“Carefully Caught Regrets” Linger While Also Bringing Hope

On December 12, 1992, a date that would have marked my sister Renée’s thirty-eighth birthday had she lived more than a few days beyond her seventh birthday, Mom wrote me a letter commenting on copies of black-and-white pictures I had sent to her.

“You said it is good to remember. I don’t know. I try not to remember. I saw those pictures again, I remembered I kept saying, ‘Come back, Little Blue Legs’—after she died. Hadn’t thought of that in many years. We used to play a game: I would say something about your red legs or black legs, whichever. And Renée would say, ‘Say something about my blue legs.’ I feel I’ve lived many lives—that was another life, one–hundred years ago. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ So we go on struggling with the wood, hay & stubble of this day.” 

“Come back, Little Blue Legs.”

My mom had never told me that story. This letter she wrote helped me recall the numerous times my mother and Renée (2 years younger than I) spent in hospitals or seeing doctors. Reading that letter as if somehow seeing my mom try to make those hours pass––entering a scene I had not lived––those written words evoked sharp, painful feelings of sorrow for each of them. 

Mom must have dreamed time and again of getting beyond one medical crisis, only to wake up in another nightmare. 

My mother would often comment, “It was a nightmare.”

Some Questions That Haunted Me Throughout My Childhood

Was Renée taken because she was good and, therefore, I got left behind because I was bad? Was it my fault that Renée died? When did I first begin to realize that it wasn’t my fault that Renée had died?  

Many of my good memories of Renée revolved around bad memories of me. Carefully caught regrets lingered, wound around a few poignant scenes, replayed in reruns. 

By second grade, I had become aware of Renée’s awkward appearance. Though two years younger, Renée was taller than I was, and skinny. She had light-colored hair, gossamer like angel hair. She wore clothes that didn’t match because she didn’t care about clothes. She was that kid who wanted to dress herself, ignoring criticisms.

One time at school, Renée came crying to me. Surrounded by a group of her friends, she had gotten hurt––a fall on the playground. Seeing her approach, I sank into the swing’s leatherette seat, pushed off with my feet, and I looked the other way. Go find someone else to love on you.

Renée was just different enough to make me feel embarrassed for my friends to call us sisters.

At school, the kids in her class singled Renée out to take advantage of her kindness. Her soft underbelly. A school rule required students to finish eating all cafeteria food before you could go outside and play for the remainder of lunch period. More than once I saw the kids at her class’s table load up Renée’s tray with their leftovers. Renée sat before a mound of food until the bell rang and she was set free. 

To this day, I cannot account for my hard heart. Why didn’t I identify with her suffering? Why didn’t I come to her aid? Why did I care more about what other kids thought than care about my own sister? 

Why didn’t I help her, sit by her, or at least defend her against repeated meanness? 

When I was a child, I thought as a child . . . I had just turned 9-years-old when Renée died. That’s no excuse.

How can I explain that long-despised memory of myself. 

“O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree . . .” Renée sang out those lyrics in her first––and what turned out to be her last––Christmas pageant, the tallest kid in her kindergarten class. She had been held back a year because of frequent absences.

If video cameras had existed, Renée would have been the child everyone in the audience watched, grinning at her animation. Front and left-center stage, her lively, unselfconscious-self swayed to that song as if she were a soloist.

Again, I cringed because Renée stuck out. I wanted so much to fit in, to look like everyone else. Renée didn’t seem to know she was different.

Four days after Christmas, she was gone.

Gone too all opportunities for me to make atonement. After she died, Renée stood out in every scene I remembered, as if she were suddenly 3-D and in color while everything around her appeared flat, black-and-white, and receding.

“I am moved by fancies that are curled around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.”

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

As I remember Renée, forgiveness flowed all around her the way water wraps around a floating log that could possibly save someone from drowning. It had seemed her instinct to forgive, forbear injury, and dismiss slight. She was gentle too.  

Once when my mother and dad had realized she was sick again, mom held 4-year-old Renée in her arms, carrying her out the door on their way to the hospital. I stood barefoot, watching, helpless, mute. Do you want to take her pillow? was all I could think.

Mom buried her head in Renée’s chest, repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Forgive me.” 

Renée and I shared a bed. A raucous arena of fun, peals of laughter and unstoppable giggles had begun the night before. We kept getting in trouble for not going to sleep, stern threats each time the bedroom door opened.

When Renée woke up crying in the middle of the night, I pulled a pillow over my head, trying like everyone else to sleep through her cries, unable to distinguish these tears as cries for help and relief. That night, Renée had gotten countless whippings, commanded to get to sleep, scolded for keeping the rest of us awake.

But at dawn’s early light, I watched Renée as she and Mom were leaving the apartment. Her arms draped around my mother’s neck, I heard Renée say in response to my mother’s words, “That’s okay, Momma. That’s okay.”

I saw Renée as one incapable of her own distress, (Shakespeare’s Ophelia). 

Renée also made me laugh.

When older kids in the neighborhood put Renée and me up to stealing candy from the grocery store, we hid our share of the booty under our bunkbed mattress. Mom found it.

Confronted, Renée said, “I snuck it and I’m gonna eat it.”

Whenever Renée and I got a whipping, I cried as soon as my mother’s hand flew upwards. Mom’s hand raised behind her back swung down with force and momentum. Whether she held a belt or a leafless switch from a tree limb, I cowered.

Renée, however, stood her determined ground. 

And I would tell her, “Renée, go ahead and cry. Mom will stop as soon as you cry.” But that little booger was tough. Mom referred to Renée as a “little booger.”

While I admired Renée’s gumption, I failed to grasp her stubbornness. 

My regrets kept piling up like the food on her lunch tray.

Remembering and Forgiving Myself

“We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more than we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.”^⁠

Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life

Maybe my desire to remember and write about Renée, contrary to my mother’s desire to forget, marks the ineffable effect my sister Renée had on me. Maybe writing about my early life centers on trying to get it right. Buechner wrote that instead of a burden of guilt, we can “gain wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead.”

A white marble headstone bears the engraved quote from Shakespeare, reminder of Renée’s brief appearance on planet earth. The inscription reads: 

Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope

Being had to triumph, being lacked, to hope. 

Shakespeare, from Sonnet 52

Every life matters to someone, no matter how long they lived.