony there: a tree-planting, to commemorate Rowena’s life.
That was a brave thing for grieving parents to do—to come to the kindergarten and explain to the children that the tree was a symbol of my sister, who was now dead on earth but alive in heaven.
I wanted, so badly, for her to be alive, somewhere.
I have a photo from that day—one of the only pictures of me and Dad, just the two of us, from when I was small enough to fit on his lap and big enough to hug him back. It is on my phone as I write this chapter. It makes me feel brave, remembering what it was like to fit in his arms.
When I was a kid and someone asked, ‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’ I never knew the right thing to say. Either I could say, ‘Five, but one died,’ but sometimes that just felt too hard. So then I’d say, ‘I’m one of four,’ and have to live with this sick guilty feeling, as though I’d left her out on purpose. But there was something in the guilt that made her feel as though she were close, still. There was something so familiar, about feeling bad.
Grief makes vessels of all of us, but most especially, of children.
I remember the day she died, the drive home, and there we all were, in the white Toyota HiAce, and as weird as it sounds, it felt like our car was floating. The sky was light lavender, still sunny, but it had been raining. It was late in the afternoon now and as we crossed a bridge down near where they later built a casino I saw a big rainbow. I can still see it in my mind, Rowie’s rainbow. And then I saw an old man planting a tree by the side of the road, so I said, ‘Mum? I just saw God planting a tree,’ because I thought it was true and, also, because I thought it would cheer her up. She was in the front passenger seat, and I think she turned around and I think she did hear me. She hadn’t been able to speak yet, and Dad wasn’t saying much either, and I don’t think the radio was on, which was unusual. Dad always had the ABC on. And I had the strangest feeling in my chest, almost like it was about to burst. It was similar to the feeling you get when you’re a kid and it’s your birthday or something—almost like excitement, except, a terrible excitement. Something really, really bad had happened—so bad, I kept forgetting what, exactly. I kept forgetting that she had died. Shock, I suppose. Or maybe, said a voice in my head, the reason you keep forgetting is because you’re just a bad, bad person.
When we pulled into our driveway at Sandy, the feeling was so big in my chest I jumped up and out of the car and said, ‘Can I tell the neighbours?’ and Mum still wasn’t talking but Dad must have said okay, because I ran across the road then to my friend’s house. I had big news, and I knew it. I let myself in and when I saw my friend’s mum I said in a very loud voice, ‘Rowie’s dead!’
Again, I don’t know whether to trust my memory here but, in my mind, I see my friend’s mum holding a vase, and then I see her dropping the vase, and I watch as it smashes on the floor, glass everywhere. Whether it was the look on her face, or the dropping of an actual vase, I can’t say for sure, but that was the moment I got it: that this was not just terrible, it was so very terrible, it could
