My Sister Died Before I Could Understand Her. Now I Finally Do.

In the car heading west to Aunt Dot’s funeral in Chicago with my sister, Nancy, I’ve been raging—or not raging, exactly, but going on at some length about how angry I often feel with our mother. My anger isn’t about specific things that happened so much as her take on the world. Anxiety and fear loomed large for our mother. She didn’t go out much, since the world was a dangerous place, and it seemed to be our job to get on board with her view. I didn’t—I left at 20. Nancy, for the longest time, stayed put.

Since I’m driving her red Impala, barreling west on the Ohio Turnpike, I don’t look at my sister as she makes a point to show me that she’s not blind to Mom’s darker side. Our mother, now 92 and not up for a road trip to bury her sister, has been talking about a newfound closeness with Nancy ever since my sister retired a few years ago and has more free time. But Nancy knows the supposed warmth between them is really something else.

“Mom is having her needs met and is confusing that with being close,” my sister says. I know without looking that Nancy has closed her eyes tight as she tells me this—something she does when another person’s presence threatens to disrupt her thinking. Groceries and homemade soup delivered to Mom in her old-age home, her cable-TV issues figured out, her simple finances double-checked, all by Nancy, always the worker bee. My sister is tan. At 65, she’s still good-looking. Fine age lines spiral out from those closed eyes, as if something irreversible is only beginning from within—I notice this as I glance at her.

“My problem with Mom is that she knew better—she’s not dumb,” I tell my sister. Our mother told us early on about her tough childhood, when she was never sure whether her father was going to stick around, whether they would go down the tubes financially, whether she and her two sisters would get cast off to live with some relative. Yet for a long time, it had bothered me that our mother constantly perceived danger for Nancy and me, too—not from our parents having problems, but from the trouble she was sure lurked around any corner.

I am 62 years old. I continue complaining to my sister about our mother’s view that disaster was never far: “How were we supposed to live our lives?”

Nancy, as if to get my rant to stop, tells me, “Mom is the reason I didn’t have children.”

I don’t react, at least not outwardly, though I’m thinking, Jesus. Maybe it is even worse than I thought.

Instead, I’ll let her confession—that Mom was the reason she didn’t have children, outrageous as it is—sit. There is time. I’ll dig in and find out more; we’re still a few hours from Chicago. But our mother doesn’t come up again for the remainder of the trip. It’s for another day.

A day that never comes.

Three months after our road trip, Nancy is dead. It happens suddenly, randomly. My sister chokes on her dinner at home, passes out, and though her husband, and then medics, and then doctors at a hospital over four days all try mightily to save her, they can’t.

I am now left with a hole—both from losing my sister and from never fully understanding her. Eight years later, that understanding still feels paramount. My sister became a mystery, and finding her has become a mission.

Nancy once told me that we weren’t part of the same generation. This seemed odd, given she was only three years older than me.

Still, she had a point. For the longest time, I resented doing all the work to get our parents to see how the world was changing circa 1969. Nancy’s big contribution was coming downstairs to breakfast as a high school senior wearing a raincoat, because underneath she had on culottes, which our mother forbade for school. She would graduate number two in her class of 1,100 students.

Nancy was busy, besides studying. She played field hockey, basketball, and softball in high school. None of us ever thought to go to any of her games. Evenings, Dad and I would be in the living room watching The Dean Martin Show and other network fare—me on the floor, Dad in his armchair behind me smoking—and my mother, who made most of my sister’s clothes, would be on the couch sewing, her kitchen table already set for breakfast in the ethereal light of an overhead lamp pulled down low. My sister would be upstairs in her bedroom doing homework. We knew it was calculus if, every once in a while, a “Goddammit!” with her foot pounding the floor would rain down, which meant the answer she came up with didn’t match the one in the back of her math book—this drove her nuts. I could hear my mother’s sewing plop down in her lap with each wrong answer, as if she worried there could be real damage from that pounding foot, but I knew there would be a little smile as well, for my sister going above and beyond what a girl had to do. Nancy was so…ambitious! She achieved; I watched. Dad smoked. Dean Martin was smooth and good-looking and always seemed to be on the verge of kissing one of those dancers.

It was pretty cozy, in its way. But not really so simple.

Small disruptions threw our mother off. When my sister and I were young, Dad got a promotion into management at a turbine factory, and he started coming home at 7:30 or 8 at night—we’d be eating as he came in the back door, and Mom would tell him, more panic than annoyance in her voice, “I can only hold dinner for so long!” She was really afraid, I think, that our father was going to fail, that he might lose his job, though her doctor decided she was suffering from “housewife syndrome,” and prescribed “green nerve medicine,” which is how we always referred to it. Mom’s green nerve medicine, probably Valium, resided in a handy spot on the kitchen counter for some time, just in case her day got out of control.

That was when I began to see my mother’s view of things as strange. She made the mistake of telling Nancy and me, when I was maybe 11 years old, that one day, when my sister was a baby, just after they’d moved into our house, she was vacuuming the bare maple stairs. Midway, she dropped her vacuum cleaner—the one she still used, about the size of a pot roast—right on a step, putting “a big dig in the maple.” I didn’t know why my mother was telling us this, but it seemed important.

“I sat down on that step and cried,” she told us.

“You…cried?” I said. “Because you dropped the vacuum cleaner?” This seemed…weird.

My sister laughed, nervously, at my audacity, as our mother stared at me. Her eyes were very blue. “You don’t understand,” she told me. “You don’t understand how important building this house was to your father and me.”

Oh, we knew. That my father had come along and saved her as a young woman still living with her parents, as Grandpop was still at it—drinking and smashing up cars in the city where Mom grew up, sometimes chasing other women, and that in courting her my father told my mother, “I’ll build you a house myself,” one where he would always come home for dinner. Our mother liked to say that she had a perfect marriage, that she and my father had never had an argument. Not one.

This house was the place where everything had changed for her. And it was her job to make sure that nothing intruded on that.

But here I was laughing about Mom’s reaction to the fresh dig in the maple stairs, and before I upset her with anything more about that, my sister disappeared upstairs, to her room, as if she was the one who had messed up. At 11, I did not understand the depth of our mother’s need to wipe the past clean with a pristine present—all I knew was that something small was suddenly a huge deal.

Sex was another area where Mom had to be vigilant. Once, when she picked up Nancy and me at the local pool, she spied my best friend chasing a thin girl through the water in an endless game of tag.

“He’s going to get that girl in trouble,” Mom announced to us in the car on the way home.

I laughed. Timmy and I were 13. “He doesn’t even know where his dick is,” I told my mother.

My sister, up front with Mom, gasped. Mom was silent for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know what is wrong with you,” which captured not just her annoyance that I would talk to her like I had, but something much bigger: I was missing the real danger here of what was about to happen. This seemed crazy—Timmy, like me, was just a kid playing in a pool, having innocent fun. Why did my mother see a crisis looming?

Later—much later—I would understand a fundamental difference between my sister and me: While she certainly felt my mother’s anxiety as I did, her method in dealing with it was different. That day, home from swimming, Nancy went right up to her room, probably to work on her summer reading list. She didn’t rebel. She never even gave our mother a hard time. Nancy was most comfortable alone in her room—she was like our father in that way, who spent almost all of his spare time in his workshop—becoming the smartest girl. My sister would perform her way past the danger Mom saw.

Later, I would understand a difference between my sister and me: While she felt my mother’s anxiety as I did, her method in dealing with it was different.

But that idea fell apart fast.

Graduating number two in high school got Nancy a partial scholarship to a private liberal-arts school. Making friends, though, was always a struggle for her, and she couldn’t connect: The other girls had more money, privilege, and assurance that they were in the right place. After freshman year, Nancy transferred to an inferior teachers’ college closer to home that Bill, her high school boyfriend, had gotten into, and with that, all those hours she had worked and worked, up in her room alone, came to nothing.

Nancy had leaped back to the safe life our mother saw for her: a husband, a house, and when kids came, you’d quit the teaching job to stay home. Midway through her senior year, Nancy and Bill got engaged and planned a wedding for that June, right after graduation. It could have been 1957 instead of 1973.

A small problem emerged, though: Bill slept with Nancy’s roommate. He and my sister had not even done the deed yet, she told me—Bill wanted to marry a virgin, though apparently that didn’t mean he had to be one (1957 was intact there, too). After he confessed, the wedding was off.

My mother was sure tragedy had befallen my sister. Nancy was embarrassed but certainly not heartbroken over Bill—something only I seemed to see. I told my mother, “She’s okay. She’s fine.” My mother looked at me like I had two heads: “Her heart is broken.”

I felt bad for my sister, but maybe getting rid of Bill was a good thing, and not just because he’d cheated on her. She called me into her bedroom one night, where she was lying under a sheet just as it was getting dark, as if she were some sort of invalid. As I sat precariously on the end of her bed, I learned she was doing a lot of thinking, and that even when she was engaged to Bill, she’d fantasized, sometimes, about older guys, which sounded like a confession, not quite as bad as what Bill had done in screwing her roommate, but in the same general ballpark.

That fall, my sister would find that fifth-grade boys were brutal in their assessment of everything, including her, their teacher, and she soon quit to take a job with the Social Security Administration; at an after-work happy hour she met Scott, who was slightly older, in law school, wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and, as an only child, had dinner every Saturday night with his parents. He struck me as a dweeb. One day, Mom popped over to my sister’s new apartment, decorated with my parents’ old porch furniture, and slipped in—there were Scott and my sister, naked from the waist up. Back home, my mother said to me, “You’ll never imagine what I just saw.” Once she told me what was apparently going on over there, I asked her what, exactly, she expected my sister to be doing in her apartment, alone, with her boyfriend.

Nancy was accused by our mother, after that episode, of “having hot pants.” Leave her alone, I thought. Just let her be normal.

A couple of years later, though, the stakes got higher when Nancy and Scott got married.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I lived in a converted chicken coop at the base of a mountain in the mid-Atlantic. It was a cozy little place, $50 a month in rent, with a bedroom the exact size of a single mattress. I had cable television. I had heat, too, though the plumbing would freeze in winter. My sister came to visit one fall for a weekend, before the cold set in, when my kerosene heater could still get the place plenty warm enough.

I had mixed feelings about Nancy’s visit, which was her idea—what would I do with her?—but I sensed she needed something, some relief from her regular life, which was very regular. Scott had become a lawyer for the feds on immigration, in order to keep the bad guys out of the country. Saturday-night dinners with his parents remained. He had all the charm of Joe Friday.

I was a cabdriver with an English degree, and I told people, especially girls, that I was a writer. Most nights, I got drunk.

I took Nancy to a nearby college town on Saturday, to a café where I was unlikely to run into certain friends I didn’t want to meet her. My sister had very short brown hair, like Billy Jean King, and a certain…nervousness that got worse in public. Our waitress wore a tight white top that showed off her large breasts. She and I had never had a conversation apart from ordering, though I was a regular there. After delivering menus, she returned with just the slightest smile that seemed to say, So you have a girlfriend, before she asked: “Do you know what you want?”

I took my time, looking up at her. Then I held her eyes for a moment. I said, “Yes.”

She smiled.

“Wait until I tell Mom!” Nancy exclaimed.

That evening, in my chicken coop, I lay on the floor, and Nancy sat in my armchair, holding my cat, petting it briskly as she told me she wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Nancy was talking about her marriage. The job at Social Security was the easy part of her life; she was rising in the government ranks. Nancy said that if you had an affair, you should not tell your spouse—she was speaking hypothetically, testing the waters. It was about survival. She sounded hard-edged and selfish, not like my sister at all.

I wanted to tell her that things would be okay, that it would all work out. But we had arrived at the same spot, my sister and I, from opposite directions. She always did what she was supposed to, which seemed like a fool’s errand. I was doing whatever I wanted, which at the moment wasn’t looking like a lot. Most days, it was a challenge for me simply to get out of bed. Now neither of us knew what was next.

After a decade and a half of marriage, Nancy would leave Scott. She had needed a push and got it from the guy redoing her kitchen. He had arrived by way of my parents—Tom had remodeled a bathroom for them. And by way of once having tried to pick up my sister in his ’54 Chevy when he went cruising and spied a girl outside her house one day: Tom was 16, Nancy 14, and she went running inside to report what had just happened—this boy out there—to Mom.

Here she was, at 40, finally ready. I had just moved back East from California, where I’d gone to grow up. I’d gotten married, had a son, and was taking a real stab at writing.

Nancy had transformed; it was a big surprise, and miraculous. She became 18 again. Her skirts came way up. She stopped wearing a bra. She grew her hair.

My parents disapproved of getting a divorce, which had me, during one dinner alone with them, lecturing my mother as Dad smoked, drank his coffee, and, as usual, said nothing. I stared at her blue eyes. She was an open book on the way she felt about everything, including Scott—she didn’t like him. But now it felt like she’d put my sister in a box with no exit, that she was more concerned with moral opprobrium than her daughter’s happiness.

Nancy taking up with a divorced man with two teenage sons—awfully dark, murky waters. I was all for it. They took skiing vacations, she and Tom, with Tom’s sons; they jet-skied and biked all over. He got her to check out NASCAR. There were certainly no Saturday-night dinners with his parents.

Nancy married Tom. I had a second son and began working as a freelance magazine writer. With that, my sister and I were locked in place with our families. I didn’t see Nancy much; it sometimes felt like we were still living a continent apart, as time, that great equalizer, slipped away.

I called Nancy out of the blue one day to ask her to lunch, a few months before the road trip to Aunt Dot’s funeral. At this point, Dad had been dead for some time, though making it to 74 after five decades of two and a half packs of Salems a day was a minor miracle. Mom had sold the house and moved to a nursing home. Now there was something I wanted to confess to my sister.

“I judged you,” I said to her at a tiny café. “A long time ago, I decided I was cooler and smarter.”

Her face was going WHOA, with her eyes wide and unmoving as if they were stuck—this was another habit of hers, the opposite of closing her eyes tight in search of solitary thought.

“It’s bullshit, but that’s what I did,” I told her. “I think it was mean. And I’m sorry I did that.”

“Oh…” she said, as our father might have, and then he would have taken a drag from his cigarette with a big exhale, though she had no way to hide, and to my surprise, didn’t need one.

“I had my own way,” Nancy said, her face calm now. “I had the idea that I had the superior career.” She had ended up running her local Social Security office; my long run as a freelancer had ups and downs. “It’s natural for siblings to be competitive.”

That didn’t sound quite right, coming from my sister, who had always given my creative juices appropriate respect.

“You came out of the gate much faster,” I said, feeling a little ridiculous. “Whereas I…”

“You needed time,” she said. “For me, ambition went out with leaving Scott. My goals changed.” She had retired at 57. “Anyway,” she said, “you are smarter and cooler.”

“It’s bullshit.” The stance of being above it all, from the time we were teenagers to deep into my twenties—that’s what it was, just a stance. “We’re all so vulnerable,” I told her. “I was as afraid as you were.”

My sister smiled and then reached across the table and tapped my head. “It’s all in here.”

Later that day, I got an email from her: “Very touched that you felt you wanted to apologize. The compelling thing was that it was important to you. On the one hand, I want you to know that there’s no need for you to say anything, because things are good between us. On the other hand, I don’t want to diminish the emotion that lies behind your desire for us to connect. That’s what touched me.”

I thought two things about her email: She wasn’t just letting me off the hook for judging her, but admiring my risk in telling her so. That was very kind.

The other thing: When the hell did she get so smart?

Three months after my road trip with Nancy to Aunt Dot’s funeral, she and Tom were eating pizza on their den sofa, watching baseball. He happened to look over at her—Nancy’s lips were blue. She slumped over. He called 9-1-1, which advised him to pound her chest to revive her heart. But it wasn’t her heart. She had choked on the pizza and, for some reason, did not make a sound or lurch toward Tom for help before passing out. When I met him at the hospital, my sister was on life support.

It was up to me to go tell our mother what had happened.

She was calm as I talked. In fact, she was so calm when I told her that the prognosis was not good at all, I asked my mother if she understood what I was saying. From her adjustable armchair, command central in her efficiency, Mom said, “I understand.”

I knew she did.

It was the power of our mother, and the strength of her, to take on truly bad news as if it were the order of the day. (What might happen, large or small, that was something different. That was trouble.)
I asked Mom to stand so that I could hug her; tiny now, frail, she did.

Our vigil for Nancy, looking for some sign that she wasn’t brain dead, lasted four days—with Tom and his sons, in their thirties now, and my wife and our sons, in their twenties. I advised Mom that coming to the hospital was not a good idea.

Then we pulled the plug, and she was gone.

Nancy was like my mother in a sense. She would escape her childhood home with something different. But family trauma has a strong hold on who we are.

I did figure out, in the end, an answer to my mother being the reason why my sister did not have children. My sister, I knew, was well aware of Mom’s feelings about Scott, her first husband. Our mother didn’t like that he was wooden and stiff, that when he and my sister came to the house, he had virtually nothing to say to her, that he would sit in the living room and pick up something to read, that she could never quite figure him out. When my mother would go alone to their house to drop off, say, some fresh peaches, she would walk right in. Scott told her not to do that, that she had to knock on the door. Even though my sister had married a successful guy, on one level, given his government lawyer career, it didn’t matter, because my mother had no idea who he was, though she was sure he did not measure up.

Our mother came of age when options were limited. Her one goal was to have a marriage—and family—utterly different from her upbringing. That was all she thought she could do, or wanted to do. My sister’s life, as she saw it, would mirror the one that Mom had escaped to, the one that she had created for us, the one that was trauma-free.

And Nancy was like my mother in a sense: She would escape her childhood home with something different. But family trauma has a strong hold on who we are. She would take in how our mother felt about herself—fearful and limited. Those feelings roiled in my sister as well; they were the air she breathed as a child. The one shot she had was achievement, but when she bailed on her first college at 19 years old and took up again with her boyfriend from high school at an inferior school, she had leaped back into the orbit of our mother.

With Scott, our mother put a veil of judgment over my sister—your marriage is not as good as mine—that Nancy simply couldn’t lift. She felt paralyzed until, at 40, she broke free when Tom came along.

By then, though, the window on having children had closed.

Certainly, she got to a better place with Tom, but not, in the end, fully with herself. As my sister was dying, a nurse revealed that there were two drugs in her system: an antidepressant and another to treat anxiety. This was a surprise to me—and even to Tom—and I knew it would have certainly been news to my mother as well. My sister’s trouble was hers, and hers alone.

She had told me on our road trip to Aunt Dot’s funeral, “What I am doing now is taking care of Tom and Mom”—Tom, at that point, had several medical problems. She was sure she would outlive them both, maybe for a long time. Nancy said she imagined selling their house and living in some garden apartment alone. There was no reason she had to be alone—early-morning sculling had given her the body of a 50-year-old. But I knew that’s how she saw herself, as if it was the inevitable end for her, and in her red Impala crossing Ohio into Indiana, I imagined her living in an apartment building that circled an inner courtyard of beautiful flowers—a sweet government pension had afforded her a comfortable last stop—and Nancy would go out into that courtyard with a paperback and a cup of tea. No one would come to see her. She wouldn’t have a boyfriend or any friends, and she’d read some historical novel written for the masses. Alone.

I knew she was conjuring something like that for herself, as if she had never gotten past the residue of old business. I didn’t challenge her on it, on our road trip. Instead, I talked about my anger at Mom, how difficult her fear and anxiety had been. I privately wanted, even at this late date, for my sister to rise up with me. Nancy didn’t take the bait.

There is, however, another way to look at where my sister landed, especially in her ongoing commitment to our mother. Nancy believed in duty, in coming through on the things she had been taught. She was a girl of her generation, when certain obligations trumped everything else. Now, as I think of my sister up in her childhood bedroom alone, working so hard, a richer possibility comes to me: That she was trying, in the only way she knew how, to make up for what Mom had gone through when she was young. To somehow solve our mother’s fears by being the smartest girl. And that’s a pretty incredible thing.

Over the years, I would learn more about my mother’s childhood: How there was a phone call one day from a woman my grandfather had taken up with, a call that my grandmother answered, with Grandpop God-knows-where, and how Grandmom would confide in my mother, the oldest daughter, about the woes of her marriage. There was no way to know, through the Depression and then the war, if they would make it; though finally, by the time my sister and I came along, my grandfather had stopped drinking, and my grandparents stayed together.

My sister gone, I started visiting Mom often, which surprised her. I asked why. “Your attitude,” she told me in her blunt way—I laughed, but she was right. It was the attitude I’d always had toward her. If my sister had not fully come to herself in the way I thought was so important, I hadn’t gotten all the way there either—not on Nancy’s terms of duty. Since our mother could still see right through me.

Toward the end, though, Mom and I reached a sort of truce. It helped enormously that she was a doting grandmother, and I was finally able to appreciate her smarts and toughness. Mom became a big cable-news junkie, and we’d have at it on politics; lo and behold, we landed in about the same place, able to share our mutual outrage at a world falling apart in her last couple of years.

There’s one more thing, about my sister: She had paved the way for me so that I could be the one to go off into the world. Nancy once said, about the time she came to visit me in my chicken coop after college, that she felt like an only child—she meant it in terms of the responsibility she took on, not judgment. Which allowed me to fumble my way to myself, whatever that might mean. We did reside in different generations, and my sister doing the work of hers gave me the escape hatch I had to have, an opening as big as the freakin’ moon, to do whatever I wanted.

She was a wonderful sister. It seems, in a way, that she was always working on my escape.

When our mother demanded that we weed the flower beds around the house on a summer morning long ago, and I would hem and haw and whine and move maybe 10 feet under the firethorn while my sister did her half through the azaleas and boxwood and rhododendron and hemlocks lickety-split, and then come over to my half, which was probably only a quarter to begin with, and weed almost all of that, too—well, just like that, we’re done!

Did Mom ever know that I couldn’t hold up my end? My sister never said a word.

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue with the headline: “Searching for Nancy.”