My sister's name was a threat

And now she's gone

Photo by Michael Jerrard

For years, she wasn’t a sister. Or even a half-sister, which is what she was.

She was a black hole gnawing at the less-than-celestial fabric of my family. My mother told me to avoid her, and to avoid being like her, at all costs.

It wasn’t hard to avoid her as I had not ever met her. Over 22 years my senior, she had been estranged from my mother for decades. Since childhood, I’d heard the damning stories about how she’d “run off” when she was 16 years old to join a commune with a young man named Harley. She sounded wild and daring. Someone willing to follow her heart.

But that’s not what happened.

Photo by Dima Pechurin

Her name was Terry. The name my mother uttered with such bitterness to send me a message. You’ll lose your mother’s love if you follow Terry’s feral ways. My mother described Terry as if she’d mutated from a gorgeous teenage girl into a dangerously insane creature who dared to run away from the warm, loving home she had with her mother, stepfather, and two half-brothers. Why was she so restless? So willing to throw in her lot with total strangers? Had she sprouted thorns from her back, making her unable to recline in the comfort of her own bed?

But as always, family stories throw a blanket over the truth to smother its flame — a blanket woven from denial and heartache. And guilt.

Mostly guilt.

And then Terry tore that blanket away.

While I was in my late teens, Terry showed up at our house one day. She was tall and a bit pear-shaped, her edges blurred. Every contour of her face mirrored that of our mother’s. Only 16 years apart, they too looked like they could have been sisters. I’d heard before she arrived that Terry was married and had three children. That sounded like the opposite of what I’d always been told about her. When I greeted her, Terry seemed kind, although her smile was sad, her eyes shining with pain. She’d come to talk to my mother — our mother — about something. So, the two women disappeared into the master bedroom to talk and shut the door.

I listened surreptitiously.

And what I heard shocked me.

Terry had run away at 16, that was true. When she fled the house that day, it might have been to a commune or a friend’s house or a church. It’s not clear. However, the police eventually caught her. When they brought her to the station, the officers noticed immediately the deep wounds and scarring across her legs and ankles. The officer asked the detective on call to talk to her, as he suspected she was the victim of a crime. With the detective, she spoke quietly about how her stepfather would use his belt to lacerate her legs and ankles during his blackout rages.

The detective sent Terry to see a nurse at the station who could dress her injuries. It was that nurse in whom Terry confided her long-term sexual trauma at the hands of her stepfather. So when my mother — our mother — came to the police station to pick Terry up, the authorities refused to release her. There was absolutely no way they would send her home. Instead, they reached out to social services to find Terry a foster family.

My mother was furious. She denied any such thing was happening in her home. It was lies. Terry was a liar…

A sweet Catholic couple took Terry in. With them she lived a productive life. Finished high school. Converted to Catholicism. Started working. Dated. At the age of 23, she married the man she was married to the day she came to reconcile with my mother.

Our mother.

When they emerged from the master bedroom, their faces were blotchy and damp. Eyes red. Clutching tissues. Terry went straight to the front door and said goodbye to us “girls.” I remember feeling an alteration to that family fabric. But I didn’t feel free to ask questions. I don’t know what drove her to have that very difficult conversation with my mother. Was it so her children could know their grandmother? Did she yearn to reunite with her own mother? What she did was brave. And our mother must have been ready to hear it, which was huge.

I never again heard Terry’s name used as a weapon.

She was a big Elvis fan. Photo by JR Harris.

She and her family visited with us. My parents fussed over the house before they arrived and bought her children gifts. It wasn’t like having another sister, though. It was more like having a new aunt with young cousins.

Tragedy continued to plague her life. Her youngest son died in a car crash at 18 years old. At his funeral, we released balloons into the sky.

She later divorced and moved to northern California to be closer to my parents, who exploited her vulnerability and craving for love. I was estranged from them at the time, so they substituted one daughter for another. Although she questioned why I was estranged, she accepted their version of events, even how my father downplayed my own childhood abuse. He used open hands, not fists. It was not that bad.

As I reentered their lives, they discarded her. I never forgave them for their callousness. Yet she saw they were elderly and needed support, so she continued to give it. We shared stories and bonded in a series of long, loving phone calls. I found her heart, her fragility, her messiness. And I held it as gently as I could.

Thankfully, she found purpose, inclusion, and love with her own daughters, caring for her grandchildren as a live-in nanny. She told me that she once had to go to school and talk to a teacher who’d disciplined one of her granddaughters for “lying” when she claimed to have an aunt who was “an award-winning author.” Terry took out her phone and showed the teacher my books on Amazon, as well as my website. She was proud of me.

I always told her that I loved her.

(I don’t have any photos of her handy, but here’s a sweet voicemail she left me in August 2019 that I kept.)

She never knew her real father. She wanted to find him but had no idea where to start. He was 32 when he married our mother, who was 15 at the time. She’d fled her own abusive father and married as soon as possible. Shortly after Terry was born, our mother fled that marriage, infant in tow. Why? No one knows for certain.

But I can guess.

And then a miracle happened. Terry’s other half-sister found her. Terry visited her father’s grave in Mississippi and talked to people who’d known him. They said he’d carried a photo of our mother holding baby Terry in his wallet for his entire life.

A child holding a child.

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When the dementia started setting in, I noticed it on our calls. She eventually became too confused to care for her grandchildren and entered memory care during the pandemic. My husband and I drove out to visit her, but she didn’t remember me that day and refused to see us.

She passed away Saturday, May 2.

Terry, you were loved. I hope you knew it.