Six weeks can be a long time - especially when it starts with snow and ends with spring buds on the trees and crocus coming up.
But six weeks is also a very short time to say goodbye to someone you love.
It was this time of year just a few short years ago that my sister went on to the next stage of her journey. And journey it was, because she believed she had been and would again be reincarnated. We talked about that belief of hers way before the six weeks started. That's how I knew she would be okay. I think I knew anyway.
Funny that our beverage of choice back then would wind up being the sole contributing factor in her death. Whoever said "alcohol doesn't kill, people kill" got it wrong. Because I watched my sister die from our favorite - vodka.
It started with a phone call to come soon, she was in very bad shape. Her major organs had shut down and she was in ICU. I made the trip in to see her many times over the next six weeks, some of them with hope as she seemed to rally, then finally with dread that I would never have to go back again because there would be no need.
When the doctors called a meeting to discuss her options, I knew it would be over soon. She was hopelessly brain dead because of organ shutdown, and, if kept alive artificially, would never be the same.
So with massive amounts of guilt and love - we chose to let her go. She left us the next day, quietly, something she never had been in life, one moment here and the next gone.
I vowed that day that I would never force my daughter to make that decision for me because of a bottle of Stoli or whatever the drink of the day was. It took me another year to bring that change about, a year of struggles and making life changing decisions about who and what I wanted to be. Its been two and a half years since my last Stoli martini straight up with a twist. And I look back and thank my sister, because in leaving this life for what she believed was the next, my sister gave me my life back - a reincarnation of a different sort. I measure time differently now, not when can I have the next drink, but when and what will be the next step in my journey.
Six weeks - very long or very short - depending on how you view it.
Thankyou sis and godspeed on your journey. I'll see ya.
Kathy
