My sister died a month ago. She’s doing great. How am I?

My sister died a month ago and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. 

I stood next to her bed while she died. 

I stayed while the nurses washed her body and covered it with sheets.

I peeked under the sheets and saw what was left of her mortal remains; eyes wide and fixed, mouth dropped open, so very dead and not really recognizable as my sister.

I sat by her dead body for hours, waiting for the funeral home to come and claim it. 

I picked out the urns for her ashes and those of my brother-in-law who died 11 years ago. After the funeral home filled the urns, I kept them for the two days before the funeral on my dining room table. 

My husband and I transported the urns, strapped in like people in the back seat of our car, to the cemetery for the internment. 

I went to the cemetery the week before the service and walked through the process of the funeral with the director. 

I wrote her obituary. I stood by her grave. I pray for her soul. 

And still, I wake up in the morning and my first thought is Brooke is dead. 

I keep reminding myself that she is really, really gone from this life, because I find it so hard to believe. 

How did this happen?

They are all gone. My parents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. My sister. 

I have three cousins left out of a huge bevy of them. One, my bestest cousin girlfriend, is lost to the mists of dementia. She doesn’t know anyone. Another precious childhood playmate lives 900 miles from me, and the other is closer, but sickly. 

That’s it. 

Of all the things I thought would happen, this was never in my expectations. I’m the one who has had cancer, a heart attack, a stroke. I thought I would leave them behind. 

Why am I still taking my grandkids to swim lessons and going to the Y to work out? How is it that I can write blog posts, worry about what Trump is doing to my country, manage my life, go to church, participate in clubs and keep on keeping on while they are already standing before the throne of God?

I am confounded by this. And I am grieving. I go over and over my sister’s last long illness, trying to figure out how I could have saved her, trying to understand what killed her. 

My hobbies — the piano and sewing — pretty much stopped when I got the call that Brooke was in intensive care. 

I spent the next six months in an ugly circle of intensive care/rehab/intensive care/rehab/intensive care/rehab intensive care. From before last Thanksgiving to her death in May, Brooke circled from intensive care to rehab and back again repeatedly and never once made it home. 

My hobbies, this blog, the creative things I do, stopped. In all that time, I never touched my sewing machine, never turned it on. I did sit down sometimes at night and play the piano; simple things, mostly hymns, just to soothe myself. Since she died, I haven’t even done that. 

I kept up with my grandkids, and I went to church, including mass during the week. I even made it to Bible study. I did my daily workout, read my Bible. I ate. I slept. I prayed every morning. I closed down each day with the Night Time prayers in the Divine Office. I paid my bills. I indulged in the wrong foods and gained 10 unwanted pounds. 

But everything in me was really focused on Brooke. I was wrapped around the effort of trying to force my sister to get well. It wasn’t pretty. It was often crazy. It was confusing, frustrating, confounding, exhausting and ultimately useless. 

I saw that she was sliding downhill, but I never understood why. I didn’t, until the last week, believe that she would die. 

But at the beginning of that last week, after a hard night at the hospital, I went home and sat alone in the living room and I knew. She would never get out of that bed. 

From the beginning to now I never understood what was killing my baby sister. After she died, I sat up late at night, me and Doctor Google, reading everything I could find, trying to understand why she was dead, trying to find a way that I might have saved her. 

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I decided that I had to stop doing that. I was inflicting pain on myself and not helping Brooke one bit. 

I’d give you the diagnosis if I knew one to give. But I don’t. What the doctor wrote on the death certificate was not the reason. It wasn’t even close. I don’t think he lied. I just don’t think he knew.

I may write out more of the details of what happened at some point. But if I do, it won’t make any more sense to you than it does to me. 

The only comprehensible fact in all of this is that my sister is dead. She is gone. That is the only part of it that I really understand.

At the same time, I also know she is not dead. She didn’t die. Her body stopped and she stepped out of it. 

She died in the peace of Christ. She was at peace and not afraid. She forgave and was forgiven by all of us who loved her for the jolts and scars that living had imposed. She died in total peace. I heard that and saw it and lived it with her to the end. 

She saw our Daddy before she passed. He spoke to her about what was coming. The nurse told me that this happened “all the time” when people were dying; their loved ones who had died before them come back to help them cross over. 

She’s not dead. She’s with Jesus and she’s doing great.

I am still alive and that is not an accident. I am surprised to be the one who is here, but I know that if I am here, then there is a reason. Our lives are a  gift. I kind of think — don’t know, just think — that when we die, Jesus may ask us, “What did  you do with the life I gave you?”

I don’t think it matters much if you win the Nobel Prize or make billions of dollars. The question is, did you love the people around you? Did you love God and other people? If you didn’t love God and other people, I don’t think anything else you might have done with your life will matter all that much when you stand before Him.

My job going forward is to live as fully as I can until God calls me home. My job is to love the people around me, to follow Christ in every way I can, in whatever form that takes.

My sister is with Jesus and she’s doing great.

How am I?