Reflections on a Life

It's the 15th again, and my sister has been dead for one month. Looking back on what I've written, I think I covered my initial reactions as well as my attempt to find some sense of meaning in all of this pretty well, but conspicuously absent, at least other than a few oblique comments, is me saying things about Mary Beth herself. Mary Beth is not defined by her death. The most important part of her life is not the last 36 hours, but rather the nearly 22 years that came before them. So with this, my last entry about Mary Beth (for now at least), I'd like to introduce her to all of you that never got a chance and now never will will get a chance to met her.

Mary Elizabeth was born on August 21st, 1986. She was number three out of what eventually turned out to be five kids: I was the oldest, then Andy, Mary Beth, John, and finally Abby.

Personalities can show themselves early, and Mary Beth's did. It wasn't long before it was obvious that she had a thing for people, particularly messing with their minds. One of dad's favorite stories (but one that Mary Beth hated) is from when she was about one year old. We were out doing something or another, and she was in her stroller. A passing lady looked down and commented how cute she was. Bending down, the lady tried talking to her with that voice so many people use when talking to a baby. Mary Beth, who couldn't even talk yet herself, simply stared back at her with a look somewhere between contempt and active loathing. The lady couldn't have recoiled any faster if Mary Beth had had yellow eyes, red skin, horns, and a forked tail. She went (nearly ran) on her way, and Mary Beth laughed, delighted. She just loved getting in peoples' heads that way.

She was someone that could walk into a room full of people and after five minutes tell you what every single person thought of every single other person. As much as she loved to tease and torment (and she was a certified master at it), she also could also use her skill at understanding people to walk them through things and raise their own understanding of themselves and her feelings. I've never met anyone else with such an innate ability to read people all the way through, and she was rarely wrong.

Mary Beth's other defining trait would probably be her voice. I don't remember what made her take up singing as more than something to do at Mass and in the shower, but at some point in early high school she joined the choir and there was no looking back. Her voice developed astonishingly quickly, and by the end of her senior year of high school she was one of the best singers in her school. Andy talks about one time he was in the basement of my parents house watching TV while she was in her bathroom singing (which was on the second floor and nearly at opposite ends of the house in all three dimensions) and she was being so loud he tried to yell at her to quiet down because he couldn't hear the TV. The problem was she couldn't hear Andy yelling at her because they were all the way across the house from each other. Her voice was just that loud to get through that distance.

Although she didn't really intend to pursue music as a career, she chose to major in Music at Texas A&M (a school admittedly not known for its music program, and I say that as someone who minored in music there myself) because she loved it so much, even though she chose to pursue graduate school in other areas. The Department of Performance Studies couldn't believe their luck to have such a talented vocalist. For the first two years she was at A&M, her vocal instructor kept referring to what they hoped to accomplish "Before you transfer to a real music school." It wasn't until her junior year came that they realized that Mary Beth was there to stay. Her senior recital, delivered just over a month before her death, was an absolute knock-out. She sang for nearly an hour in at least four different languages, and only the very last song was in English. I was unable to attend due to being in China with my medical school, but reports from everyone who was there say that she was absolutely incredible.

She was also heavily involved at St. Mary's, which is the student Catholic Church in College Station, as well as the Brazos Valley Coalition for Life. As I mentioned previously, the spiritual growth she showed over the last 6-12 months of her life were absolutely humbling and a bar I can only hope to match given the rest of my life. The outpouring of support and stories from those who knew her and her involvement in both the Church and the Pro-Life movement speak to how many lives she touched during her four years at A&M.

There's so much else to say of course. Her habits and mannerisms, particularly in how she almost had a different persona to interact with different people (especially inside out family). Her flaws and imperfections (when she was hungry, safest to keep you arms and legs away from her mouth). There's no way that even the simplest person could be adequately described in a thousand words, much less someone like Mary Beth (who was far from simple). But for all of you for whom this will be your first and possibly only exposure to her, I hope this might give you at least a glimpse of the loss you'll experience at never getting to know her. Because at the end of the day, the loss is ours, not hers. She's happier now than we can every be here on Earth. It's those of us left behind to deal with the loss who are the ones suffering.

Reflections on a Loss

It's now Sunday night, and Mary Beth has been dead for four days. I still can't wrap my head entirely around this fact. The raw emotion has worn off, to be replaced by a sense of absence. No longer am I overcome by the fact that she's gone, but instead I just notice over and over that she's missing. I'll be out doing one thing or another and just think of how much she'd enjoy what was going on and keep realizing that she's not here now and never will be again. It's a lot to take in, and I haven't entirely wrapped my head around it. A lot of times it just feels like she's gone away for a little while, but given enough time she'll be back. "Never" hasn't managed to sink in yet.

But all of that is part of the normal grieving process, and that's not something I can offer any additional insight into. But I can look at my sister's death and try to find some meaning in it. I touched on this in my last post, but even now, a mere 72 hours or so later, I feel I have more to say.

To start off, I guess I have to offer some insight into my own faith so you know where I'm coming from. I have never been someone that could really feel God's presence of hear His voice, although I know people who have done both. The most I could do was look back at my life and retroactively see the influence He's had and how He guided me to where I need to be, often even using my mistakes to put me where I belonged. It makes things hard while I'm in the middle of it, since I so often feel that I'm flying blind, but with hindsight I can sometimes find the rationale behind many of what seemed to be random events. And with Mary Beth, even if I can't understand the why, God has allowed me to see beginning of the evidence that there is one. I may not see the rules of the game or the positions of the pieces, but God at least showed me that there is a board, even if the scope of it is beyond my understanding.

As I've talked with others over these last few days, I've been shown a side of Mary Beth that I was only dimly aware of, despite how close all my siblings and I are to each other. And listening to what they've had to say, and seeing the reactions to her death, I've truly come to believe that despite her not knowing that it was coming, God was helping her prepare to die. Her spiritual life, already extremely vibrant, took on an even greater depth and strength of purpose. She became acutely aware of her own faults and weaknesses, and worked tirelessly to improve them. Her relationship with Craig, her boyfriend, also took more meaning. She had an amazing senior voice recital that showed the incredible singer she had become. Always a shining star, over the last months of her too-short life Mary Beth became nothing short of dazzling.

Meanwhile, she was busy tying up loose ends. Her voice recital provided a cap on her musical career, and just last Friday (a mere six days before her death) she graduated from A&M with a bachelors in music and double minors in psychology and Spanish (and only 18 hours from a triple major). She took her relationship with Craig to near the limits that it could be as boyfriend and girlfriend. She spent more time talking with my parents, my siblings, and myself. As graduation approached, she got back in touch with many of her old friends that she'd drifted apart from. Soon she was going to enter the next phase of her life (going after a PhD in clinical psychology for graduate school, and Craig was going to propose at the end of the summer), but for this brief moment she had pretty much completed everything.

And it was in this moment, when she was shining at her very brightest and had wrapped everything up, that it all came crashing down (all too literally in her case). Despite the pain I've been feeling, I can't help but take comfort in how clean the break was; how she didn't leave anything hanging or work unfinished. I also take comfort in how she was clearly prepared to meet a death she didn't even know was coming. And I look at this and cannot accept it was all a coincidence. I can't believe that she was becoming an ever-more spiritual person while simultaneously tying up all the dangling parts of her life for nothing. I reject the idea that she was chasing a fairy tale. There was a purpose to all of this, and even if I can't understand all of it, that doesn't mean it's not there. As a Catholic, facets of the answers are available, but I can't put them into the big picture, and probably never will.

But that's ok. As I've thought about Mary Beth's death (and God knows I've thought about it a lot these last four days) I realize I can accept that. For me it's enough to know that there is meaning in a seemingly random accident, and that even in death my sister's life served a purpose that will live beyond her physical death. Already one of my brothers has been contacted by someone who was led to rekindle his own spiritual life after hearing Mary Beth's story. Her organs have given hope and life to people who had neither just one week ago. The outpouring of support from people, including many that we haven't heard from in years, continues to swell, as do the messages from her friends and professors speaking about the kind of person that she was. And on it continues. It may not be much, but it's enough.

Farewell, Mary Elizabeth

When I put his blog up, I stated right off the bat that I had no idea what I was going to put in here. Never in my worst nightmares could I have imagined that this would be my first real post. Two days ago, my younger sister, Mary Beth, was broadsided by a tow truck that apparently was speeding and ran a red light in downtown Austin. The injury was horrific, and although her initial trajectory in the hospital gave reason for hope, she remained in critical condition. Last night around 8 PM she began to bleed into her brain. The neurosurgeon placed a shunt to attempt to drain the blood, which initially helped. However, at about 11 PM the pressure inside her skull increased to fatal levels and could not be reduced. The pressure became high enough that it closed off the blood vessels supplying blood to the brain and forced her brain stem down through the base of her skull. That opening is not big enough to allow for brain functionality if it's forced through, and my sister died shortly thereafter. At 10:30 AM this morning she was formally declared brain dead.

My 21-year-old sister, who just graduated from Texas A&M last Friday, is gone. Her future has been taken away from her. She was going to go to Texas A&M's graduate school for a PhD in Clinical Psychology next fall. She had a terrific boyfriend who is a wonderful person, and it would have been a privilege to have him as a brother-in-law. They had already planned to get engaged after her first year of grad school. Now none of that is going to happen. Her story is concluded, far faster than any of us wanted.

Never again in this world will I hear one of her lightning-fast, razor-sharp comebacks, or her beautiful singing voice. I'll never see her smile, or the way she could walk into a room and within five minutes tell you what every single person thought of every other person. The fact that I've lost this still doesn't seem quite real. Intellectually I know it's true and emotionally I do as well, but the waves of grief continue to come every time I try to speak about her. Even writing this post I'm fighting back tears, as I try to put all of my thoughts and emotions and everything else I'm feeling into words that seem utterly inadequate for what I'm trying to say.

And yet even in this, one of the darkest hours of my entire life, there's reason to see the good. The outpouring of support from friends both recent and old, far and near, has been truly overwhelming. People all over the country have been calling and praying for her and for us. It's a reminder of how wonderful the friends that we have are, and a humbling realization that we can only hope to be worthy of such friends. Never for the rest of my life will I forget the way that we have been supported through this ordeal.

As for making sense of Mary Beth's death, right now I can't even try. I don't think that I'll ever make sense of it, but I know that there is sense behind it. We're all put into this world to serve God's purpose, and once we've completed the work He has set out for us, He calls us home. In Mary Beth's case, there was far less work for her to complete than any of us wanted, and she was so good that she was able to finish it 3 months before her 22nd birthday. She planned to be a researcher and wife and mother, but that wasn't meant to be, and it wasn't what God put her here for. Instead she had far too short a time with us, she touched all of us to our very cores, and then she left. I don't know why that was the way it had to be, but somehow God makes sense of it all, and even when we're not allowed to see the big picture that doesn't mean it's not there.

Good-bye for now Mary Beth, and I love you. I'll see you again someday, even if I don't know when. Maybe then you can explain it all to me.

Welcome to the Chronicles of Chris

So the big question is, of course, what goes in here? The answer is I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm finishing up my fourth year of medical school this month and beginning my intern year of Residency July 1st, so that's obviously a topic that will get quite a bit of coverage, but beyond that it's wide open. Random ramblings on life, the universe, and everything will no doubt be a part of this (it is a blog), but also just random things on whatever happen to strike my fancy. I've never done the blogging thing before, so my current plan is to hop in for a ride and see where it takes me. Glad to have you along for it.