Tonight I want to express my deep gratitude for my oldest sibling, my sister Michaele in honor of her birthday. In so many ways my two older sisters, nine and seven years older than I am, were more like surrogate mothers for me and my younger sister Ruth. Among my earliest memories of her was her bandaging my wrist when I accidentally put my hand through a glass door. I had been outside playing with my other siblings–it was winter time and I had gotten cold and wanted to come inside. I knocked too hard on the glass portion of the door and put my hand right through it. My mother hadn’t been feeling well and was lying down and missed the whole thing. Michaele was the one who managed the situation, tending to my wound and helping me to feel better.
When the six of us kids were all still living at home, all four girls shared a bedroom upstairs, the two boys shared a second, and my grandfather lived in the third. Our parents’ master bedroom was on the first floor. For a time, I slept with Michaele and Ruth slept with Sandy. Michaele often complained that I peed on her, though of course I have no such recollection. During my early childhood I recall having a very serious case of the measles. Michaele was again called upon to help take care of me and I remember her carrying me from my parents’ room back up to our bedroom. So many experiences bonded me to my oldest sister and in spite of my likely irritating little kid-ness, she seemed to take to me. When she went away to college–all the way in New York, I felt like I would never see her agin. And when she finally returned home for Christmas on her first visit, I chortled with laughter at her newly acquired New York accent. How alien it sounded to my Midwestern ears.
Whenever she came to visit she drank coffee out of my mug–a little red and white checkered cup with the name “Terry” inscribed on it. I always got it out and ready for her when she was coming home. At the end of her three years in college (she graduated early), she’d married her long time sweetheart. They were about to pull out of the driveway, and to my 12 year old mind, out of our lives. I ran back into the house and pulled the Terry mug out of the cabinet and ran back to the car. “Here!” I thrust it into her hands, tears no doubt running down my face. Washington DC felt just as far away as New York had, and I was once again sure I would never see my big sister again (though I saw her again that Christmas…) In the years to come she would fly me out to DC to visit her, sometimes by myself and others with my sister Ruth. She even gave me her guitar when I was 15 and started me on a music-making path that I’m still on to this day.
In 1976 I wrote The Little Sister Song in honor of my sister Ruth. The first time I played that song for Michaele, she cried and made me play it at least three times. Perhaps it connected her back to simpler times, family, childhood connections, I don’t know. But it connected us once again to one another as we’d always been. In particular the line of the song that says, “You’ve grown up much too fast or am I living in the past…” would take us back to the old days. As I grew older I still made my way to DC to spend time with her, helping to take care of her infant daughter so she could get some much-needed rest and returning a few years later to help with the second one. Michaele and I had a number of funny home-improvement experiences as I helped her paint bedrooms, plant gardens, and engage in a variety of other activities intended (sometimes quite successfully) to spruce up the decor.
Over time, of course, as we each got busier with our lives, we spent less and less time together. I still consulted with her periodically on a variety of things and she was more than happy to weigh in on a variety of subjects. When my mother died in 1995, my sister Michaele stood at my father’s side for hours greeting every single person (and there were hundreds) who came through the line to pay their respects to him and honor my mother. She presided over many Christmas gatherings after that, working to keep the family traditions together and intact, particularly in the first few years after mommy died. One such Christmas I was flat on my back sick with a serious case of the flu, fevered, weak and wracked with a variety of symptoms. Michaele, a physician and my father also a physician, stood over my bedside arguing over the best course of treatment. Considering I felt like I was going to die, I tried to encourage them to save the arguing and just let me go. In the end my father’s wisdom prevailed and I was relatively quickly on the mend.
Michaele always seemed to me to be more of a daddy’s girl than a mommy’s girl. She was close to my father and ultimately was the only one who followed in his footsteps into the medical profession. I was with her at my father’s bedside the last few days of his life, and when he died she and I stood together just the two of us in his hospital room looking down at him. She was relatively calm (my siblings and I are not given to theatrics), and I saw a vulnerability in her grief that I hadn’t seen before. At Daddy’s funeral she stood in the place where she had stood with him 15 years earlier at mommy’s funeral. The older brother of my two brothers stood next to her and the other four of us stood across the aisle. This time I stood the whole time and greeted every guest that came to pay their respects. I had learned from watching Michaele all those years ago and I was not going to sit down.
I cannot write in these few paragraphs all that my big sister means to me. I cannot write about 56 years of history that I have with her–of her caring for me as an infant, a young child, a pre-teen. Two years ago, when the bottom fell out of my life Michaele was there for me quietly helping me month after month, taking care of me yet again. And when I moved this last year into her neck of the woods she helped me get my house set up–unpacking boxes, hanging pictures, sewing curtains for my windows. I am grateful beyond measure for who she is and who she has been for me. She has had a successful career, co-parented three children, and accomplished many wonderful things. But to paraphrase the song I wrote for my little sister all those years ago, “she’ll always be big sister to me.”
