The frenzy with which my sister had cleaned our Dad's home in the hours after he passed did not abate. After his funeral, she began working on his house, which he had left her in his will, to prepare it for her to move into.
She started in mid-February and kept at it for months.
She assembled items for auction and had them hauled off. She went through Dad's clothes and gave them to me to deal with. Much to my delight, his black clerical suits (without the collar) went to a homeless shelter in Kansas City because the homeless men had nothing to be buried in.
Dad would have been thrilled that he helped the poor in some small way.
Pris got rid of duplicate household items, painted every room, added wallpaper strips to every room (much to my dismay years later) and made his house her own. By May she had hired movers to help bring the big items from her house to his and she was finally done.
She refused all offers of help from my husband and I, and moved quite a bit of her items herself. However, after all those years of looking after our Dad, especially the last three weeks of his life, she had not really cared for her own health.
Pris still suffered greatly from her 1993 stroke. She had difficulty walking, her equilibrium not quite 100 percent. Her vision left a lot to be desired and her breathing was always labored.
She admitted she wasn't feeling well a few months after Dad passed away and I took her to the hospital where she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. The doctor told her she'd had several small heart attacks in the months after Dad died. All the frenetic activity had not been good for her coming on top of months and months of little sleep and a lot of care for Dad.
I'm sure my sister had anticipated that once Dad passed away, her life would pretty much return to normal. She had plenty of interests that she could still enjoy – driving, shopping, perusing the Internet, puzzles, arts and crafts, gardening and cleaning.
The heart attacks and diagnosis of CHF struck a devastating blow to her psyche. She became more withdrawn and cranky. It slowed her down significantly and contributed to her already shaky equilibrium.
Eighteen months after Dad passed, in the summer of 2003, Pris decided to have the house sided. She always had a habit of using whatever local workers she could find on her own, without ever checking credentials. For someone so savvy in the business world, this would often leave her with problems.
For example: from the time Dad died until Pris passed away, she insisted on using the same mechanic for her oil changes. He was local to our town and had a very poor reputation for lousy work, overcharging and claiming problems that didn't exist with your vehicle. We had been burned by him at least once as had several people we knew. Despite these testimonials, Pris dug her heels in every time and continued to bring her vehicle back to this guy.
So it was the same with the siding contractor. A small, local business, the owner sent two people over to do the job. While the siding has more or less held up over the years, the problems that presented themselves during the two weeks it took them to side the house nearly drove my sister to her grave.
And cranky? She was off the charts miserable. I couldn't talk to her at all.
Over the subsequent years, I determined that my sister was a very angry woman. Gone was the talented, savvy woman who worked so hard at her job 20 years before. Gone was the incredible sense of humor. If you didn't do what she asked when she snapped her fingers, she would explode. Often her explosions had no explanation, no merit, and came out of nowhere.
My husband, my son and I learned to tiptoe around her, though I was usually on the receiving end of her tirades.
I eventually got some things out of her that helped me to understand her behavior. Life had dealt her some difficult blows.
Because there was 15 years between us in age, she was raised in the '40s and '50s, while I was raised in the '60s and '70s. Our parents were born in the early years of the 20th century and had an incredibly difficult time adjusting to life as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
When Pris graduated from high school, she wanted to be a missionary. Looking back at her school years, she was very popular and well-liked. She was on the debating team, yearbook and newspaper staff, played sports and loved the drama club. She was active in Girl Scouts and had a very popular column in the city's newspaper while in school.
This was not the same gal that emerged from college with a teaching degree. Mom and Dad refused to allow her to become a missionary. She was to be a teacher or secretary – that's it.
It would take many, many years for this to come out of Pris in a huge display of anger – and she waited until both parents were gone before letting it out.
She only taught school for one year, souring on it very quickly. Prior to that, while she was a student teacher in Newark, NJ, she had disciplined a student in her class early one day and at day's end, she had her back turned to the door and was writing on the blackboard in the rear of the class. She suddenly heard someone shriek behind her and turned to find the student she had disciplined with his arm raised, a knife clutched in his hand, ready to plunge it into her back when the regular teacher had walked into the room and caught him before the deed was done.
Nevertheless, despite the close call, Pris finished college and got a job at the high school in Vineland, N.J., where we were then living by then. After just one school year she'd had enough.
Mom and Dad quickly pushed her into a banking career, having a parishioner who worked at a local bank; he helped Pris get a teller job.
It turned out that Pris had found her niche. She was really good at handling money and quickly moved up through the ranks into the Trust Department. She was well-respected in her job and managed to withstand every merger for the next 27 years, ending her career as a Vice-President in charge of Trust with J.P. Morgan Chase.
She hated every minute of it, but she was very good at what she did.
She ended her career despising most men, a consequence of having worked in the business-like setting all those years when men were paid more than women, more well-respected than women, and got away with misbehaving much easier, along with sexual harassment being the larger order of the day.
She was laid off in 1992 when her branch closed and, not wanting to transfer to New York, she decided to come out to Missouri where Dad was clearly in need of being looked after.
After one year of searching for work and finding herself overqualified for that which she was trained to do, she had a massive stroke in 1993.
By 2003, she was a bitter, angry woman. She not only had suffered the debilitating stroke in '93, diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2002, but she had severe diabetes II, macular degeneration and glaucoma, as well as high blood pressure.
No amount of medication or diet lowered her triglycerides. There was no joy in her life. She was limited on walking, which affected being able to take herself to the mall, or visit some of the small towns out here that offer boutiques and interesting antique shops in which to browse.
My sister never married, but did have a bit of a romantic life during her younger working years. Used to living alone, she had a difficult time understanding what it was like to live with someone else, so she spent a great deal of time in the years after our Dad's death, being angry at him for things he did that merely illustrated that he was simply a man. Living with someone else requires anyone to have a measure of compromise in their life. All the years of looking after Dad demanded that Pris would often have to sleep at his house and otherwise spend a great deal of time doing things for him.
His habits annoyed her. Our habits annoyed her.
How do you help someone whose own choices in life created the hell she was living in? She chose to smoke cigarettes for 35 years, not exercise and work in a very stressful atmosphere.
Not only was she angry at our parents for her career path, but she was angry at herself for her own choices.
Looking after my sister was a lesson in compassion and strength. While she was angry, she could also show the most compassion and caring attitude that I've ever witnessed. She always donated to the needy, anonymously, every year at Christmas. She took care of us, especially me in every hour of need. She was there for me throughout my entire life.
She never gave up and she fought life's battles with ferocity.
In 2005 she suffered another heart attack and had to be hospitalized with severe symptoms of her congestive heart failure. At the same time and for several years after, she suffered from additional problems with her eyes, though by 2009, her eyesight had finally improved.
In 2008 she had another stroke and was hospitalized for that, along with the edema that collected around her heart. Her kidneys were beginning to fail.
Still my sister persevered.
She drove herself to the city to shop, went antiquing and continued doing her own housework. She was rarely idle.
With sleep elusive to her much of the time, she went to bed very early and was up by the crack of dawn if not before. It was a frequent sight to be making coffee at 6 a.m. and see her in her backyard pulling weeds – her head covered in mosquito netting.
She learned to live with her limitations and found ways around everything. She tried new diabetic recipes and began enjoying the art of cooking. She and I traded books, often discussing the plot lines. She reveled in my newspaper work and eagerly read my columns and gave me advice – that English major she once was proving that her education was not for naught.
Every year would bring me to the conclusion that it was her last Christmas, but every new year brought new surprising examples of Prissy's tenacity.
It is amazing at what the human spirit can endure. Years of suffering, years of limited activity, limited mental acuity, limited enjoyment of life – yet a person will remain plugging away at life.
Through it all, I am convinced that Pris knew that God had a purpose for her and she had to remain faithful.
By 2012, however, things began to change.
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