The Goodbye Journey

By JoAnne Young

 

It was a journey I knew I would probably have to take some day.

 

A year ago my sister, Jackie, who lives quite close to the ocean in South Carolina, broke the news that she had been diagnosed with leukemia. But while she was pessimistic about the prognosis because of her age, I was more optimistic because of my faith in medical science. And sure enough, after months of treatment, she let me know she was in remission. 

 

It bought us some time, for the pandemic to subside enough to allow me to travel half a country away. Then the hope that bloomed with the vaccine. And I told her, as soon as we get our two shots, I will come. That would be good, she said. 

 

Then the news in February that she may be out of remission. 

 

She was getting her covid shots and I was close to getting my first in the next few weeks. We talked about me coming to see her as soon as both of us felt safe. 

 

In late February things took a bad turn. She was hospitalized and I waited to hear what her doctors could tell us. And she grew weaker and unable to talk on the phone. The doctors found additional bad news, and suddenly, it was time to go to her, pandemic or not, vaccine or not. 

 

Scott and I made the nearly 1,400-mile journey in the car. Twenty hours. Two and a half days. All the while, her husband telling me he didn’t know if we would make it before she was gone and, if we did, she probably would not be able to respond. 

 

And on Monday, we were there, in her land of palmetto and Carolina moon. On the coastal edge line of my only sibling. 

 

She had hung on, even as it was in some deep foreboding place between being and not being, between the light streaming through her sunroom door and the darkness to which she was headed. 

 

I could only talk to her and hope that, somehow, she could sense I had made it to her side. In the early mornings of those three days, I could take her place at the beach where she and I had walked on my last visit. Where we picked up shells and watched shrimp boats, pelicans and the rising sun. 

 

I asked silently for a sign that perhaps she knew I was there. A few minutes later I came upon a starfish and then another and another that had washed up with the high tide. 

 

Hours later she left us. 

 

It was too fast from thinking we had some time, to knowing we had no more. And then watching them pick her up, load her into the back of a long car, and drive away. No funeral, no communal goodbye. 

 

On the 20-hour ride back to Lincoln I unpacked a lot of feelings and remembrances, regrets and understandings. It can be so easy not to see beyond childhood memories and what you think you know about a person you’ve shared time with all your life. Now, it seems, I want to know her differently. 

 

I am proud of the good soul she was, of the mad photography skills she developed later in life, of the worth she saw in getting her college degree decades after most traditional students. 

I will admire her eye for beauty and design, her caring for animals and people, and wanting the best for all of them. I will regard highly her giving nature.

And I can simply love her for her complications and how she loved me for mine. 

 

On the road to and from my sister, we crossed bridge after bridge after bridge. They spanned the wide waters of the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, Cumberland, Ohio, the Great Pee Dee and the Little Pee Dee. 

 

Our siblings are the bridges that enable our crossings over life’s waters – from our parents to our grown-up selves, from our childhood wanderings to our adult groundings. 

 

We use those bridges while we can. Because at some point, the darkest of waters are there before us and we must find a way to cross them on our own.