By Pigeon Post

When I was preschool age, my second eldest sister *Paula returned home for a holiday visit, bearing a special surprise for me. A handmade puppet with a riot of lemon-yellow hair, dramatic lips and a look of astonishment. For me, it was love at first sight. I named her (unaccountably) Irving.

Irving remains among my childhood keepsakes. About eight years ago, I spontaneously phoned Paula, wanting to invite reminiscence. Hey Paula, do you remember the puppet, Irving?

Had an art friend of Paula’s made this puppet, or had she and her then-girlfriend Robin found her at a certain craft fair? But I was bothering Paula and taking up her time; she was peevish and sarcastic. Dismayed, I figured it best to abandon the cause. This was the way of things.

Winter of last year, returning inside after a round of snow shovelling, I found both a missed voicemail and an email from my eldest sister, Elaine. Paula had collapsed and died unexpectedly. She was early seventies in age.

The shock of it. Paula — a fit gym-goer with good eating habits and hyper-vigilance in all matters of health. The fact that I had been notified was in some ways a secondary disbelief mingled with the first.

Over two years before, on a group thread involving the five of us sisters, Paula had dispatched an email that targeted me. I have written previously of our family’s inherited norm, the practice of exclusion as control; anywhere on the gamut from icing out to ostracism. Paula’s email logged itself as part of the campaign of the past several months.

Within a month of my homecoming to native Maine, my sister Melanie had cut me out of family get-togethers, and in an act of naked relational aggression, Paula had enrolled in Melanie’s cause. The fundamental troubled-ness of Paula’s nature had been leveraged against me. So it seemed.

This was the same timeline during which metastatic cancer was taking our brother Marc away. To be fully present for Marc, I had shoved all of the sister-induced pain into a basement storage room inside me, to reckon with at a later time.

Paula’s goading email — a scant month after Marc’s death — exceeded my limits. I had spent the past several months tending the hope that any upstander out there in the family ecosystem might prevail upon Melanie and family to reconsider their treatment of me. The now-volcanic anger took to the keyboard:

ENOUGH, ENOUGH, ENOUGH.

No longer able to tolerate the sanctioned family behaviors — coalitioning, shunning, conditional love — I declared the need to free myself from Melanie and Paula’s conduct towards me.

Paula was a common denominator. She had participated in this tactical alliance with Melanie, against me. And she had previously partnered with Bridget, fourth sibling chronologically, in a case against our eldest sister. In an ill-advised act, on my part, I identified this tendency in the shout-cappy email. I did reap the consequences.

Bridget’s health had been on a steep decline. Following my reply-all to Paula, she blocked my number and placed a gag order on the few family members I had in my life, prohibiting them from releasing a word of health update in my direction.

By the time that Elaine contacted me to notify me of Paula’s death, the two previous years had already conditioned me to believe that I might be shut out from any manner of update, ever. As my lot, among my kin.

***

No one had shown up to put Paula on notice that she had two scant years remaining to her, and therefore did she and I truly want to spend those final years living out relational rupture?

I have now passed almost twenty months bushwhacking my way through the massive tangle of vines that are my emotions. Though I cannot say for sure, I would be inclined to wonder whether Melanie and Bridget delegitimize my grief surrounding Paula.

There were a lot of Paulas for me. I am sorting through them.

When I was in the neighborhood of kindergarten age, I fell madly for all things writing. My mother had taken note — and my first stationery set materialized. Sturdy lined sheets with trifold creases; you stickered the letters shut using the accompanying sticker assortment. In my mind’s eye, purply hippos were involved.

Paula was not only my first letter recipient but also the recipient of all the hippoed stationery, the whole show. Turns out that she preserved the letter stack for many years. Sorting through items in preparation for a move, Paula fell upon these 1970s artifacts and mentioned them to me over the phone.

In so doing, she transported me right back to that moment in time when writing to my big sister Paula had the atmospherics of a 19th century novel, possibly. True, I was just a five-year-old who never learned to hold a pencil correctly, but I was also Paula’s Jane Austen. With a front-facing cowlick and a lot of polyester ensembles.

When I was sixteen and Paula was early thirties, I spent a summer weekend at her place, forty-five minutes from my hometown. Her historic studio apartment smelled like open windows, Green Mountain Coffee, and freshly laundered linens.

Paula and I passed this sun-filled weekend companionably. We breakfasted wharf-side on blueberry muffins, cruised around in her stick-shift, and watched art house movies.

I wore a certain cotton sweater, vibrant and multi-colored. Via the roll from my sister’s 35mm, that sweater became, for me, a visual emblem of happiness. I have it still.

Paula’s idiosyncratic humor, a specialty. Among her moments that I hold dear: the situation BML. During my high school years, it happened that my mother, Paula, and I enjoyed a tropical getaway, the three of us. After a few days’ worth of soggy swimwear, Paula found that the candida had gone rogue on her.

This was a topic of conversation among the three of us, and while in a public setting, Paula had taken to referring to the current state of affairs as her Situation BML. BML in this case meaning, between-my-legs.

The server had just delivered our beverages, when our Mom (ever solicitous) leaned in and made her inquiry in low voice register. So hey…How is the “situation BML”…?

To which Paula replied, one perfect beat later:

I don’t mind telling you…business is slow.

I did a spit take, and Paula’s iconic laugh issued forth. Her laugh had a way of ever so briefly welling up before busting free of all constraints. Marvelously extravagant. I miss it.

When I was mid-twenties, awaiting the arrival of our firstborn daughter with my then-husband Brent, I selected Paula for the role of godmother. Paula, early forties by now, had not had a child of her own, and this was a known source of personal disappointment. Her art background, her sideways humor; these things suggested her as the family member to be a special presence in the life of our daughter, Eva.

I was picturing my Aunt Irene who, like Paula, had not borne a child. This aunt had brought great fervor to the aunt business — indeed, as one of the benefactors who kept my grade school bookshelf peopled with Trixie Belden et al.

As it turns out, I made a disastrous selection in Paula. She was warmly disposed towards Eva for her first few years of life. From that point forward, it was as though she actively cultivated antipathy towards her young niece, her godchild. Perhaps as an extension of the antipathy she was cultivating towards me. My own vision had improved and I was capable of viewing Paula in her vertiginous complexity.

She picked on Eva, the only word choice that captures the schoolyard-meanie mood of it all. My husband Noah and I merged our little families the year that Eva was ten. We took on a sweet bungalow in an urban Midwestern setting, and what we might have termed our backyard was a weed free-for-all, two feet in height.

Noah set to work. Eradicating the weeds by hand; constructing a wooden fence. Given that the alleyways had a certain muggings problem, the new fence was sound parenting at work. One day, while Noah was out toiling, Paula phoned to exchange news updates.

I filled her in on Noah’s big undertaking and — fateful conversation filler — I mentioned that Eva was hungrily waiting for completion, so as to invite playmates to our backyard.

Over the phone, I could hear as Paula crisply affixed the privileged label to Eva, and that was that. From then on, any and all Eva updates got sorted by the confirmation-bias apparatus inside of my sister…this was apparent. Wincingly so.

I was with Paula in Florida on her 60th birthday. Among her presents was a pashmina sent by my two daughters. I had assisted them in color selection, as I knew that Paula would look favorably on an item matching her aquamarine eye color, of which she was proud. Eva and Chloe, teenagers, purchased this gift item, but Paula later voiced to me her accusation that the gift had been my doing, only.

When Eva graduated high school, this godmother let me know that Eva would not be receiving anything in the way of a graduation observance. As Paula explained it to me, she had begun to sort photos for a collage. But seeing as she already knew that Eva would fail to come through with a thank-you note, she cancelled the effort saying, Why bother?   

Oh Paula.

None of this was truly about who Eva was.

She was somewhere in her sixth decade when she received the diagnosis of a mood disorder. The care and treatment plan was robust; the titration of pharmaceuticals, painstaking. It took a while, but she got there: the place where she was both stabilized and also able to recognize her Paula self. We, as family, bore her up in all the ways that we knew how.

Paula’s mood disorder became her identity. For all that she had undergone, I held a great deal of compassion. I still do.

That is not the same as looking the other way. Looking back upon all the ways that Paula treated me in book three of her life, I wonder whether an interpersonal carte blanche, in her estimation, accompanied this midlife identity. For someone the likes of me — expendable — maybe she granted herself license to not fritter away resources on this, our relationship.

Our mother Juliette died seven years ago. I flew from the Midwest to Florida to be with her and my father during her final two weeks of life. The evening of my arrival, my last-ever interaction with my Mom took place; afterwards, the remainder of her days belonged to the morphine.

My mother’s hospice-issued bed was situated in her sunroom, and I kept a place on the couch alongside her. My presence offered my sisters Bridget and Elaine, also local residents, a measure of reprieve.

The act of dying was hard labor on our mother. Her body was agitated. She moaned, her facial features becoming a distortion. Her hands clenched fitfully at the hem of the blanket. Over those several days, discomfort was visibly making its way towards suffering.

During those two heart-rending weeks, I slept not. At night, I let the health caregiver know that I was going to retreat to the loft bedroom for a bit of rest. Up in this guest room was a bewildering sound effect that sabotaged anything beyond forty consecutive minutes of sleep.

Unbeknownst to me, there was an automated air freshener, atop a high shelf, out of view. Who knows how long this thing had been on empty…at regular intervals came a THUNK followed by a compressor-like sound. I portrayed this to my Florida sisters, in hopes someone knew the answer to, What in the hell?  No one did.

To our father Raymond’s great distress, our precious mother needed transferring to a hospice house, a setting better equipped to ease her suffering at the end. When the transport service arrived at my parents’ home, my father could not look on as the stretcher bearing my Mom went out the front door and away forevermore. She died two days later. She did this solo.

Raggedly underslept, in the process of packing up a jumble of contents for my northward return, I stopped in disbelief to try and metabolize a text communication from Paula. A chore list, this was.

Not a kind word, not a word of acknowledgement. Not a Deb, I can imagine what the past several days have been like. Thank you for being there with Elaine and Bridget. Hope it’s a smooth travel day.

Instead, Paula lectured me on remedial-level houseguest etiquette; school marmish. Tend to the linens, the guest bathroom, the wastebaskets: so that Bridget won’t need to take care of it. Her words.

Inside my mind, I could hear my father’s terminology, his coarse vernacular:

pissant.

I cannot verify that I was regarded as a pissant. Only that I was treated as one.

Three years later, when Paula joined Melanie and daughters in coalition against me, the act seemed nothing if not foreordained.

***

I have come by a carrier pigeon whose roost is in the hereafter. Please don’t ask me how. Just trust that my sister Paula would have quite liked this device.

My note, about to be sent on its pigeony way

Dear Paula,

It has been a year and a half since your passing, but four years since our miserable final email interaction…and how many years since you and I had done something such as share a good laugh together?

Last month I began a blog project on family cutoff. Rupture is leaching away my sense of wholeness and worth as a human.

I’ve just completed a piece on you and me. I wrote my way through the pain.

Anger showed up too. I let it.

I like to picture the afterlife as the place where we all shed our egos like old sweaters we outgrew two sizes ago. Please tell me, Paula, if you had a do-over, would you still coalition against me…?

Would you still add your elder-sister certification to this devastating banning of me?

If you’re inclined to say yes…will you please lie?

Because I hurt like hell.

Something within you seemingly needed to treat me with contempt; with an impulse towards mockery. I am left grieving the big sister I did not have in you.

You are gone. Your legacy within my life remains.

I want for you to know that I have three Paula things I am holding onto. The gift of sweet wacky Irving, some lighthearted vintage photos, and the auditory memory of your laugh.

It is becoming more difficult to retrieve the sound of your laughter, but when I am able to concentrate reallyreally hard, like this moment…it is still there.

I love you.

*All names are fictionalized

---

A passage from a Canada-based counselling center, which speaks to intergenerational patterns in my family of origin.

Mentally healthy family members recognize that everyone has room to grow, that mistakes are part of being human, and that taking ownership and responsibility for one’s actions is essential. Forgiveness is not only sought but also offered generously and sincerely.

In contrast, an unhealthy family system is often marked by punitive behaviours that manifest in various harmful ways. These include ostracizing individuals, belittling, gossiping, weaponizing sarcasm, smearing reputations, and excluding members over perceived wrongs. Among these, exclusion deserves particular emphasis because of the profound emotional pain it inflicts on its target and the power it grants to the narcissist or those emulating such behaviours. In dysfunctional systems, exclusion becomes both a tool of control and a form of social currency for those seeking dominance at the expense of others.

(Waypoint / Canada)