Ink and Vein

content note for discussion of death, miscarriage, and suicidal ideation

My life began with death.

This is not a metaphor.

On March 24th, 1984, my mom went into early labor, during a sandstorm in the desert.

She went into early labor because my twin miscarried.

Because my twin miscarried, the doctors figured out that my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. They also figured out I was breech, and practically hanging myself before my feet ever touched the earth.

That’s some kind of metaphor, right there, while also being quite literal.

They rushed my mom into the operating room for an emergency cesarean, and both my mother and I lived. It was a close call, and had the miscarriage not occurred, it’s possible that medical team might not have been able to act in time to save us.

My entrance into the world came packaged with the death of my sister.

I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge, as a child. I don’t really know what to do with it, even now, having just turned forty.

It’s a fact of my life, a foundational part of my origin story, that my life came at a trade for hers. Or, at least, that’s how I understood it, how I received the story as it was told to me.

I spent a great deal of time feeling as if I did not deserve the trade, the sacrifice. It definitely had me looking at god, back when I believed in god, with some serious side-eye, giving a “miracle” (as my parents told me) in the form of me, and taking a life in return.

And then I spent time grateful that I was the one who stayed, because that meant my sister didn’t have to live through the things I did. It was better that she had not experienced this world, I told myself, better that she wasn’t here.

I wove many narratives about myself and my twin, explanations for her death, and my life, and I suspect that my life-long suicidal ideation is tangled up in all of this, too. (lest you think I exaggerate with “life-long”, the first time I remember wanting to die, I was five).

I turned forty a few days ago, and I am glad I’m alive on more days than I’m not.

For the first time in my years on earth, I went back to my birthplace and visited my sister’s grave site in Riverside National Cemetery, a military cemetery in California. I decided to drive down there, camp along the way, and spend some time with my twin.

It felt overdue.

On the 24th, I drove from a damp camping site in Sedona to Joshua Tree National Park, where I set up camp, and then I drove on to Riverside, to the cemetery, and walked along the grassy rows of headstones until I found hers.

Immediately choked with tears, I read her name on the stone, and I looked around to see what her view was like. Just after 5:00pm, cold, and threatening to rain. Mountains off in one direction, trees around. It was a pretty cemetery, a good view.

I sat down in the grass, and spoke to her. I read her a letter I’d written the day before in my campsite overlooking the red rocks in Sedona. I lay down in the grass next to her, and took a selfie: my face puffy and red from crying, next to the headstone with her name.

After several minutes of cold seeping into me, I knelt in the grass. I knew that if I didn’t leave then, I wouldn’t be able to leave at all, not without someone telling me to when the cemetery gates were closing.

I kissed the stone, rose to my feet, and walked away. I wished for some flowers to leave her, something to signal that anyone had been there.

Many hours of my life were spent wondering what I was missing, how I was lacking, without her. Always thinking of what I was not, because of her absence. While words formed on my page, though, as my pen inked what it was I wanted to express, I started to think about what I was because of her presence. Physically, she wasn’t in my life, beyond the womb, but she was deeply imprinted on my narrative. Her shape, her name, her specter, have always been right next to me, behind me, in front of me… how did that shape me?

As I write my own story these past months, it occurred to me that she never got to tell hers. Her story was written for her, by people trying to cope with the grief of losing her. She didn’t become who she would’ve been, frozen forever in that moment of just-before-life.

Part of me froze in that moment with her, in the choke-hold of the umbilical cord, holding hands with her. Part of me will always be in that moment with her, and part of her came with me, too, as I struggled, feet-first, into life.