Family
After My Sister’s Unexpected Death, I Healed Myself Through Writing
After My Sister’s Unexpected Death, I Healed Myself Through Writing
After My Sister’s Unexpected Death, I Healed Myself Through Writing
By Lisa K Friedman
Years ago, my sister Debra taught me a game she called Let’s Complain. Taking turns, each person expresses their current complaints with as much detail as needed. The listener only listens; no response is allowed. In fact, the listener is not permitted to speak at all. Furthermore, and most importantly, the topics are never to be revisited. Ever. Not in future conversations, not anywhere, not to anyone.
Our last round of Let’s Complain started in the usual way.
“I’m not speaking to my husband.” Her voice was grim as gravel. She was preparing dinner for her neighbors when her husband had decided to take to his bed. There were five people sharing the ramshackle house next door, one was an arms dealer covered in tattoos. She didn’t see superficial things. She was hoping they’d all become friends.
Hosting parties was her favorite thing to do. She loved to cook, to set the table. She’d invite veritable strangers, people she’d met at the farmer’s market and in the mall. She had no preconceived judgements about people. I suppose that is how she wanted people to behave toward her. As an overweight child, and a chubby adult, she’d sustained more than her share of harsh judgments.
“He says he’s too tired to entertain, even though he hasn’t done anything all day, and he doesn’t do anything when people come over,” she said of her husband. “At the last dinner party, he went to bed before the dessert was out!”
She’d married late at the age of 47, to a man who was addicted to pain medication. “Can you believe I found my soul mate at this age?” She was positively gleeful. “Every morning, he says, Hello wife. And I say, Hello husband. How great is that?!” Her voice danced across the miles between us. “You should write our story!” she said. I didn’t know then, that writing her story would save me.
They’d met online. Neither had ever been married; indeed, neither had ever had a healthy relationship. She was going to help him conquer his addiction. That was the plan, anyway.
I listened to her complain while stretched out on the couch. Her voice washed over me like Mozart music. His infraction was detailed in piercing staccatos, little spikes of fury that made me laugh, which made her laugh. Most of our games ended in laughter. When she hung up, I enjoyed a last moment of bliss. My head, my stomach, even my feet were happy. We’d have plenty of time to play, I thought. But I was wrong.
Ten years later, at the age of 57 she was gone. Was it heart attack? We will never know. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women in the United States, and it becomes more prevalent after menopause. Our father had heart disease, as did our grandfather. It’s a safe assumption.
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I spent that year in the murky fug of grief. I spoke infrequently; I moved as if tethered. I heard sounds as if through water. The only solace I found was in the last voice mail she left me.
“Should I buy the Crenshaw or the Cantaloupe?” she’d shouted over the din of the grocery store. “I’m making that recipe that you told me about, the one with the melon and toasted walnuts. I have thirteen people coming for dinner later. Hurry up and call me back.”
I remember chuckling at the request. I had no idea what recipe she was talking about, but I knew that our next conversation was going to be lively and fun. I never got the chance to tell her: Crenshaw.
“How does it feel to lose a sister,” an old friend asked during the holidays that winter.
I heard the question through a haze and wondered how to articulate an accurate answer. What did I feel?
“I don’t feel anything,” I said. That was the truth. I didn’t feel sad or lonely or bereft. I felt, just…nothing.
“I miss your laughter,” my husband said, his voice gentle. I missed it too.
My sister and I laughed at everything. We laughed when I dropped a 16-pound roasted turkey on the floor while presenting it to my Thanksgiving dinner table. We laughed when we got pulled over for driving under the speed limit on the Long Island Expressway with a foot-long meatball sub strewn across both laps and drips of tomato sauce on all four hands, gleaming like blood. “Cry,” she commanded with a mouthful of meatball as the trooper waited at the window. That was funny.
I began to worry that I would never find my own laughter again.
One day I scribbled Let’s Complain on a sheet of paper. I can’t even remember why I wrote it, but it felt good to approach the game anew. I noted the rules: the listening, the promise never to repeat anything. Then, I penciled in a complaint:
You left me, I wrote. You left me, and now I am alone.
The following week, I wrote about the events she had recently missed: I published an essay in the New York Times. I turned 60. My son got married.
Next, I wrote about a small mishap I’d had in the parking garage at work, where I miscalculated the distance between my car and the cement column painted yellow, and how I googled How to Remove Yellow Paint, and made a solution that took off the yellow paint, and also the white paint underneath. She would have laughed about that.
I wrote about the day she poked me with her clarinet because I was pelting her with the tiny rubber-bands banding my braces, which bent the clarinet’s octave key and costing us each $25 in repairs. I wrote about how she nursed me to health when I was sick and took care of my kids when I couldn’t get out of bed. I wrote about her weight problem, her low self-esteem, and the wounds she accumulated from careless strangers.
I went to Al-Anon and listened to the stories. I tried to understand the life she lived with her addict husband. I wrote about my fears that he was sharing his medication when she had a headache, or a twinge. I wrote about the sound of her voice when his drugs overwhelmed her body, causing her words to slur and her focus to wander.
Before I realized it, I had amassed dozens of pages about her, about me, about others in similar situations. Without realizing it, I’d written her story. I fictionalized my sister’s experience and titled my book Hello Wife, because that was how her husband greeted her. In the end, that was what made her smile.
When I was done, I had a new sense of peace. I had reconnected with my sister in a new way. And, I’d written my way out of grief.
Bio:
Lisa K. Friedman is an award-winning essayist, author, and educator. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, the Huffington Post, and other publications. Her debut novel, Hello Wife, was published to acclaim in 2025. Lisa is an avid sailor, an enthusiastic traveler and an active participant in arts and education around the country. She lives in Washington DC.
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