The following is an excerpt from a novella, My Sister Died:
Less and less the phone seemed to ring, and hardly at all if you discounted the telemarketers. And yet there it was, a personal message on his Voicemail when he came in the door with a small bag of groceries.
“Hi, Gideon. It’s me, Jeanne, with some sad news. Ingrid has suffered cardiac arrest. The ambulance is taking her to the hospital as I speak.”
Such a voice his niece had. Mournful and slow and rich with pathos, whether discussing family illness or the weather.
Hospital? Ingrid would be DOA. Seventy-nine-year-old women who weighed over three hundred pounds and whose LDL cholesterol numbers flew high off the chart did not survive such attacks.
He envisioned weeping and wailing, a lot of serious emoting, up at the hospital. Perhaps best to delay his arrival to spare himself the spectacle. If that sounded mean, he supposed that it was.
But death was not only and always about tears.
Such a sister, Ingrid. Moody, stubborn. A consumer of fast food eaten right out of greasy bags. There were closet drinkers and closet eaters. Ingrid one of the latter, parking herself in front of the refrigerator in the crowded, rundown Upper West Side apartment late at night while everyone slept. Though not always closeted. Spooning Breyer’s ice cream into her mouth right out of the quart-sized container while watching Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9 on the second-hand black and white TV in the darkened living room. And telling the doctor essentially bah fung goo when he recommended cholesterol-lowering medication. A woman with her own purposes in life. A sister he hadn’t known, or had known in only one dimension of her existence, he suspected.
Download the full pdf here: My Sister Died