THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 21, 1996 TAG: 9605210039
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EDITH SMITH, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 136 lines
MY SISTER, Sherry, died in a fire April 13, alone in her mobile home in Portsmouth. According to the arson report, she was trying to light a kerosene lamp.
On April 21 we scattered her ashes over a quiet lake in Norfolk.
Though a month has passed since then, the feel of my sister's ashes stays with me. Cremated remains feel, alternately, like coarse, uncut amethysts or the fine, powdered sand found on Caribbean beaches. Appropriately so, for Sherry was both strong and forceful, but also delicate and fragile.
When I last saw Sherry, in Maryview Hospital, I gasped. My once vibrant and witty sister looked weary, battered and tired. She had suffered a stroke. There was a tube in her stomach, and an IV in her arm. A tube ran from her nose down into her throat. She was held down by restraints.
I spent several hours with Sherry that day, and although I did most of the talking, I realized that my fiercely independent sister wasn't so tough. Just the opposite, she was far more vulnerable than I'd ever imagined.
Over the hours, I learned an important lesson about the masks that people wear because of their insecurities. Some people can pick themselves up after a disaster and get on with their existence. Others, like my sister, Sherry, never get over their hurt.
Ours is a story familiar to many families. A story of siblings who, despite the same backgrounds, take very different roads in life.
My sister, and also my brother, labored in low-paying jobs and called me frequently to ask for money, implying that because I fared better financially, I owed them a debt.
They did not attend my college graduation. And they sometimes introduced me as ``the brain.'' It was as if any success I enjoyed, any strength I showed, was a betrayal to them. It was as if I had escaped the misery and left them behind.
We were born into a middle-class family whose lineage includes educators, ministers and military personnel. My father was a minister in Norfolk and operated his own dry-cleaning business for more than 20 years.
Ours was a fairy-tale family, sort of like the one in ``The Cosby Show.'' For the first three years of my life, my mother stayed home and was the perfect housewife.
One day, however, my mother packed up all the furniture, left my father, and did not return until his death five years later. She took my sister, who - unbeknownst to we children - was from her first marriage. My brother and I remained with my father.
A broken marriage. It was a scenario that has been repeated thousands of times, but it set my siblings and me on a rocky course.
All of my parents' children married before we were 18. It seems we were attempting to rebuild a semblance of family life.
My brother, who in his youth played the trumpet so well that he could have been another Wynton Marsalis, dropped out of high school three months before his graduation and married my wonderful sister-in-law, Joyce. My sister married her junior-high sweetheart, Robert.
I married a man who was 19 years my senior. At the time you could not have convinced me that I was marrying a father figure. My ex-husband has my father's exact coloring and build.
In less than five years, all our marriages had become failures.
My family shattered into a thousand pieces the day my mother and father separated. I stayed in a abusive marriage for 10 years because I did not want my daughter to experience the same kind of pain I had gone through when my parents divorced. My brother and sister began to use our parents' split as a deadly crutch.
They often talked of what they might have realized if Mama and Daddy had stayed together.
I visited Sherry at least three times in the hospital over the last four years. Once she had been severely beaten by a boyfriend, and had suffered a brain concussion and a perforated eardrum. Another time, she had passed out and fallen because she had failed to take her insulin.
My once-gorgeous sister gradually became a shell of herself. Friends said the death of her second husband in 1993 was too much for her, and she had begun to drink heavily. The autopsy performed after Sherry died showed that she had high blood pressure, pancreatitis and cirrhosis of the liver.
It was not until the last time that I saw my sister that I realized the full extent of her vulnerability. That telling moment came in Maryview Hospital, while I was holding her hands in prayer.
I looked down at my sister's hands tightly entwined around my own. Somehow I must have appeared startled by the difference in our hands.
My nails were manicured and colored with bright red polish. My sister's nails were jagged, her polish chipped. Her hands had the look of someone 20 years older.
My sister stared at me with tears rolling down her cheeks. She pulled away and hid her hands under the covers. It was if she felt that I had judged her, and she was ashamed of her appearance. My heart filled with anguish at the thought that I had embarrassed her.
It was as if my sister was making a comparison of our lives, as if a manicured nail could imply that I had come out the better of the two. Her reaction spoke volumes about her self-esteem and concealed pain.
While Sherry never openly expressed aspirations of being other than a wife and mother when we were growing up, she worked two, and sometimes three, jobs after her two sons were born. She wanted them to have all the best that she could give them, once noting at a Christmas get-together that ``I want them to be better than me.''
In Africa, all people are considered to be royalty. How I wish that Sherry could have understood that better. That she was an African royal in her own right, born of kings and queens, with the blood of nobility coursing in her veins.
I have wondered since her death: Was my sister ever really happy? Was, as expressed in Langston Hughes' poem, her dream deferred? Did it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
I know it is not right for me to judge my sister's life. Sherry did things her way, the only way her independent spirit would allow.
And when I wonder about my sister's legacy, I know inside that I already have the answer. You only have to look at her wonderful and well-mannered sons. For the true essence of my sister lives on in Robert and Ronald.
Both are kind and sensitive, loving and honest. When I look at these young men, I know that my sister left a legacy of which we all can be proud.
I am content with the last meeting I had with my sister. She knew I loved her. Though we had coped differently with the disappointments we had suffered in our lives, we had made peace with each other and our choices.
And if there is one thought that will remain with me always, it is to have compassion for life's more-fragile souls. Many times, they are the ones with the false bravado, reaching out in quiet desperation. Underneath the tough exterior, theirs is an unspoken plea, begging for our approval, our encouragement and love.
And I am reminded of a quote by the great poet Maya Angelou:
Someone was hurt before you; wronged before you; hungry before you; frightened before you; beaten before you; raped before you; yet, someone survived.
And I hold back tears, hoping that my sister is at peace. MEMO: Edith Smith, a former Virginian-Pilot reporter, operates The Smith
Group, a special-events, public relations, fund-raising and artist
management business in Arlington.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
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by CNB