The Sister I Lost Before She Died

Ruth Ann lives eleven miles away and she has not spoken to her in twenty years.

It started over the house, in the way these things start over something and are never actually about it. There were words said at a kitchen table in 2005 by both of them, and there was a letter afterward that made everything worse, and there was a second letter that was never answered.

And then, somehow, twenty years.

Not a dramatic twenty years. That is what nobody understands. It was not a feud. Nobody threw anything. It was two women who each waited for the other one, and then the waiting became the arrangement, and then the arrangement became a fact of the family that everybody works around at Christmas.

They have a hinged photograph frame in the front room and one side of it is turned partly away, and she cannot tell you when she did that or whether she meant it.

Their mother died in 2013. They were both at the funeral. They stood eleven feet apart and neither of them crossed it and their cousin cried in the parking lot about it afterward.

And here is what she has never said to anybody, in twenty years.

I lost my sister.

She cannot say it because Ruth Ann is alive. She is alive and well and eleven miles away and there is a phone in this house. And so every person she has ever half raised this with has said the same thing in one form or another: well, you could always ring her.

Which means the conversation stops being about a loss and starts being about a task.

And she is tired. She is seventy one and she has spent twenty years having a grief treated as a to do list item that she keeps not getting round to, and there is nobody on this earth who has ever just said to her, that is an awful thing to have happened to you.

If any woman has looked at a turned photograph frame like that, stay with me. There is a verse in Proverbs that tells the truth about this, and telling the truth is the whole gift.

Scripture is honest about how hard those bars are

Here is the line, and the honesty in it is unusual.

A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle.Proverbs 18:19

Harder than a strong city. That is a military image and everybody who first read it understood exactly what it meant: a walled city with a gate, siege works, months of work, and quite possibly failure.

And then the second image goes further. Their contentions are like the bars of a castle. Not a door. Bars. The thing that is specifically built so that it cannot be opened from the outside by somebody who wants in.

That is the book of wisdom describing a family estrangement, and it does not describe it as a simple thing that a reasonable person could sort out on a Tuesday.

It says: this is the hardest kind of closed there is.

You are inside a situation Scripture itself calls harder than taking a walled city, and you were inside it for every one of the twenty years people told you to just ring her. Proverbs 18:19 is the written word putting a family breach on a level with siege warfare, and the Spirit who breathed that line is in a front room with a woman looking at a photograph frame.

And notice what that verse is not doing. It is not assigning blame. It does not say who offended whom, or who should move, or who is at fault. It is a statement about the nature of the thing and nothing else.

Nobody is being prosecuted in that verse. Not her. Not Ruth Ann.

You have not been put on trial by that passage, and you were never once required to establish whose fault 2005 was before you could be comforted. Proverbs 18:19 describes the bars without ever naming who set them, and the Holy Spirit does not require a verdict on a kitchen table before He will sit down with a woman in a chair.

You could always ring her is not comfort, and here is why

Now let me take that sentence apart carefully, because it has been said to her perhaps forty times and it has closed the subject every single time.

Well, you could always ring her.

The people who said it were being kind and practical. Most of them love her. Some of them have themselves rung a sister and had it go well and are speaking out of that.

But look at what the sentence does. It converts a grief into a problem, and a problem into her problem, and then it hands it back to her.

And there is a quiet accusation folded inside it that nobody intends: if the solution is that available, then the continuation of the loss is a choice, and if it is a choice then she is choosing it, and if she is choosing it then she is not really entitled to grieve it.

That is why she stopped bringing it up. Not because anybody was unkind. Because every time she raised a loss she was handed a task, and after about the fifteenth time a person stops raising it.

I am not going to tell her to ring her sister. I am not going to tell her not to. That is not a thing an article can know, and the decision belongs to her and to God and to nobody else on this earth, including me.

You are permitted to grieve this without deciding anything at all about a telephone, and you were permitted to grieve it in every one of the twenty years. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to weep and a time to mourn and attaches no condition about what the mourner ought to do next, and the Spirit of God does not hand a woman an assignment in place of comfort.

God counts a loss even while both people are breathing

Now the thing this site exists to say, and this is the room where it is hardest to say.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Counted. Bottled. Written.

And there is not one condition in that verse. It does not ask whether the person is dead. It does not ask whether the loss was preventable. It does not ask whether the crying woman contributed to her own circumstances, which is a question that people apply to estrangement constantly and never apply to a widow.

David wrote that psalm while being hunted, in a mess largely of other people's making and partly of his own, and he did not sort his tears into the deserved and the undeserved before offering them.

So the funeral in 2013 with eleven feet of floor is counted. The turned frame is counted. Every Christmas that everybody worked around is counted. Twenty years of a phone that both of them could have picked up, counted, on both ends, without one word of adjudication.

You are keeping a grief God has already entered in His own book, and you were counted through all twenty years when nobody would call it anything. Psalm 56:8 has the tears bottled with no question asked about the cause and no assessment of who was at fault, and the Holy Spirit does not sort a woman's grief into the parts she is entitled to and the parts she is not.