When I was two, my mother had a baby who only lived
for eight weeks. My sister Rachel Ann was born with congenital heart defects so
complex that none of the doctors heard the irregularities in her tiny valves before
it was too late. Because I was
two, I don’t remember anything about her. I don’t remember her being born, I
don’t remember her dying, but I do remember her birthday parties. Every July
9th, we celebrated Rachel’s birthday with a special dinner and a birthday cake,
but no presents because there was no guest of honor. The six of us sang “Happy
Birthday” in the middle of summer to a little person I was told was my baby sister
who died because she had a hole in her heart.
Rachel was present on other holidays
as well. Each of us has a different color Christmas stocking hand sewn by my
mother. Seven in total hang on the mantelpiece: two for my parents, four for
the kids and one for Rachel. Hers is made of soft pink corduroy trimmed in
ribbon embroidered with baby blue rocking horses. As the years went on, the
contents of our stockings matured with us from Lipsmackers, to lipgloss, to
lipstick, to liquor. But like the taste of my mother’s spinach quiche, the
contents of Rachel’s stocking never changed. Every year on Christmas morning, her
stocking was and is filled with a bouquet of pink carnations. It wasn’t until
very recently that I realized that because Rachel died in September, my mother
must have made the stocking after she died. That’s why Rachel’s stocking has
the baby ribbon on it. She knew that this particular pink stocking was for a
baby who would never grow up. Until recently, I also didn’t think about my dad
ordering those flowers every year for Christmas morning. A strange thing to do,
order carnations on December 20th, as they are not exactly your
standby holiday fauna.
To this day, when we decorate our
Christmas tree each year, the last ornament we hang is a small golden tree with
five leaves. One leaf has fallen away from the other leaves, off its branch and
rests on the ground. As my mother quietly hangs that tiny golden tree, my
father puts his arm around her as if to say, “Merry Christmas. It’s okay to
still miss her.” After Rachel died, a number of my parents’ friends who lived
on the Naval base in Philadelphia with us planted a tree in her memory. We call
it the Rachel tree. We visited her tree and brought balloons to her grave
during our yearly visits to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, my parents’ alma
mater.
I wonder what rituals like this do
to a kid, when ornaments and plants and graves and poorly attended birthday
parties are all you can base your experience of someone on. And this is someone
you’ve known your whole life, but you can’t remember. I don’t have any memories
of my sister. All I have are memories of the ways in which we acknowledged the
fact that she existed. I used to think we just did all of this for my mom, that
it was something my mom needed because it must have been terrible for her, so
terrible to lose something she grew. So terrible to only get two months with
someone she held inside her warmth for nine. She must felt cheated and like she
had failed and angry at the God which she so, so fervently believes in. I
thought we were doing all of this for her because, honestly, I never really got much out of celebrating her birthday or looking at the few photos of her we
had around the house or even visiting her grave. I didn’t know her so I didn’t
miss her.
But then I went off to college and
I missed the Rachel days. Her birthday came and went unnoticed. I haven’t seen
her grave in years. She stopped feeling a part of my life.
A few years ago, during my third
year of actor training, I had a dream. In the dream, I was in a Michael Chekhov
class doing an exercise. I don’t know if you are familiar with Michael Chekhov
exercises but they involve imagining a particular set of circumstances as you
walk around the room, like imagine the floor is on fire, imagine you are at a
cocktail party with the president, imagine your butt is a magnet, that sort of
thing.
So in the dream, my acting teacher
said, “Okay, walk around the room with your sisters.” And for some reason,
dream Maura asked him, “With all our sisters or just the ones that are alive?”
“All your sisters.”
So the picture changed like a flash,
because this was a dream, and all the sudden, I was walking around the room,
milling and seething, with two other women. One is my younger sister Claire and
the other is a woman, about 20 years old, who looks just like me and just like Claire,
but different. And the three of us just walked, in silence, weaving in and out
of each other, smiling in awareness of each other's presence. Then it was over.
That’s all I remember of the
dream. But I swear, I know, it was Rachel. I’m sorry, I don’t believe that my
brain could through random firing of neurons and chemical reactions create that
vast an experience. I just don’t. I’m not saying it was a ghost or an angel or
a vision or proof of the supernatural. I’m just saying it was amazing and eerie
and I know it was my sister.
Shortly after the dream, I asked my mom about the decision to make Rachel
such a part of the fabric of our lives. Many families experience a miscarriage
or the death of a young child and do not discuss it openly or often as we do.
She told me something I’ll never forget. She said, "I wanted you all to
grow up knowing that bad things happen, for no reason, things you think you
can't survive, but you can, you do. We did.” She said something else that struck me
during that conversation, about how people sometimes say things like, “Well,
you are a stronger person or a better mother because this happened.” She doesn’t
think about it that way. Although she probably did grow in unexpected ways by
knowing Rachel, my mother knows that the purpose of Rachel’s short life was not
to teach her something about herself or the value and unconquerable fragility
of life. The purpose of Rachel’s tiny life was to live, for as long as her
little, imperfect heart would allow. It’s nothing but vanity to think
otherwise.
I never knew how to answer people when they asked me how many
siblings I have. To form the words “I’m one of four” has always felt a little
wrong in my mouth. Since the dream, when people ask me how my siblings I have,
I usually say I am one of five. In the first photograph of the four of
us with the Rachel tree, it is a small sapling standing only a few inches
taller than my five-year-old brother. We visited the Rachel tree a few years
back. In the photo from that visit, the four of us are sitting in the tree a half
a dozen or so feet off the ground. It’s funny, in the ornament she’s the fallen
leaf, but in the photograph she is holding us all up the way we carried her
when she was a baby. In a way, it’s the only picture of all my mother’s
children: two girls, two boys and a tree with deep roots into the earth and
lush, extending branches reaching towards the heavens.
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| Jeff, Claire, Stephen and Maura in Rachel's tree, 2001 |
