My Sister

None of these things mattered at the end as I watched them hand my oldest nephew the folded American flag after the 21-gun salute at her funeral. She was a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a wife, a mother, and a soldier. My sister was so full of life and genuinely thrived on socializing and being adored. She was the life of every party, had real life goals, and big dreams. She was my baby sister and I never thought about a life without her in it. When reality set in and the concept fully formed in my mind and heart, a part of me died, too. There are several things in life a person takes for granted. The idea that someone you love will always be there is one of those things.

I was one year and 4 months old when I was given a sister, K.M. Trisco. Our dad went to prison a couple years later on an arson charge and our mom got a divorce almost immediately. She found a man willing to love her and her two young daughters and we became an instant family. As the years went by, we developed an almost twin-like bond in the sense that we were each striving for our own identities yet born from and living in the same small, dysfunctional world. Nobody could understand the traumas that we lived through or the chaos that we carefully navigated each day just to survive. We were partners in crime and I was perfectly okay with taking the blame and consequences because I couldn’t stand to see her hurt. We spent most of our time together, living on the outskirts of town, playing in the dirt that was usually mud and the fields that were either filled with tall grass and wildflowers or ripe with hay to bale. A common theme of our childhood was “Go play outside or you can take your ass to bed” so we definitely

got our fill of country air. I remember the summer we got caught with a big black trash bag full of packs of cigarettes, cigarellos, lighters and cigars. We had decided to steal all these various items from the Cenex that was about a half mile down the road and we would “Go play” in the barn and take our turns trying to smoke like our mom and stepdad. We were only 7 and 8 years old but we had an agenda and quite the stash before we were found out and my mom, for all her hollering and threats to turn us in, smoked them all. The lesson was never realized but we never did steal from that Cenex again or let her catch us.

Eventually, our mom being an addict and life getting to be more chaotic and uncertain, I shifted into a caretaker role and I started to resent my sister. Taking care of her meant no time for myself and too much added stress on my adolescent brain. I was starting to develop a lot of bad behaviors and had no outlet for my emotions which led to me taking out most of my frustration and hurt on her. I once chased her with a butcher knife down the hallway of our trailer screaming that I was going to kill her for some minor annoyance. I almost drowned her at the lake for interrupting a conversation I was having with some friends while out past the buoys. She told me, later in life, how those memories still haunted her and how traumatized she was to have felt like I really would end her life. I could never apologize enough and there was nothing to say in my defense that would ever make what I had done okay.

As the years rolled by, I ended up in a foster home because my mom couldn’t “manage” me and my sister stayed with my mom and her newest boyfriend. We still stayed in contact and got to see each other a few times a year. After my graduation, I moved away for the summer and got my driver’s license and came back for the fall to start cosmetology school. I moved in with my now single mom and pregnant baby sister. I ended up pregnant a couple months later and we both had happy, healthy babies within a year.

I knew that my sister had experimented with meth before her pregnancy and she was already an alcoholic. I had started using two months before I got pregnant. We both abstained for the duration of our pregnancies but only I continued to use. Eventually, the relationship with my sister became strained. While she was getting her life together and joining the National Guard and being a great mom, I was continuing the vicious cycle of addiction we were exposed to during our formative years. The time came when my sister had her third and final child and became addicted to opiates. My boyfriend at the time was also addicted to opiates and could get them at a cheaper price. This led us to hang out with my sister more often and my need to babysit my niece and nephews became more urgent with each of her comedowns. On one of these occasions, as she could barely move or talk, riddled with pain and shame, she asked me to get her some meth. Wanting to help and reverting to my inability to see her hurt, I acquiesced. It went downhill from there.

The next few years were a blur of drugs for the both of us. The wonderful mother and protective aunt she had become had slowly but surely faded into a broken woman without a husband, children, or home. What had started out as a little “pick me up” after a downer binge quickly turned into a habitual numbing of her mind, body, and soul until she truly felt she had nothing to live for. There was no party she could participate in that could bring her back from the guilt, condemnation, and utter loneliness she pushed through on a daily basis.

Her body was found on the bathroom floor early one morning, cold and unresponsive, with a needle still in her arm and the remnants of a fentanyl-laced baggie of heroin and a blackened kitchen spoon within arms’ reach. The official cause of death was a fentanyl overdose but the journals my mom and I found in her things after the fact, the ominous messages sent to friends, and note left to my dad were clear indicators that she simply given up. I miss her every single day and wish with all of my heart that I could rewrite the ending to her story but that’s not reality. This is the story of a life I took for granted.