Margaret

This is the first part of my essay for the book Stricken: The 5,000 Stages of Grief. Click the title to go to it on Amazon.


Margaret

What is this resistance I have to going there again, procrastinating writing about my personal grief? What comes to mind is a scene from Beth Henley’s play Crimes of the Heart, made into a movie with Diane Keeton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek, in which Old Granddaddy has been dying for a long time, and the three Southern sisters have just been through so much—parental abandonment, suicide, sacrifice, numbing out, lies, neglect, loneliness, scandal, attempted murder, and gallons of too-sweet lemonade—that by the time they learn that Old Granddaddy has finally died, they burst out laughing.

An evening out with girlfriends, taking turns reading favorite Rumi poems on the patio of a Mexican restaurant and laughing a lot, will also do the trick.

Now I’m back home, facing it. So here it is: I am 54 years old, and I can tell you that without a doubt, the most grievous thing that happened in my life was the murder of my younger sister Margaret when I was 11 years old.

This is a story about trauma, about experiencing a loss that is so horrifying that I thought, “If this is what life is, I don’t want to be here.” I checked out in some ways. Yet here I am, years later, and, damn, that was a high price to pay. Never again.

So here’s the story. One day, right before she was to start first grade, Margaret went outside to play after lunch. She went down the street to visit a neighbor girl, but the girl was taking a nap and her mother told Margaret to come back later.

Margaret walked down the alley back towards our house. She met a 15-year-old neighbor boy whom none of my family knew, who was also walking down the alley, and they began walking together. That was the last anyone except that boy saw of Margaret alive.

I don’t know what all happened. I suspect he raped her, and she was not cooperative. Maybe she threatened to tell, her most powerful weapon with her older siblings. Whatever. He strangled her with electrical wire. He strangled her for a long time, the paper said afterwards. Then he put her body in a cardboard box and covered it with leaves and trash and closed the box and left it in the woods. The paper said that the police found a trail of blood leading from his garage across the alley into the woods. There was a photo of a policeman standing by a box in the woods at night. The paper also said that the boy told the police that she was still breathing when he put her into the box.

Margaret and I shared a room from the time she got out of the crib until that day. She had straight brown hair and big blue eyes and sucked her two middle fingers. She still wet the bed sometimes. She was also daring. She once looked up a nun’s habit to see her artificial leg, something none of us older children would have risked. The nun just laughed and later gave her a teddy bear. And Margaret was outgoing. She was the one who told her first grade class, gathered for a group photo at orientation, to say cheese. She couldn’t say her Rs, so if you asked her what her name was, you’d hear “Maw-gwet.”

Every year I remember her on her birthday, May 7. I count how old she’d be now, and I wonder what she’d be like if she had lived. Would we be close? Would we live in the same city? What would she have done with her life? Would she have married, would she have had children? What kind of work would she be doing? Would we like each other?

Sometimes she shows up in my dreams, always as a young child. I miss having a sister. I had one for 6 years.

When my daughter turned 7, I breathed a sigh of relief. When my granddaughter turned 7, my daughter and I both breathed sighs of relief. She made it past 6. Whew.

I also remember Margaret every year on her death day, September 4. That date is seared into my memory. I feel sad, and it passes. After 43 years, my grief has been reduced to feeling what a horrible shame it was that she died like that. She just happened to run into that boy on that day, and he just happened to be so unstable that he had a psychotic break and he killed her. I so wish that she had been able to die at peace, in the presence of love. I wish that for you, for me, and for everyone.

But there’s more to my grief than that.