This one's been long in coming. Finally the urge to write this came when I woke up on a rainy morning a day after Christmas, a day after I hosted for the first time our family's Christmas lunch.
This story happened in the not too recent past, Christmas 2004.
Christmas 2004 is just one of the highlights in the long overdrawn drama in the family. But this one I think would be the overly dramatic highlight, picture this: Christmas eve of 2004, few hours before the stroke of midnight, amidst the festive cool air of Christmas, I was walking stretches of desolate road , soaking wet in thunderous rain, searching vainly for my lost sister who has gone astray of home and this world, literally and figuratively. I can no longer imagine and I do not want to recall anymore the thoughts, morbid and other gruesome scenarios, running through my head during that time as I continued walking that desolate road.
Backtrack more than a year before that. I got a frantic call from my elder sister telling me to come quickly for something bad has happened to my other sister, a suicide attempt: wrist slashing and drinking poisonous concoction nobody knows what. An attempt, as I came to know and realized only at that time, a result of a long battered-wife existence. As I get caught of her sorry state in that small clinic/hospital where she was brought; the doctor in me tells me that she will definitely survive the physical problem of slashed wrist and poisoning; but definitely not the emotional/psychological scar that I know and I'm afraid to admit is just starting to unfold.
And it was, as I have predicted just the start of our long battle with her major clinical depression; not to mention the various legal, financial and emotional toil it has exacted to the rest of us, family members. I have to go through with her with several confinement in the hospital, including the dreaded ECT treatments and weeks of isolation and heavy sedations. It was already taxing for me to deal with her medical condition and it was made doubly hard for I have to deal as well with the rest of the family who cannot seemed to comprehend the ongoing turmoil or as I have surmised probably refuse to accept that fact. I have become a referee, mediating on my sister's needs and the need to satisfy as well the rest of the family who in their stage of denial have also felt the need to be assuaged of the situation. Most of the time I'm caught in the middle, made more difficult by the fact that the family have relegated to me the responsibility of making all sorts of decisions; I am the youngest in the family and this I cannot really fathom. One part of me shouts with pride for the trust and responsibility my family has given to me being a son, a brother, a doctor and to the wisdom of my being; but another part of me was crying out foul for the burden put upon me. I dutifully did my part, despite all the pain and difficulties.
And so on that stormy Christmas Eve, I got a frantic call from my parents who were extremely anxious when my sister was nowhere to be found shortly after she had an altercation with her son. It was almost close to midnight when I got a call to proceed to her house. I found her already towelled dried and warming in bed, sobbing still and would only allow me to be near her. Somehow, she must have found her way back home on her own. I spent the rest of the night beside her in bed as she sobbed and waited in vain for sleep to find her, amidst all her fears and my reassurance to her every pleas. I woke up on that morning feeling more exhausted and oblivious that it was Christmas Day. I can't recall anymore how the rest of that Christmas day went.
Thankfully, she was able to pick up her shattered life, it was a slow and exasperating recovery for her and the rest of the family. She was put off her medications the following year. It was a hard climb out of the pit. I felt sorry for my parents for having been put into the ordeal despite their advancing age. At the same time I felt relief that my parents are still around to help us see this thing through. They have shown an overwhelming resilience and I feel remorseful at the same time for I know they have been robbed of the chance to enjoy their retirement and that I could have done more to lighten up their burden, I just have been selfish at times.
She left for the prospect of a renewed life in another country in 2006. This Christmas of 2007, her son finally joined her and hopefully the pit of nightmare will just be but part of dustbin of memory.
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