Sisters and random thoughts

Today was a day where I had to take a moment to reflex on a few memories I have for my sister, Nina.

I received an unexpected call from my mum today asking me how I was doing and that she had some things she wanted to talk about. She said she is retiring, has decided to downsize her home and wanted to know if I wanted some of my sister's things.

Objects.

Just items I think that are pretty useless if you ask me. But they seem to be important enough for Mum to pass them on. I cannot tell how much this pained me to hear her ask this of me. A very blue day has arrived breaking down my door where I now have to face a reality I never wanted to believe.

Nina is dead. Gone 5 years now and for everyday she lays in her grave, I have neglected to think about this fact and always put it aside reminding myself she was just away, staying in some far off distance place where she never had a chance to contacted me and was doing just fine. Simply a stupid fantasy that's easier to believe than facing reality. I'm such a nerd!

Andrew came home early, to which I thanked him with saying he felt something was wrong and just needed to be home. I am so glad he did. He looked after our son and allowed me time to myself to which I cried in my room for quite a few hours cleansing the soul for the next coming 5 years I feel her absence from our lives.

Nina was 18, a student, beautiful and our youngest sibling. The biggest sweetheart of a little sister who wrote me letters every month in large rounded girly alphabet letters that took up twice as many pages. She and her boyfriend, Erik were on their way to the St. Francis beach to sail with his Dad and never made it. Both of them gone in an instant.

It had never occurred to me how much it hurt my mum surviving this kind of loss until I had my own son and the feeling she must have felt crushed me into pieces. I asked her today how she lived through it and she said it wasn't easy but knew that Nina would never want us to fall apart just because she died and at times when she felt the world closing in on her she put those thoughts down knowing she had her other children to live for. "It's easy to give up you know," she said to me. "Easy to lie down and let the world walk all over you and cry over things we have no control over. I miss her, darling but I am not the one who die and neither did you." I suppose she was trying to tell me to snap out of it because I was really crying. Then I remember her being the driving force of telling us to stand for what we believe in and fight for those we love. She grew up in Apartheid worse than we did and said she was ashamed to admit that she too hid behind her feelings of love for her "true mother".

Mother grew up a farmer's daughter who was reasonably well to do because he had workers, one being my mother's nanny. I can't recall her name but she was an old Zulu and single and looked after my maternal relatives back then and mum always said she felt her love in her cooking, rearing and mothering. "It was she who kissed the boo boos, kissed us good night after story time, checked for monsters under the bunks and was there to spank us when we were bad," she told me." My grandmother apparently spent way to much time at church functions and entertaining to bother with her kids and it was her nanny that looked after mum. I guess that was just the way it was back then.

But her stories about this old woman made us realize as a family that our county's adoption of this horrible belief back then made my mother seriously rebelle. She was a renegade when she was young and probably got into worse fights than me, but it's her woeds and strong perseverance that gets me through life and for her, that one day... even after she is long gone it is her wish that we will all be allowed to be the same and not have to cower under such thoughts that one race is more superior than the other.

And her feeling toward my dad who said on that fateful day she left him, that he was disappointed he had no son's? Oh lord, I thought she was going to kill him. I do not like my father, although do love him and see him once in a while. I know he loves me and Karen, but we are a disappointment to him being daughters, perhaps too outspoken and too much trouble for his liking. He is not as strong as my mother nor as accepting.

He's moved on, married and finally got his son, who I have never met. Very sad!

After much thought, I declined my mother's offer to send some of Nina's things. She has never cleaned out my sister's room and must be hard to fianlly have to face this after 5 years. Karen will go over and help her out. I am glad she is still there for my mum, who is so far away, but not as far away as Nina.