Grief in the Days of Time Machines
“Gerbils, I think. Or maybe hamsters.”
“How do they make them look so big?”
I didn’t know the answer. “It’s just a trick of photography. They aren’t real. They’re probably somebody’s pets.”
When we became teenagers, our ritual changed. We still looked for horror movies to watch together, but instead of one-stars we chose those that were actually scary. And instead of watching on a Saturday afternoon, we waited until late on a weekend night. Most were not aired until after 11 p.m., when my mother and grandmother had gone to bed. My father by then was gone. He had died when I was sixteen, before Terri even made it into her teenage years.
We would pull out the fold-out couch, grab our pillows from our beds, and huddle together beneath an old comforter while we watched Bad Ronald, When Michael Calls, or Satan’s School For Girls. The one I remember most vividly was called Stranger in the House and starred Olivia Hussey as one of a group of sorority girls living in an old mansion on a college campus. Scary phone calls begin to rattle the girls, and then people begin being killed, one by one. We knew it was the deranged lunatic hiding in the attic. But they didn’t—not until the very end.
Terri and I hid beneath the comforter, one eye allowed over the top to keep a view of the television. We submitted ourselves to the strange and giddy pleasure of watching girls strangled, suffocated, and impaled. It wasn’t the deaths that we were drawn to. That was never the appeal. It was the adrenalin, the electric terror of knowing what those unfortunate girls did not know. That death waited just above their heads. That the safety they believed was theirs was ephemeral, an illusion. That what they believed to be true and predictable was not, at all.
*
Ever since my sister died last year, I have been haunted by memories— memories of moments we passed together in the last, brutally cruel two years of her life. One of these memories visits me nearly every day.
In her last July, in a brief and tenuous summer of hope, she spent the night at my townhouse so that I could drive her in the morning to the hospital for her reconstructive surgery. She had endured all of the chemotherapy and had been pronounced cancer-free. Now it was time to be rebuilt.
“I always wanted a boob job,” she said. “Now I finally get my chance to be busty and voluptuous.”
That early summer evening, the sun still dazzling the streets with shimmer and heat, we decided to go for a walk. We had just reached the intersection of Cherry and Westover Streets when she slowed her pace and turned to me.
“Mel, do you ever think about how we’ve probably already lived most of our lives? How maybe, at best, we only have about twenty-five years left?”
The dread I always feel when death is mentioned welled up in me with its usual velocity. I did not want to have this conversation; I didn’t want to think about any of it on this golden day, when it seemed the odds had been beaten and that my sister had been restored to me.