Objects In The Mirror

I sipped my coffee slurry as I scrolled through the New York Times the morning of my sister’s death.

After finishing my usual hot black coffee, I now settled for a cold brew made each morning with cold-brew coffee and chocolate protein drink mix, crushed ice, and ginger sprinkled on top to minimize nausea. I didn’t choose the cold brew out of preference; it was a compromise born of the desperate need for morning caffeine competing, as it did most mornings, with my stomach.

“Is this Mr. Thompson?” the male voice on the other side of the phone asked.

“Yes, this is he,” I replied.

“Is your sister Lisha Thompson?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I am here at her apartment. Her neighbor asked me to call you. I am with the Sheriff’s Office. Your sister was found dead this morning.”

My coworker would later remark that she believed the call to have been over at this point. In a cube next to mine, she assumed that the conversation had been exactly that brief at first.

Then, after a long pause on my side, she heard the unmistakable sound of a sob, followed by the question:

“Could there be some kind of mistake?” I asked in a soft, wet-sounding, tortured whisper.

“No. There’s no mistake,” the officer replied firmly.

After a few minutes of silence, my coworker appeared in my line of sight, tissues in hand. Lightly touching my hand, she somehow guided me to a chair in the nearby conference room. Closing the door behind us, Nancy said little as my shoulders slumped. From behind the hand now cradling my face, I said, “This is going to kill Mother.”

More than one person offered to drive me home that day. Insisting on driving myself, I made my way home, where I met my partner, Kent. After sharing the news, I collapsed into Kent’s arms, and we spent quiet moments together, heads touching, silently taking account of a day we both knew would come.

Lisha’s substance abuse had begun, by her account, about 10 years prior to her death. I often wondered how much of what she told me was true, given the many half-truths and lies she shared in the last years of her life. Her body had been found the morning she was supposed to move in with my Aunt Norma, the one who taught us to dance the Twist in her living room, who had told Lisha that while she was welcome to stay, she could not simply stay around the house all day drinking.

The tiny airline-sized bottles found near Lisha were likely her attempt to limit the amount she drank in anticipation of securing the latest place to crash.

“Please call Mother,” I managed to say to Kent. “Make sure she is at home and let her know we are coming over.”

Lebanon, Tennessee, is about 50 minutes from Belle Meade, where Kent and I lived. Kent drove. He was the singer of the family, and he sang along with Barbra Streisand on the radio. I let the whizzing landscape distract me from the conversation I was about to have with my mother, Rose.

For some reason I found myself remembering another car ride: Lisha and me, five years old or so, traveling in Aunt Norma’s VW Beetle from Columbia, Tennessee, to Nashville.

I had the habit of falling asleep in the car when someone else was driving. That morning, in the memory, I stayed awake—listening to Petula Clark’s “Downtown” with Lisha while Rose and Norma passed sandwiches to the two of us, busy copying Peanuts comics with Silly Putty in the backseat.

Barely one year apart, Lisha and I had been close from the earliest years of our childhood. Through the many schools we attended, the various stepparents and stepbrothers and sisters, we were always each other’s closest companions. On drives like this one, we would share plans about our future, conspiring together to make great works of art with our Silly Putty and ingenuity.

Now in my fifties, I felt myself falling asleep on the way to Lebanon to tell Rose her daughter was dead.

The gravel driveway crackled under my feet as I approached her front porch.

“I need to talk to you,” I said to my mother, my hand on hers.

“What is it?” Rose asked earnestly.

The tears that had stopped during the drive returned. Big, wet tears streamed down my face and splashed noisily onto the wooden porch, preventing me from answering for more than a few moments.

“Is it Lisha?” Rose asked. “Is she sick?”

I quietly shook my head.

“Is she dead?” Rose asked.

I simply nodded.

Kent later told his mother, Patsy, that he had never witnessed the kind of grief he saw and heard from Rose that day. The howls of pain that came from Rose as she sat with me echoed through the outdoor setting, loudly enough to drown out the nearby traffic.

“Not my daughter. Oh Lord, not my daughter,” Rose shrieked that morning.

The medical examiner’s final report would list chronic alcoholism as one of the three causes of death on Lisha’s death certificate. To me, Lisha’s death had come to seem like a very slow suicide, coming as it did after many emergency room visits, rehabs, and detox centers. The last of these had advised me that my sister’s BAC had been .40, a “likely deadly” reading. Lisha had understood many times that she was close to death.

I was shocked by Lisha’s death, but shocked in the way that people say they are when they cannot be surprised.

Rose’s pain that day would give way, it seemed to me, to what I believed was a deep, bone-level, perhaps spiritual exhaustion. Selecting the funeral home, the casket, and, in Rose’s case, her daughter’s outfit for the coffin, she completed each task wordlessly, ending each only with a deep, staggered sigh that left her mouth in waves.

In the days and weeks that followed, Rose and I spent more time together than usual—in cars, in Lisha’s apartment, in a funeral home. It seemed to me that I spent much of those days wandering. I moved through rooms, some filled with strangers, others containing only scattered pieces of Lisha’s last days on earth, as she had held onto the ledge of life with only enough strength to endure the various indignities of addiction long enough for the next drink.

Rose and I also seemed to circle each other at times: in the kitchen, where we had to clear empty bottles from the sink just to pour a glass of water; in Lisha’s bedroom, where her body had been found and which still smelled of death. It was as if the space between us was being saved long enough for Rose’s daughter to once again appear.

Rose was never again the same person following Lisha’s death.

On the drive to work my first day back, I stopped at Starbucks for a hot black coffee. My palm full of Tums, I chewed several before washing them down with the acrid sting of my favorite substance.

Smacking my lips, I drove to work, preparing the excuse I would give my doctor for the assault on my stomach. But at some point, I told myself I had to be able to live my life.

Settling into my cubicle, I moved aside the tissue box and opened my computer. Not expecting any calls that morning, I sipped my coffee and read the condolence card on my desk.

Maybe today I would stop on the way home and get some more cold brew.

On the other hand, this coffee really hit the spot.