I remember my dad breaking the news to me, quietly, that Annie was going to die soon. They used all the resources they had on How to Help Children Deal with a Terminally-Ill Sibling. Of course looking back I think, what else could have been done? Who wouldn’t want to make the best of whatever time they had with someone whose time was so limited? But what could anyone have told that 6-year-old to help her not feel so forgotten? See? I’m not the only selfish one! She can be selfish, too! It just happened so rarely. I confess to gloating a little when Annie later threw a temper tantrum over some stickers she wanted. “What kind of horrible selfish person wants ice cream when her mom is bawling and her sister can’t walk?” “How can you think about ice cream at a time like this?” it said. And the innocent 6-year-old in me thought, “But what about our ice cream?” Then that awful inner voice I’ve come to know as my own worst enemy spoke up, though at the time I thought it was just my conscience. Mom sobbed and dropped beside her and scooped her up and rocked her, then carried her home. One day that spring, when the seasonal Dairy Queen down the street reopened, we all set off to get ice cream, and Annie fainted right outside the restaurant door. Everyone made exceptions for her at home. And so cheerful through it all! Everyone loved her at the hospital. The nurses at the hospital got her a Cabbage Patch doll, in the Winter of ’83-’84, when they were notoriously hard to find! I’d gotten a generic knock-off doll for Christmas, didn’t even come with a birth certificate. And being sick all the time just got her more attention. It was a strange sort of sibling rivalry because I agreed with it. What’s purple? A kind of grape I don’t even like? Leave it to Annie to have the right answer, the color of the whole world. “Grass is green, trees are green, it’s the color of the world!” Well, that was humbling. “Sure, green’s a great color,” Dad piped up. “What’s your favorite color? Mine’s purple,” I said, like a typical kindergarten girl. She was a perfectly capable companion for my make-believe adventures, even three years younger as she was. If the metaphorical heart was responsible for pumping blood, she would be running marathons today.Įven at that age, I knew Annie was the cool one. Her metaphorical heart was vibrant and funny and fun. It just so happened to be nearer the world-renowned Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where my toddler sister, Annie, was spending more and more time.Īnnie, as far as I understood it as a kindergartner, had a hole in her heart. It just so happened to be nearer my grandmother, who babysat more and more frequently. It just so happened to be right before I started school. Ostensibly, though, we moved because my dad had gotten transferred to a new office. We’d moved here just before I had to start kindergarten, the best possible time to move since I wouldn’t have to switch schools. (The military one, it turned out, was an Imperial Officer, but I thought he was dumb-looking, and tended to make him the butt of jokes). I kept the two figures anyway, and incorporated them into my own playtime, and you’ll have to forgive me if I may have thought the brown hairy one was an evil monster. I much preferred my stories set in magical kingdoms with knights and princesses (nobody’d told me Star Wars actually was about knights and princesses). I didn’t like robots and blasters, and I was frankly terrified of outer space. I was five and a half–I’d been to preschool, I had older cousins, I’d seen enough to recognize the military type and the hairy brown creature as Star Wars characters. A long time ago in a neighborhood two counties away, I found two small action figures in our new house, left behind by the kids who’d lived there before.
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