Early Thoughts on the Shock of Losing My Sister

In the world as I used to understand it, I would be getting off a plane in Boston tonight after a month of traveling alone in Scotland. My mother would meet me at the airport, and maybe my sister Emily. I would have called my sister Hannah in Colorado as soon as the pilot allowed passengers to use our phones on the ground. I would have announced that I had arrived, that the Loch Ness Monster was safely stowed in my luggage, and that I had become more extreme than all the sheep.

I also would have cried a little when I talked to her, because I would have been so relieved to be back in my regular life, where Hannah and I talk a few times a day, text about how cute her dog is, or if tacos or burritos make a better dinner, or anything else that is so crucially important to tell each other. I was prepared, on my trip, to be lonely for Hannah for a month, but no longer.

Instead, at 3 a.m. on the very early morning of July 22, I was woken up by a knock on my door from one of the folks who run a wildlife refuge in the north of the Shetland Islands, where I was volunteering. “Bethany,” he said, “you’ve got a phone call.”

Nothing good happens at 3 a.m., but I could never have thought my mother would tell me: “Hannah has died. Hannah is dead.” 

No mother should ever have to say those words. If there were any karma or reason or balance or benevolent deity in the world, my mother should have been especially spared. Not because my mother is more special or Hannah more precious than other mothers and daughters and sisters who are ripped between life and death every hour of every day, but because the losses of loved ones have just piled up upon my family in a way that feels unfathomably out of balance. Some people have all their parents, all their aunts and uncles, all their siblings, all their cousins, all their children, all their spouses. My family do not. If there were a God, if there were a reason, if there were anything that could be clung to as a way of making sense or keeping faith, then this cavalcade of loss would be different to me.

But it is not. I now wake up every morning again trying to wrap my head around how it is not different, and that my sister is really gone. Forever. I say “my sister,” but the word doesn’t go deep enough for what Hannah is to me. My sister Emily has said that she gets annoyed at women who will lightly talk about “the sisterhood” of all women or refer to each other as “work sisters.”

“No,” says Emily. “Sisters are sacred.”

And they are, but with less of the priggish sanctimony than the word implies, and much more discussion of underpants and Minions and the best way to work with helicopters. At least, that is how it is with my sisters. 

What Hannah is to me makes every word I know about friends and sisters and companions seem utterly pale and useless. She is simply my person. I have thought, at times, that perhaps I will be okay at this somewhat lonesome time in my life when every one of my peers seems to be part of a nested pair and I am not, that I am not really alone because between the tight constellation of dear friends and the constant daily contact with my sister, all of that added up to something even fuller in some ways than a partner. It’s not the same, but it’s what I had and it worked well enough.

I digress. One thing that Hannah and I often said to each other, with wry smiles and one raised eyebrow, while complaining about this or that way in which the world as we dealt with it was not going as well as it would if either or both of us where in charge was: “but this isn’t really about me, now is it?”

And that’s a lot of this. While I am broken and hollow, while my mother naps hugging Hannah’s sweatshirt to her chest, while Emily has lost her third parent and idol, while Will rattles around their house with his sadness and Hannah’s heartbroken dog, while our grandmother sighs more often and looks at pictures of Baby Hannah—her first grandchild, while Olof helps his and Hannah’s skiers handle their emotions, while Whitney makes nerdy jokes without Hannah’s impish laugh to cheer her on…while we all who love Hannah struggle to do any of this, all of this, anything we can and have to do without Hannah, it isn’t really about any of us. It is about Hannah.

She stood on a rock slab, braced herself with one hand on the rocks to look ahead to her best adventure friend, smiled, and the rock in her hand gave way, sending her down ten feet to a ledge, another loosed rock slammed into her head, and the impact sent her body down a steeper section of rock. 

Imagine you went to the grocery store and a watermelon fell off a display, hit your head, and that is the end of all your living and breathing and loving and being. For all the time and experience Hannah had in mountains, her end is about that strange and unavoidable.

Where she had stood was not steep. She was not on the edge of danger, pushing her comfort zone. After our father died three years ago, Hannah started to do more of the things that scared her, because Dad believed in pushing limits and it was a way to be more alive and to honor that part of him. I should say, she risked safely—she was not a woman seeking to touch the void. She adventured to live, not to die. But this, Hannah’s accident, was not one of those adventures. This was, as she would say—imitating a fussy British Olympic commentator on slow Nordic skiers—“positively pedestrian.” 

People, meaning well and trying to make sense of the senseless have said: “at least she died doing something she loved.” I find this reductionist and unhelpful. While she loved mountains and hiking, she also loved napping with her dog, goobling over her friends’ babies, looking at fancy shoes, making birthday cards, painting her nails, calling our grandmother, throwing tennis balls for her dog, wearing umpteen towels wrapped around her at the beach to protect her fussy skin from scorching like a lobster, and all the thousands of things a person does and calls it living. 

And that all is what my most special Hannah doesn’t get to do any more. And all the hikes we can take, the chocolate cake we can eat, the memories we can share, the whatever rituals and adventures to be done in her spirit…all of that—which we must do as long as we each feel we must—doesn’t add up to a fraction of the life that she still had yet to live.

I have grieved before. I know too well what the living do. I can, eventually, get out of bed and eat. I can do laundry. I can laugh. I can even make small talk with strangers. Soon I’ll go back to work. I can do all the things, in time. I do not doubt the human animal’s beautifully hideous ability to survive the harrowing of grief. There is a deep shock and sadness in knowing that we will, in some ways, become okay again. It does not seem possible now, and I do not want it to be possible, because that part of grief and healing, when the active pain is gone, feels as if the departed is somewhat erased. This seems unbearably cruel to me.

But again, this is not about me. It is about the life that Hannah—fierce, goofy, wonderful Hannah—does not get to continue. As desperately as I want Hannah to have never left my life, I more deeply grieve she is no longer in hers. I think this is a hurt that does not heal.