My Sister Julie

It's a beautiful morning in the Palouse, with the sun shining not too hotly -- yet -- and the breeze blowing through the leaves, birds swooping, and nary a cloud in the sky.  I'm sitting on the front steps of the house, under the eave, with the front porch door wide open, sipping my hot cuppa joe and munching on my toasted english muffin -- breakfast of champions.  I'm a champion of the mundane, I guess, and celebrate the wonderful ordinariness of life just as it is.

My most recent employer somehow failed to schedule me for the next four days.  So, whilst everyone else will be going nuts getting ready for the 4th of July, I have four days of quiet and solitude with which to reflect on life a little, do some reading, some writing, and some stretching of these poor, sore muscles of mine. 

It actually has been a week of subliminal reflection because it was sometime this week four years ago that we learned -- by letter -- that my oldest sister Julie had passed away.  My dad, my mother, and my oldest sister all died in the month of June so although I've always loved this month, its sunny nature has now an undercurrent of sadness running throughout.  Dad died on June 3rd, 1987, Mom passed on Dad's birthday (June 25th) in 2015, and four years ago my oldest sister joined them, sometime in the last week of June.

Julie had distanced herself from the family.  My two other sisters hadn't seen her in five years.  I had seen her the previous two summers simply because I just showed up at her door and braved being eaten by her two English mastiffs.  Julie had ceased responding to emails, voice messages, or phone calls some years prior.  No one could reach her.  So I just showed up on her doorstep.

I remember the last morning I spent with her, after a visit the previous afternoon.  First, I took her out for coffee.  Then, at her request, I took her out for breakfast.  Finally, a few hours later, I took her out to lunch.  It seemed she didn't want to let me go.  I think she knew this was the last time she would ever see me.  

Julie was the wild child in the family.  Usually, in terms of family dynamics, the first child is supposed to be the do-gooder, the achiever, but my second sister outdid my first at being the good child, so Julie reacted to that by becoming the rebel.  She burnt all the bridges.  In late 1966, early 1967 Julie dropped out and joined the burgeoning hippie movement.  She did all the drugs and told me about her experiences.  She asked my mother, an RN, for birth control pills.  She lived communally.  I didn't see her for four or five years at one point.  She moved to Seattle and lived her entire adult life there.

It was a life of hard knocks.  Her high school boyfriend, a strapping, 6'4" blonde surfer named Dan, was drafted into the army, became a helicopter pilot, and was shot down and killed in Vietnam in 1966.  Julie went and saw Dan's parents and they unwisely told her how Dan had died -- he'd survived his helicopter crash with a broken collarbone and then was shot in the back when running away from the wreckage and killed.  Who needs to live with that image for the rest of their lives?

I think that drove Julie's plunge into drugs.  No one knew how to help.  My Dad just shouted at her and drove her out of our house.  She was orphaned.

It got worse.  Julie married and her first husband was abusive.  She became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy with a massive heart defect who died on his fourth day.  Not long after, her husband was hitch-hiking, was picked up by a driver and they both died in a head-on collision.  Julie was in her mid-twenties by the time all this had happened.

As you might suspect, she recoiled from life, put on weight, and became largely agoraphobic for many years.  But even throughout all this pain and heartache, she pressed on, married again and worked steadily all her life.  

I got to know Julie better when I moved to Seattle in the late Seventies.  I lived there for the next 21 years.  It was here that I became familiar with Julie's wicked sense of humor -- it's hard to characterize the flavor of her humor -- it was wicked and sardonic but it was never really at another person's expense.  It was really aimed at the ridiculousness of life.  We had many a night watching either sci-fi or horror movies and laughing our way through the entire evening.  Her husband was always writing a book so he was off in the den or had his head in his research, Julie and I on the couch eating peanut M&Ms.  After I explained the simple rules of football to her, she became a rabid Seahawks fan and could shout at the screen with the best of crazed sports fans.

Eventually, Julie learned how to drive, bought a car, and finally she and her husband bought a house.  It was trashed by her animals -- always a herd of cats and usually a dog or two.  But it had a wonderful little creek abutting the backyard and was a stone's throw from Lake Washington.  A lovely location.

Julie's original litter of cats had a mythic dimension to them.  The mother was a small black-haired siamese with a ball and socket joint at the end of her spine which gave her a swiveled gait.  Her name was Sheba and she ran on primal instinct and little else.  When she ate her little plate of canned cat food, she would yowl loudly as though she'd just made a bloody kill.  The father was a huge thirty pound tomcat who looked like a manx.  If he deigned to sit in your lap you'd pet him just to keep from being eaten.  The dog paced and when the tomcat got annoyed with this, he'd hop down off the sofa, and swat the dog on the nose.  Duly abashed, the dog would go sit in the corner and Tom, the true alpha, would recline again on his throne, or your lap, whichever suited.

And then there were the others, so different from one another.  Isis, the sweet round one.  Ramses, white long-haired with eyes which were constantly dilated so that they reflected everything and looked endless.  Maggie, short, black, no tail, and spunky.  Squirt, grey and with over-sized ears who always had to be at the highest point in the room.  And of course, Corky, who was a male tabby and was so ugly he was cute.  Corky had the most endearing personality.  He always remembered people.  If you came over, he'd stand up and put his front paws on your thighs, and meow at you as if to say, "Make a lap for me already."  

Part of the charm of an evening at Julie's house was just sitting on the couch and watching this menagerie of cats interact with one another all night.  They were highly entertaining all by themselves.  I still miss them.

Julie's father-in-law died a millionaire and despite his wife's attempt to withhold her two sons' inheritance, or spend it all in international travel, Julie finally came into money late in her life.  She was profligate.  She must have bought 20 guitars and no end of jewelry, the more shiny and glitterier the better.  But she was also very generous.  Many a time she helped me out and I never asked -- she would just hand me a check out of the blue.

My mother had foot surgery in 2006 and we kids all four took a week off to take care of her.  Mom had been a nurse and what they say is true -- doctors and nurses are terrible patients.  Something happened in Julie's week with Mom that changed their relationship forever.  Julie stopped coming to visit her.  All our holidays were at Mom's; Julie adopted a cousin's family and spent her holidays elsewhere from then on.  She could really hold a grudge.  She felt intensely and no amount of reason could dislodge her from that emotional stance.  

Julie had refused to go see my father when he was dying.  I think she just couldn't handle it emotionally.  When Mom went into Assisted Living in Seattle, Julie became the point person and did that job for three years.  Mom had to move facilities twice and Julie took the point on that too.  It didn't help that another sister accused Julie of stealing from Mom.  When Mom was finally transferred to Long Term Care over on the Olympic Peninsula (at a facility where my younger sister worked as a geriatric physical therapist), Julie was done -- with Mom and the family.  She didn't attend Mom's memorial services when she passed and neither sister ever saw her again.

So, she was a complex character.  But truth be told, she was one of my most favorite people on the planet and I miss her dearly.  I often think about her.  Because of our age difference and the fact that my mother always worked when I was a small child, Julie was my perpetual baby sitter and kind of a second mother.  Later, she served the role of a confidant and advisor to all three of we younger siblings.  I think it weighed on her.  

Once at Mom's house, Julie and I were alone in the den.  She said to me quietly, "I feel like I'm eternal."  I said, "Yeah, I feel that way too."  Then she said, "But I don't know whether that means I stay myself forever or I get reborn as someone else."  I just said, "Yeah, I don't know either."  My guess is that this is the kind of thought that Julie wouldn't share with anyone else.  It was just a special moment between we two.

I am sure she is happier where she is now and that she's exploring life with renewed vigor.  I feel that she is watching over me.  Strange, I can sense Julie but not my mother.  I think of her often, I miss her dearly, and will love her forever.  I look forward to seeing her again.

I'm including a silly rendition of "White Rabbit," the old Jefferson Airplane song, which Julie loved -- it was the siren song of 1967 -- in a new, send-up version by the wonderful Molly Tuttle -- in costume no less.  Something tells me Julie would love this version.  I can hear her laughing and exclaiming all the way through, eyes gleaming, crooked smile of delight as we enjoyed it together.  

Here's to you, big sis' --