Dear Jean;

Danny and I are on a skiing holiday during this Spring Break.

Let me rephrase that – Danny is on a skiing holiday and I’m on a chalet holiday. I stand at the lodge and look up to the summits of the hills around me, and I marvel at their beauty, but also at the feats of engineering and construction that transport people to those summits so that they can defy all the rules of what is sensible about the speed at which humans should travel – and my insides turn to mush. Danny loves it; he’s been skiing all his life. I’m happy to accompany him and spend my days writing and walking down snow covered country roads and along cross-country ski trails that let me wander into the forest.

The weather has been wonderful and I’m glad to be here. Not glad in the joyous sense, but feeling that this is a good place for me to take some time to work on the letters of my childhood.

I’m so grateful to have you, Jean, as a presence that I can picture when I’m writing. Sometimes I become so focused on understanding for the first time, from my adult perspective, the implications of what happened to us that the words all start to run together and their meaning becomes barely intelligible, even to me. Picturing you reading these letters has demanded of me a wonderful discipline, so that I force myself to treat the words with the same care, requiring the same precision that I’d give my thesis or my report writing. It pulls me out of the darkness that sometimes threatens to swallow me and gives me a reason to seek clarity of meaning.

I sit at the long, rough plank tables in the chalet with pen in hand, writing to you and to myself, and watch the skiers coming in for snack breaks or to warm up, and I wonder about the stories that are buried in each of them. Do other people have to invest this much personal energy into making sense of their lives?

I realize now that I had to come away from the setting of my regular life to write of Claire’s death. I needed the strange ambiance of safety and exposure offered by the anonymity of a public place to allow that day to come back to me. I also knew that I had to address the letter directly to Claire, to speak to her of her death in the same way that I used to speak to her of so many aspects of the world around us when we were together.

I’ve just reread my letter to Claire, and I’m trying to discern what it is that I feel about what happened. I examine the different corners of my soul and look for emotion and am surprised when I find so little of it there. I would expect to find guilt, rage, vengeance, blame, certainly confusion and deep grief, but none is present in any great abundance.

I could understand such numbness in the moment, brought on by shock, but even today I look for the switch that will colourize the stilted, black and white memories, and bring them into a reality where I can feel something about loosing my baby sister. Yet the numbness persists despite all the memories of bright garden flowers, and of “Ariel the Evil” that I try to resurrect, to coax some deeper emotions to the surface.

The numbness that I felt – that I feel – disturbs me; it makes me feel less than human, that I’ve never really mourned Claire. It makes me feel unworthy of the time we shared and the love I feel for her.

I look up from my writing and gaze around the ski lodge. I’m surprised when I recognize Danny’s back as he stands, putting coins in a vending machine across the room. My heart skips and there’s a tiny and sudden intake of breath, like I’ve been startled by his beauty and what he means to me, even from across the room. One of the songs that plays on the radio a lot these days has the line: “You take my breath away.” A rather silly and uninspired line, I would have said, yet that’s exactly how I feel when surprised by Danny’s presence. And from somewhere deep inside, a memory stirs of me on a swing – higher and higher I’m pumping. Claire is a baby, sitting on someone’s lap beside a tree in the park; they’re watching me on the swing and I’m focused on getting higher still. Then from the corner of my eye, I see Claire, delight radiating from her beautiful smiling face as she claps and giggles her baby sounds, and strains to break free of the hands that hold her, to come to me. She loves me. The sight of such pure cherubic beauty, and the joy that we find in each other, take my breath away.

I believe that this is a real memory and not a dream. The sight of Claire’s beauty often startled me in its pure intensity. I remember times at Sophie’s when, on a quiet evening we’d all be on the couch watching T.V. I’d stroke Claire’s hair and her cheeks and I’d say to Sophie: “Isn’t she precious?” And Sophie would smile at me and pet my head and reassure me that she was.

One of the reasons that I’m so grateful for the opportunity of exploring my past is that it’s given me back so many of those cherished memories of Claire that have been long buried. And in a way, those memories have given me back my sister. I sit here before this beautiful mountain, sun streaming over me, blessing me as I realize with that same breathtaking shiver of pleasure and surprise, that I’m becoming a happy person.

Thank you, Jean,
Starla

Copyright 2003