At the Beach with my Sisters

Hannah & Me, after deciding to "swim" in storm infused waves in 1997

Emily and I had a wonderful afternoon at Popham yesterday. Mom and Emily and I took a walk along Back Cove last night. Emily and I went sailing with great friends today. The beach was beautiful…for all that the climate is changing the shape of that beach, there is something eternally lovely and comforting about being there. At Back Cove, I got to point out to Mom, across the dwindling light, all the places I like about this city I’ve loved for two years. The sail was also fantastic—two of my favorite Short Friends climbed all over the boat, all over us, and the weather was as gorgeous as September could possibly be. It’s better to be sad outside in the world than sad in a basement, but all the beauty of these days doesn’t much touch the ache within.

All of this good living, this is what I miss for Hannah. 

She would have run more 100 mile races. I loved looking at the ages for the Big Horn 100 race and seeing that most of the lady endurance athletes are in their 40s. Hannah was literally running into her prime. She did the Elk Mountain Grand Traverse this year, for the third or fourth or fifth time now. And doing it with the usual suspects wasn’t as fun anymore, she said, and thought seriously about skipping it this last year. After the race, she said the only way she’d do it again was if Emily or I wanted to give it a try. And we could probably been talked into it. I wanted to crew for my sisters whenever they were ready to ski the Birkebeiner together. Hannah was over the moon with the idea that if Emily and Alex have kids someday, she was going to be Adventure Auntie, and get those babies up their first 14,000 foot mountains before they were 10. Hannah’s running of 100 mile races has helped Mom get excited about running, and Hannah was as thrilled about any of Mom’s 5 and 10k races as she was about her own longer jaunts—"our Mum! She's so cute. And strong," said Hannah when we talked about The Dij going for a run.

I’m sure that the folks who skied and ran with Hannah have a million more trails they were looking forward to doing with her. I’m sure Hannah would have wanted to do them all with you too…as long as you brought snacks and weren’t going to be either an idiot or a dick. 

But, although I once made Hannah laugh so hard she almost fell of her bike by deadpan stating that “I am primarily an Athlete,” and I would give a lot to spend more time doing any sport she wanted with her, it’s not the trails run and the miles skied that I miss for Hannah. To me, all of Hannah’s sports were things she did, not who she was. Her warmth and grit and delight at being out in and seeing how far she could go in this beautiful world were part of who she was, and whatever sport that manifested in were just a symptom of her personhood. If her love of the world had taken the form of oil painting and rebuilding engines, she would have been the same person to me.

Yesterday, Em and I walked and sat and swam at Popham Beach, where we grew up spending a week every summer from birth until we were all in middle and high school. This is the place where Hannah turned cartwheels on ever grain of sand one summer. She'd just gotten her ears pierced and lost an earring in the sand. I looked for it for years, wanting to get it back to her. This is the place where Hannah and I ran down together into the rainy windy hurricane improved surf one morning to jump in and swim because everyone else said it would be crazy. This is the beach we walked down when Hannah told me about Austin Powers movies and said “we need to get you to watch some movies outside The Parents’ domain,” This is the place where Hannah put my best doll into the cabin freezer to “cool off,” so I took Hannah’s last pair of clean underpants, ran them under the faucet, and stuck them in the freezer. This place that is as much a part of my childhood as the houses I grew up in…I am shattered that Hannah can’t ever come here again, wrap up in her ten-towel Burd-kini, and watch the water come in and out. I don’t know when the last time she was here was, but I called her almost every time I went, and always got a “Jeezums. I love that place.” 

I want to sit here with her when we’re forty and sixty and seventy and eighty and tell these stories. Emily and I have our own code, our own stories and history of this place, and the beauty of being the middle sister is that I have rich and robust lives with both my sisters in ways that I’ve always found their particular relationship without me to lack. They big-baby sister worshipped and protected each other, and have come to a different beautiful mode of being in grown-up sistership. Me, I’ve always gotten to be more of a friend to each, apart from us being our intesimable trio, being Hannah’s first team, being my best people always. No one of us would trade what we each have had, but I’ve always felt like I got the best deal. 

Lately, when I walk around alone anywhere, I imagine my knees just buckling under me and falling. The Christmas Carol “O Holy Night,” and the line “fall, fall on your knees” sung with such emotion that the words could topple a cathedral comes to me.

I want to fall on my knees most of the time.

Because how, how on earth do we keep going? I can convince myself on one level of the brain that Hannah is gone on a trip and will be back. It’s the permanency of death that fells me. Days are long, and to want to seize each day and throttle it for me, for Dad, and now for Hannah, to not always feel capable of getting out of bed, to feel hollow enough to be unstable, and then also to find myself in beautiful places, surrounded by people I also love, smiling and laughing and talking about every day things like politics and grocery stores, all the while knowing that I have lost forever the person who traced around my ears as a newborn and announced “her ears are small,” I just don’t see how we do it. I know we can and will. It's the how that boggles. 

A dear friend told me today “you’re stronger than you think you are.” Thank goodness. However, I already know we all are strong enough to do what needs to be done. Heck. We’re strong enough to do it with some style and maybe even grace. I simply don’t want this to be what needs to be done, and all the strength in the world and in me cannot change that obstinancy. A part of my heart simply isn’t in this new post-Hannah world, because part of my heart was in her. I identify as Hannah and Emily’s sister before any other part of my being, before even my name. 

Emily and I talked yesterday about how we are still and always three sisters, there’s me here and her there and then there’s Hannah…we’re not sure where. Molecularly, some of the fire of Hannah has already been released into the world. The rest of her, at some time we and Will somehow will find the right place to let those parts of her go into the ecosystems—and we all know she’d be sort of fascinated to understand exactly the science of that. But, the molecules that go into the ocean or forest or mountains…these don’t have Hannah’s laugh. They don’t know the stories I want to laugh over and try to explain what we were thinking or weren’t thinking. Hannah always said it was great for her that I have a good memory, because it meant she could use me as a reference for her childhood. I have Emily, I have Mom, but I am missing the parts that maybe only Hannah also knew. I want her to fact check me, I want her version of events, I want her.

Because, when we share memories, it’s not at all about getting the facts right. It’s about the mutual adoration society, and about being able to see each other from and as all the stages we’ve been through. When Hannah and I laughed now about the underwear incident, we could see how far we’d come, without making a fuss over things. Memories are emotional shorthand, because “I love you so” falls far short and is much too serious when you are speaking Minion and trying to find wedding shoes and doing all the more important work of being aboard the sistership. 

That Hannah doesn’t share any more chapters with me, with any of us, that we all don’t get to make any more great stories together, that fact knocks me flat. Every time. 

(This is Emily, yesterday, standing in a hole and eating a sandwich, to make a point and making another great story that we'll have for this place.)