My Sister's Glasses

By Roberta Durra

A few days ago I threw out a pair of silver framed reading glasses. They were smudged and bent out of shape and too strong for my eyes. They weren’t my glasses anyway. They belonged to my sister, Lois, who died of breast cancer 3 years ago. I have struggled with having these glasses. And now I know that I don’t need them any longer.

Lois was fourteen years older than me. I idolized my sister when I was growing up. I don’t have many memories of actually living with her because she went away to college when I was only 4. But I remember knowing that she was the best big sister. Why? Because she was kind, beautiful, wore cool white bobbysocks and she shared her hairdryer with the big cap.

When I was 7 years old, I was a flower girl at Lois and Stan’s wedding. My nose was red in all of the photos because I cried throughout the wedding. The kind of sobbing that comes from deep in your chest, makes you hiccup, unable to talk, and embarrassed because lots of people are watching. After the ceremony my brand new brother-in-law, Stan, bent down on his knee and tried to console me.

            “Bobbi”, he said. “You are not losing your sister. You are gaining ME as a brother”.

That’s when I really became hysterical. I didn’t want a new brother. I wanted my sister back!

When I was 9, my sister became pregnant with her first child.  Again, I cried.  I worried that Lois wouldn’t love me as much once her baby was born. She sat with me on my bed, in my pink childhood bedroom and promised that her love for me would not change once her baby was born. She told me that she had enough love for both of us. Lois was a woman of her word. She remained my wonderful big sister, making lots of time for me throughout my childhood, always making me feel important. She taught me how to bake bread, let me babysit, and continued to stay involved in my life through my less than pleasant teen years, my self-induced young adult dramas, my various careers, the joyful birth of my child and every other life scenario as it played out.

Lois raised her family in the suburbs of Chicago and stayed in Illinois throughout her life. On the other hand, at twenty-five, I moved to New York and later to California. From that point on, our relationship was one of long distance phone calls and visits that were always too short. We led very different lives, and on paper had little in common.  And yet, we chose to be each other’s unwavering supporter and closest friend.

Although Lois had been living with breast cancer for a year, she became extremely ill very suddenly and died within a two-week period. Her children and I were at my sister’s bedside when she passed. This was the greatest honor my sister could have given me. The weeks spent with her in hospice were filled with love, grief, humor, disbelief and some unsettling scenes pertaining to the end of life that sometimes still haunt me late at night. My sister lived her life in a very full way. She died with tan lines on her feet from the sandals she’d worn during a recent trip to Argentina.

I spoke at my sister’s funeral and stayed in Chicago for a few days. Then I went back to my own life in Los Angeles. When my sister’s belongings were divvied up amongst her children and other family members, I was not there. I ended up being given things that I had once given Lois… a beautiful glass pitcher she had displayed in her living room, a large shell she gave me from her honeymoon (and then took back 20 years later), a scrapbook I made of a recent trip we had taken together and a small clay bowl with the letters L O I S on the front. I made that clay bowl for Lois when I was a kid at camp. I remember working hard shaping the letters. The glaze was a beautiful pearl blue, and I was very proud to give it to her. She kept it all these years. Most recently it was on her kitchen counter filled with paperclips, pens, and a pair of silver reading glasses. When I first received the bowl back, that’s exactly what was in it. It felt like sacred offerings, and I put it in full view on my dresser where I could see it every morning. It stayed there for most of a year.

Then there was a time when some of the scenes from her last days began haunting me again, and I had trouble looking at the bowl. I moved it behind my tall jewelry stand for about 6 months.

This year, I put the bowl back in its rightful place on my dresser, and threw out the paperclips, rubber bands and other miscellaneous items. That’s when I began carrying Lois’s silver framed reading glasses with me. They were just cheap, drugstore glasses. They hurt my eyes. When I tried wearing them they gave me a headache. But they were hers, so I carried them in my purse.

I miss my sister. I still want to call her when something wonderful happens, and want to talk to her when times are rough. I haven’t had many dreams about her, and I feel somewhat disappointed. Her husband died 2 years before she did, and she told me that she often witnessed signs of his presence. A necklace that was very meaningful to both of them once mysteriously appeared in the corner of her living room. She had no recollection of how it might have gotten there. She was certain it was Stan. One time, when I was completely immersed in washing dishes, I had a very strong sense of my sister. It came in a clear wave of emotion, really out of nowhere. It felt loving and pure. I think she breezed in for a quick hello.

I see Lois in my aging body. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflection and I look like her. Sometimes I can see my sister’s hands when I look at my own. I hear her voice in mine when I answer the phone. I never saw these things when she was alive because she held the space that was “Lois”. Now with her gone, I find her energy elsewhere. I look for her likeness in her children, grandchildren, and in myself. Sometimes it catches me off-guard and I feel shaken. Sometimes it feels like a warm hug. But as for the glasses, still smudged by Lois’s wear and tear, they don’t feel like a part of my sister any more. They feel like bent reading glasses that take up too much room in my purse and give me a headache when I wear them.

Where Lois lives is within me.