"Wildflowers" Guest Post by Stacey Margaret Jones, Writer/Researcher

In the heart of the pandemic, July 2020, I got a call on a strange number in the Dallas-Forth Worth area; because my sister Susan lived there, I answered it when I would usually decline. The call wasn’t from Susan, but from an emergency room doctor who had found my number in her phone as a recent call to a person with the same last name. I knew where his introduction was leading, though I hoped it wouldn’t be the worst possible news, even as he was embarking on the sentence I dreaded, that Susan had died of a heart attack that morning. Her friend had brought her in after she had died in her car on the way to an appointment with her cardiologist. It had been sudden: In the short time it took her friend to put something in the trunk after getting Susan settled in the passenger seat, she had left us all. And the long days of our lives lived without her had begun.

As I waited for my mother to answer her phone to give her the sad news, I thought about the telephone tree that would play out among the members of our family, Susan’s eight remaining siblings and my mother. Our father had died in 2015. I’m the youngest of the nine, and Susan was the oldest daughter. She was my half-sister, the child of my father’s first marriage, and for many reasons, including that we were the only daughters of the six without children, she was my sister with whom I was in the most regular contact, although we probably had the least in common. She was an energetic conversationalist when it came to her extended family and her beloved cats, and though I was the youngest, she treated me with respect as equal adult children of the same parents, not the little girl she played with when she came home in her 20s for holidays. I had just sent her a copy of my novel that had come out in 2019. The last I’d heard from her was a voice mail saying she’d received it and couldn’t wait to read it.

But because of the pandemic, there could be no funeral, and as my mother and our niece worked to sort through the legal detritus of her death, I felt the strangeness of her passing as if I’d dreamed it, as beyond Facebook, there was no public proclamation that she was gone, no communal tears and remembrances to confront me. Yes, she had died, but it seemed too distant of a realization that each day I woke up she was still dead. Since she had lived in Dallas and couldn’t travel due to her increasing health problems, I hadn’t seen her in several years. So, I just wasn’t seeing her still. The night after her death, I took a strange, wrong step on our deck and broke three bones in my foot, and the injury removed me further from the realization that she was gone while I focused on doctor’s appointments and recovery. But when it came back to me, I thought repeatedly of the line in Sylvia Plath’s poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”:

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

I knew I was going somewhere, into a life in which Susan was dead, and there were only five sisters in our family, a life in which I couldn’t call her back after a voicemail or text from her and hear about her friends and close-by family adventures and her telling anecdotes and jokes on herself. A life without the oldest sister who gave more than she had to give to others and accepted every gesture, every present with sincere gratitude. A life without a woman whose struggles made me frustrated with this world and the way people treat each other, because her problems were often due to her trusting nature and profound desire to help those she loved. That ER doctor’s call had put me on a train, it had left the station, but I hadn’t ever agreed to buy the ticket or take the ride, and I certainly hadn’t agreed to the destination.

Of course, I felt the regret that comes from not having called her back soon enough after her last message to connect with her one last time before her death, but I had no desire to tell others to call their sisters and brothers and tell them they loved them. I knew I had done my best in that relationship, as had she. My regret was surface, not of depth. We’d honored the relationship we’d had and now it was over except in my memories.

And it was in those days I stopped saying to someone who had lost a family member, “I know you loved her.” Because I still love Susan. The pain comes because she’s not there to accept the love, to be loved, to love in return. The love has nowhere to rest. The love simply cannot see where there is to get to. But I still love her. I still fling my love out there into the world around me because I can’t not. I still say I’m the ninth of nine children with five sisters and three brothers, one of whom is dead (if the conversation gets that far). I know that I won’t get over the sadness, but where I am going is to a place where I am used to feeling sad to the extent that happy memories are able to join in the emotional experience that thoughts of Susan bring.

Over time, the Plath line has lost its primacy as the mental refrain of the loss. We celebrated her life and mourned her death a year later when the vaccines were available and before Delta forced another hard retreat. Her absence became real as our family members looked around at each other and her face was missing. My grief settled a bit into my sadness that she had had the struggles she had, that things hadn’t been easier for her at the end, as she dealt with health problems and the health system too often alone. I still cry about that.

I bought a little garden sculpture of an angel holding a cat and put it in the flower bed I’d started to really care about when lockdown began, when I couldn’t do much else besides literally watch plants grow. Her angel lives at the base of the climbing Carolina jessamine, whose bright, small yellow flowered vines twine around it on their way up the trellis. I did this because as the Plath line and its hopeless resistance to the journey of love and the loss of it we’re all on faded, Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” came to take its place when Susan comes to mind. It is my strongest wish for her that she is whole and free of her troubles, whether among the Caroline jessamine just outside my study windows or just “out there,” where I continue to love my sister, whether she is here to feel it or not. I believe there is a place to get to, and it is to the place she belongs, that I hope our love has helped her find.

You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
Sail away, kill off the hours
You belong somewhere you feel free

…

You belong somewhere close to me
Far away from your trouble and worries
You belong somewhere you feel free

Author contact information: https://staceymargaretjones.com/