I Zoomed My Sister’s Funeral

How I handled my grief from a distance

The Basilica of San Albino, Mesilla, New Mexico

The email pops into my inbox late on a Friday evening. My dad, in matter-of-fact terms and brief, short sentences, lays out what will be my sister’s final days. While the message is out of the blue, it isn’t entirely surprising. She had been stable for years; her cancer treatment almost seemed routine at this point and without day-to-day knowledge of her condition, this email seemed a sudden turn of events.

“There’s nothing more they can do; she isn’t responding to treatment any longer. She left her appointment this afternoon and her doctor will begin arranging for hospice to start next week.”

I want to email back and ask a few clarifying questions, but I hold back. Was I allowed to know anything more than what was said? I don’t think so. Do I want to know anything more than what was said? No. Probably not.

My husband asks if I’m okay. I tell him I am and go on with my day. The truth is more complicated, however. My mind doesn’t know how to mourn someone who wasn’t really in my life, that I had no real relationship with, our estrangement having lasted years. My body doesn’t know what it’s supposed to feel the moment I read my dad’s message telling me my sister’s status has changed from sick to actively dying. I do know all I feel is a quiet numbness and very removed from the situation.

I try to remember the last time I laid eyes on my sister, felt affection for my sister, really knew my sister to any degree. I can’t recall. I don’t know if she has seen my grown child since he was a baby. I don’t know if she wishes it was all very different. I actually don’t know anything about her at all.

I didn’t attend my grandfather’s funeral. I was 14 and terrified of death. Of bodies. Of permanence. I opted to stay in my grandparents’ home, just up the street from the church that held the service. I sat in his chair, read a book, waited for my parents to collect me for lunch. I watched the cars drive slowly by the living room window on the way to the cemetery. The cemetery, situated across the dirt road from my grandparents’ farmhouse and buried beneath the tall pines, held generations of family eternally resting.

I wanted to be in different clothes instead of the dress that threatened to choke. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be curled on my discarded couch cushions, the ones tossed on my bedroom floor, reading. Listening to music. Dreaming of boys. But most of all, I wanted to hear my grandfather’s booming voice, walking in through the screen door, telling a joke to my dad. I wanted to know I would see him again. Hear him again. Instead, I shoved my feelings down and made myself quite small, trying to hide from death.

My sister is older than me by quite a bit. She was already in high school as my memories come online. Despite the age gap, she would always read to me at bedtime. The Monster at the End of This Book, complete with the requisite family voices, to start and then, later, Jenny at the Fire Station or Nancy Drew when she was home from college on break. Curled up on the big queen-sized bed where the spindles rattled brass on brass, just one more chapter, please. Can you read just one more chapter as we tighten the spindle with the hair ribbon that never did its job. I always asked. She always relented. Books, our tether across the years, never dreaming it would break.

No one tells you when you are eight years old and your older sister lays with you to read about Jenny the Cat that 40 years later you won’t know one another. No one tells you when you are six years old that people grow and change and make choices not even blood can breach. No one tells you when you are four years old that there will come a day when it will hurt to see the covers of your favorite stories as you try to work out where everything went so terribly wrong. I wonder if someone will tell me when she dies, even as I know my parents will. I wonder if I’ll hear about it soon after or maybe later, as an aside, even as I know I will hear along with everyone else. There is no reason that I won’t be told, but I still wonder. I don’t know my place. The protocol. I start. I flail.

The first funeral I attended was for my former father-in-law. My then-spouse, overcome with grief, insisted a package of Hydrox cookies go in the casket before it was closed. We stopped at Ralph’s on the way to the service, him frantic to find them among the sea of Oreos on the shelves. Only 22, I felt too young to be a comforting spot to land. Only 22, I remembered how small I made myself after my grandfather’s death and tried to take my mind there as I loaned my body to my husband’s grief. Only 22, I wanted to run back to my life, tell his family I was sorry, but I couldn’t be there, in the room, with them, with him, with this crushing anxiety, listening to them say their goodbyes.

I loved my former father-in-law, but I sat still in my chair, eyes averted, never getting close as my husband slipped that blue package of cookies alongside his father’s hand, better to grab them in the afterlife. His grief had to find its own way back to where I was focused on the corner of the room, unable to go near the casket, unable to breathe, unable to see, unable to bridge those few steps for him. To him. Paralyzed and useless and still terrified of the dead.

The only brunettes in a sea of familial redheads, I assumed I would be most like my sister. Nothing could have been further from the truth. While I always loved her as I grew into an adult, I didn’t always like her. I found her inconsistent choices frustrating. I found her problematic philosophies maddening. Time and again the friction from our basic values clashing drove a wedge deeper between us. There were times I stayed in her home and couldn’t wait to leave. There were times she gave me advice that I immediately discarded. There were times when I wondered at her inability to see our relationship for what it had become.

The last funeral I attended was my grandmother’s almost 30 years after I stood at her window watching the procession of cars crawl away from grandfather’s service. After getting the news of her passing, I immediately wondered how I could get out of going. It was in my parents’ hometown, in the middle of the school year. Could I use my child as a shield, feigning maternal labor to schedules and lunches and lost socks? Could I excuse myself away, pretend I was swamped and far busier than I was? Could I just say no, I don’t want to, I can’t, I have trouble with death so close to my face I can’t breathe?

I didn’t choose any of those options. Instead, I drove south with my sister. We stayed at my parents’ house, driving to the service the morning of, locking the front door of my childhood on our way out. We encountered a hawk, deer, elk. We scanned the horizon for javelina, for cows, for sunrise. We talked about who we might see, when we might leave. I parked in the church parking lot and walked in. I found the family gathered in a room for family prayer before the service and tried to find an escape but too late. I was sat down. I was enclosed in a row of chairs. I was within the line of sight of the open casket. I was staring at a face full of make-up that looked wholly unnatural on her. I was being talked at, to, around. I was counting down the seconds, digging fingers into palms, trying not to panic, losing my mind. I was too close. Everything was too close. That prayer lasted days. Why was no one shutting the casket, blocking death from my view? The cemetery wasn’t any better and I found myself wandering through the lots, finding relatives, my namesake, where my parents will one day rest. After far too long we were talked out, fed full, car finally pointed home.

The call comes on a Monday morning not quite weeks after she entered hospice. I debate what to do. I try to work out what my obligations were and are. I realize I’m in an impossible situation, and I take the selfish road. I choose not to attend my sister’s funeral in person, but I do tune in via livestream. It clicks on, grainy and oddly focused, minutes already into the service, as if someone had forgotten it was supposed to be streamed. I find I’m not scared of death, here. Closed casket, just out of the screen’s view, I can focus on something other than the odd permanence and pageantry. The speakers begin a barrage of tales. I remind myself that whole humans are complicated. The speakers talk of love and care. I remind myself that my relationship stands alone. Mine is mine. Theirs is theirs. Then, the speakers get specific.

“She was tirelessly selfless.”

Wait, is this the right person? I try to quiet my mind.

“She was the least judgmental person I know.”

But what about her constant judgement of me? Toward me? Shouted and whispered but mostly spat when she thought no one could see her. She never wanted anyone to see that in her.

“She was, above all, kind.”

Flashes of her calling me an abusive bitch ring in my ears. Spitting words of disdain, of hatred, of anger run circles in my head. My last memory of her suddenly comes to mind. It’s one of snarling judgment, of showing how little she knew me, of a lifetime of poor choices—surrounding herself with people who treated her poorly and somehow blaming me. Emailing me, she told me how she hated me, couldn’t stand to look at me, that I was the worst of people. While the exactness of her words has been lost to time, I still recall my confusion reading them. I felt her lashing out, never again sure of anything between us. Never again sure of what prompted them. Never again sure she hadn’t mistaken me for someone else. Never would I hear her apologize for her words. For her actions. For her part in this escalation between us.

When I was small, we had a children’s book about counting. Starting at one and marching to ten, the child counts every little thing that is needed to go to bed. When they get to the last one, they find the bed too crowded. The last line of the story is something along the lines of “...and sometimes, there isn’t room for me!” I think of this book, now, while trying to reconcile the face of martyrdom portrayed at the service and the sister I knew who would hiss insults as easy as breathing. The book was read often, referenced often, and I think of her reading it to me while looking into the crowded circle, knowing I’m on the outside, staring at the funeral over Zoom, furious at the words that don’t ring true.

I couldn’t see her for anything she might have been to others. Only for what she was and wasn’t to me. I couldn’t hear those words being spoken as the polite nuance of loved ones saying goodbye. Only feel the ones she sent before sending nothing more. Looking at the mourners, I know I made the right choice not showing up in person. There was no room for me. For my truth. For what I’ve said and not said about her. For everything I’ve held in. For my expanding complicated feelings.

I exit the service before it’s fully over. I can’t sit through the rest. Her cancer diagnosis, years prior, made clear there would be no swapping happy stories at the end. I was startled when I realized that being sick doesn’t always make people want to be nice. Or say sorry, reach out, bandage old wounds. So days passed and there was no reaching out. Months passed and the fissure split more. Years passed and there was no meeting for lunch and laughing through tears. Time stopped and there was no whispered apology.

I wonder who I’m supposed to mourn—the older sister who loved me deeply and read to me when she was home from college or the one who shot venom at me when she thought no one could see? I still don’t have an answer as I stare at the blank screen and tally what I do know: that at one time I was her favorite before I simply was not.

Tawnya Gibson is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in TODAY online, Newsweek, Under the Gum Tree, Sky Island Journal, and Blue Mountain Review (among others). She currently writes the Substack newsletter Off The Record and lives and works in the mountains of Northern Utah.