My Sister's Keeper

By T. Eve Greenaway, AlterNet. Posted December 13, 2004.

My sister was strangely secretive about the whole thing. In fact, I don’t think I heard about it from her at all. I guess I must have known that things would change for her in college. But I expected her to shave her head, or experiment with drugs, or start dating an ex-con. I thought maybe she’d become a vegan.

Instead, she started going to church.

I know, I know. To some this would seem the better option. But to me, the older of the two, the one born when our parents were going to see Swami Sachidananda speak and using the word “consciousness” a lot, it was a little traumatic.

As kids, Lisa and I were so close it was sometimes suffocating. I was Beezus, she was Ramona. We were three years apart but shared a bedroom, had all the same clothes, watched the same TV shows. After school, before our ballet class, we would spend hours at a time in the public library, doing homework, avoiding homework, reading the racy parts of the fashion magazines. In high school I moved into my own room, started wearing only dark colors and carrying my journal everywhere. My need for autonomy was overwhelming. I hated being part of a duo, hated that her name was always attached to mine, that we were so often referred to as “the girls.” I harassed her relentlessly, accused her of imitating everything. One night, at dinner, in a cold, adolescent frenzy, I remember slamming my fist down on the table and screaming at her, telling her to “get her own life.”

Soon enough, she did. She became part of the student body government, went to prom with an older boyfriend, and had a social circle all her own. Within a few years I left home for college, and we become virtual strangers. Soon, we saw each other only a few times a year, and rarely spoke on the phone. While she assimilated nicely into small town culture, I practiced what I thought was bohemian living at a small liberal arts college half a continent away.

Lisa has always been drawn to tradition. And while both of my parents had rejected their religious roots, she seemed to gravitate towards the small slivers of Christianity (on my dad’s side) and Judaism (on my mom’s) that remained in our family. Our parents were not uninterested in spirituality, but they never enforced or advocated for any kind of regular ritual or practice.

On the rare occasion that our grandparents brought my sister and me along to temple for a Jewish holiday, I would sit patiently and wait for the food or the dancing. I liked lighting the Hanukkah candles but I never could remember the prayer you were supposed to say while you lit them. I suspect that Lisa, on the other hand, had probably memorized this prayer by the time she was ten, as I’m sure she did The Lord’s Prayer from the Bible — one of my dad’s favorite ways to put us to sleep at night. Thinking back, I realize that she was always collecting bits and pieces of religion and tradition and committing them to memory as we were growing up.

Dad had also kept a Bible around, a lingering trace of his Episcopalian upbringing, and I’d often picked it up as a child, read bits, studied the images. But I’d felt the same about it as I had most old literature: respectful, somewhat awe-struck, but in an abstract way.

One winter break I remember picking up a Bible, thinking that it might have arrived in a box left over after my grandma had died. It had beautiful leather binding and I remember thinking it looked like something I would have bought in a vintage bookstore. I opened it to find Lisa’s name in it and while this didn’t exactly surprise me at the time, I don’t remember taking it seriously. Until then, I think I knew she’d been going to church. But I don’t think I cared, or knew how to care about what this meant.

Then again, I wasn’t paying very close attention to anything my family was doing at the time. My dad had gotten sick and died and for years I felt somewhat numb to the world. I dealt with it by separating myself from a lot of what made me feel vulnerable or weak.

While Lisa had set out to have her deepest questions answered, I was going through my own set of changes. There was that whole business of getting on with life after college. There was the attempt to navigate my first “adult” relationship. A new city, all kinds of notions about a career path that would sweep me off my feet, fulfill me personally and allow me to pay my off my loans.

T. Eve Greenaway is an editor at Alternet. This essay originally appeared in the anthology, "Bare Your Soul: The Thinking Girl's Guide to Enlightenment."

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