My sister, Jenn, is dead. I still can't get my head around it.
I'm eight years older than Jenn, so growing up it seemed like I was always in one phase of life and she was in another. We were separated by age, but always really close. Whenever we did get together we always picked right up where we left off. We were comfortable together. She was funny, pretty and like I wrote, has a sense of compassion beyond her years. There were lots of times she gave her big brother a shoulder to lean on, and I hope I gave as good as I got from her. Sometimes I wonder.
I always thought that we would have time together later on, that the age difference would close and we would find each other, finally together fighting the good fight as adults trying to make it in the world. Hell -- even my aborted foray into the culinary world was partly based on her influence. She just loved cooking so much that she got me interested in it. I wanted to see what the buzz was about so to speak and once I got into it, I found that we really shared the same passion. A part of me even envied her opportunity to do what she loved and get paid for it. How rare is that.
It was great to have her stay with us when she was doing her externally with the CIA. While she was really busy, we still got to hang out a lot together and just BS and chat. She was at the Westchester Country Club doing baking and pastry work and some line cooking and really moving and grooving. When she was around, she was always cooking and the place always smelled delicious. I have a letter from the owner of the Westchester Country Club commending her and the rest of the team for turning out and serving great food during a blackout. That's the culinary world for you. You get it done. You kick ass. And Jenn did. However -- things turned bad when her back condition just got worse and worse under the stress of the work. One day she fell (sometimes she could not feel her left leg) and they told her not to come back until she was well.
She opted for surgery, which seemed to help when she recovered, but not much. She also got an epidural after that which did not help at all.
The thing is with the CIA externships -- you need to complete 18 continuous weeks. You do 17 and 6 days and you stop for some reason? Do it all over again. So Jenn went to to it all over again but this time at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz. Again, she was moving and grooving but she hurt her back again and decided that she just could not go through this again and that despite it being her dream, she had to try and do something else. At the time I agreed with her and advocated it. Why prolong the agony? Cut your losses and move on. We all thought that was the best route. In retrospect, I made it too practical. While the advice was, maybe on the surface, sound, I don't think any of us did enough to talk to her about how bad it made her feel. I mean we knew how bad it made her feel, so why bring it up and make it worse?
After the CIA she took on too much. Classes during the day, working at IBM in a clean room all night and hardly getting any sleep. And she moved out and got an apartment because she felt weird about living at home. She seemed to think that there was a stigma attached to it. These days there isn't really -- but if you feel a certain way about things, that's the way you feel and its hard to change that.
As for how she died.... we are not sure yet. The short of it is that its medication related - possibly an adverse interaction, but that's just speculation at this point till we get the toxicology report. Till then we wait.
