1962-1997
I still have a hard time dealing with my sister's death. I thought making this ceramic doll would help. Her foot was mangled in real life, too. When she was a little more than a year old, my mother watched as she played in oven cleaner. After cleaning her off, my mother put the oven cleaner soaked shoe back on her foot. For hours, she yelled at my sister to stop crying. Finally, after at least four hours, she took my sister in to the hospital. My sister had second and third degree burns from the waist down. Her foot was burned the worse.
I had put holes in her hands because I had originally thought to put ski poles in her hands. Christina went skiing with friends and after watching her tear wild down the mountain, her friends asked her where she learned such great hot dogging. Christina told them she never learned to ski. The last run of the day, there was freezing rain. Christina went down the mountain with her eyes closed. That was my sister. She wasn't afraid of life.
Melonoma killed her in June 1997. My mother decreed that no one should tell me that my sister was sick or that she died. A friend called me to let me know that she had seen my sister's obituary in the paper.
1 comment:
Your story really resonated with me.
I have a lifelong phobia about scorpions due to having one crawl in my shoe and sting me repeatedly while my father spanked me for crying when I was five or six. He and my mother thought I was merely crying because of the bloody blisters the shoes had worn on my sockless feet.
The memory makes me wonder at, try to avoid, the profoundly cruel things we can do to others when we're impatient or unaware or just plain selfish.
I am sorry for the hole in your heart left by your sister's loss, the fact that you probably didn't get to say goodbye and tell her that you loved her one last time. Your sculpture is a good way of remembering her. Each time you see it you'll remember the goodness of her and send a silent "I love you" into the air.
Best of luck to you -
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