Life after death

...They passed, surmounted mostly by the contingencies of her illness...

...I have heard these words as far back as I can remember and, because death came early in my life, I have always been alert to them...

...Roberta did not seem upset...

...We were a combative family...

...In the last months of her life Roberta achieved a great sweetness, and, at the very end, peace...

...I was not afraid or disturbed by the sight of her body as I had been of other dead people...

...their fathers had been competitive brothers, and in our house the twists, myths, and disappointments of history invaded and superseded the present and the everyday, throwing their weight and complexity into the simplest disagreement...

...That life was too valuable, too important, to just stop...

...I know where the furniture is placed, and the colors of the upholstery and the carpets and the walls...

...We re-enacted some of the history we had absorbed too well, and in adulthood we suffered and instigated tensions and rifts between us...

...But it is only now, with my sister gone, that they are real to me...

...I remember him playing the cello and listening to the hi-fi inside our old house, and outside it, unbaling peat moss and raking loam...

...our personalities and ideas-similar, I think now, at the core-developed differently, and rivalry grew...

...My mother's heart had broken years before, when Roberta first got sick, but she managed, out of love, a sense of responsibility, and her tragically good understanding of grief, to be wise and strong for her child...

...My father died before we could be anything but a young family...

...it may simply be that her grace in so saying them finalized our bond...

...We moved into a new, and newly decorated apartment and three years later, when my mother married again, into a house in another town...

...Roberta was not afraid to die...

...She was devoted to hers, and she expected the same of Roberta and me...

...I think those were her last words, but I'm not at all sure...

...Oh Roberta," she cried, "how I'll miss you...

...The predominant part of her left to me is her image as a child, the perspective only I have, and that her children and mine ask me about now...

...He died at forty-six-the age I am now-when my sister Roberta was fifteen, and I was nine...

...objects so set apart from the rest, and I worried about my inability to understand it...

...My mother bent and kissed her, and stroked her hair...

...When, shortly after Roberta died, I sat in my mother's living room, the only things I recognized from our old life were a pair of bookends, kneeling Chinese figures that hold up, now as always, two leatherbound volumes of poetry...

...They flash into my mind as I go about my business, and come to me in the night...

...Both my parents believed themselves to be out of the ordinary...

...But I had displaced her, as second children do...

...There was, first, her bravery, which she expressed as a longing and need to live, through all the terrible treatments she underwent, and the great physical problems and limitations with which she was left...

...To my mother, the love between sisters is sacred...

...Roberta's room was blue...

...When I was a newborn baby, she used to tell me, she would wash her hands and then sit by my crib, patting mine...

...She's knitting, not reading or studying, and the effort is a youthful one, full of holes...

...My brother-in-law, tireless in his care of her, had gone himself to choose the site...

...Roberta died in the middle of the night, and my mother and I went into the room where she lay...

...My mother felt she could not bear to live without my father in the place he had been and so, right away, she sold the house and gave away the rugs and lamps and furniture...

...Theirs was the most intensely romantic relationship I have ever known...

...Roberta talked a lot about the possibility of an afterlife...

...She entertained her, fed her, listened to her, and found the words-available to no one else-to reassure her...

...The temple was packed, and the rabbi, referring to my father by his nickname-"Eddie"-wept delivering the eulogy...

...I have not, physically, been in our old house since we moved away, but it inhabits me...

...This was a heavy burden, and through our lives both of us sometimes failed to carry it, although Roberta always said she loved me...

...But I, out in the hall, am younger still, and when she turns toward me I see my big sister, full of knowledge, her face troubled with the future that is sure to come...

...It's good you are here...

...Although I believe that to be true, I cannot comprehend it...

...I think her life was witness to that belief...

...Judaism teaches that we live on in our deeds, and in the minds and hearts of those who knew us...

...Inside me, she lives in our old house...

...I will never see Roberta again...

...He came home from work one morning in late August with what he thought was a stomach ache, and was dead from a heart attack before the ambulance my terrified mother tried to call could arrive...

...He was an insurance agent, and a passionate man...

...I can see all ten of the rooms, and the hallways, too...

...There .was her gratitude to me, maintained in the face of my fear and anger at her plight, for what I did to help her...

...My mother and sister and I left that house after my father died...

...MADELINE MARGET, a writer and reviewer, is now working on a book about the humane delivery of high-tech medical care...

...Everything belonged to and reflected on all our ancestors, including and especially those who still lived around the corner...

...A few minutes before she lost consciousness she said, calmly and firmly, to me...

...Two weeks before it happened, "Allen bought a cemetery plot," she told my mother...

...When I was a child, I wondered about the significance of the content of those books...

...I know, dear," said my mother, "near me...

...He loved gardening, and music...

...each considered the other to be extraordinary...

...His funeral was on a bright, hot day...

...There were shouts and sulking over what groceries to buy and what music to listen to, rages over school grades, fury at the possibility of dishonesty...

...My mother always said she married my father because he made her laugh-on their first date they went to a dance, where he stepped on her feet but kept her in hysterics-and his brilliant mimetic gift and exaggerated sense of the ridiculous filled our house, fusing with the sadness there...

...This was still, in some way, Roberta...

...That's good, Mum," she said...

...My parents were first cousins...

...She died at home, as she wanted...

...Images of its rooms and its light, in the evening and during the day, superimpose themselves on places I read about in novels...

...I can see her at her desk-my father bought it unfinished, and stained it for her...

...I told her I thought there must be one, in some unimaginable form...