Tag Archives: Death

Sarai’s Death, One Year Later

11 Monday Jul 2011

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Sarai Washington, February 9, 1983-July 11, 2010

This was the eulogy I wrote for my sister Sarai’s funeral 360 days ago:

“On Sunday, July 11, 2010, Ms. Sarai Ador Washington passed away at the age of twenty-seven from complications from sickle-cell anemia. It was the battle of Sarai’s life from the moment she was born. Yet Sarai fought that battle with dignity and a sense that her life was worth living. For those of us who knew her, and knew her well, most of the time, Sarai lived as if her disease didn’t exist, or at least, didn’t matter.

Even in those first few months after Sarai was born, she was obviously in trouble. She hardly gained any weight, all of her food had to be fortified with iron, and she only had “three strands of hair,” as our mother put it. It was more like a few dozen in three spots on Sarai’s scalp. She always needed help. Sarai was in and out of the hospital, in need of the occasional blood transfusion, and at times in excruciating pain. Between the disease and the hardships what we were going through as a family during the early years of her life, it’s amazing to know that Sarai managed to survive in the worst of those worst times.

Despite all of this, Sarai managed to grow up and eventually find herself. She almost immediately gained a love of music, whether it was listening to her mother’s singing of hymnals or her older brother Donald’s horrible rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.” She sang in choirs with her brothers Maurice and Yiscoc while growing up. Sarai attended Mount Vernon’s public schools, where she made friends along the way. Though delayed by her bouts with sickle-cell anemia, she eventually graduated from Mount Vernon High School, in 2003.

Later that year she spent some in Silver Spring, Maryland helping to care for her nephew, Noah Collins before returning to Mount Vernon. In 2005 Sarai moved to Huntsville, Alabama to live on her own for the first time. In addition to working for Western Corporation as a customer care professional, Sarai found her voice, making a whole new group of friends, touching others lives in the process. Sarai’s wonderful sense of humor and sense of kindness were assets that her friends in New York and Alabama truly appreciated.

When her disease became more difficult to manage, Sarai moved back to Mount Vernon in the spring of 2009 to live with our mother. Though her illness had gotten worse, she still had dreams for the future. She was hoping to go back to school to earn a cosmetology license.

Sarai’s sickle-cell anemia complications got worse, so bad that she had no choice but to quit her job. Although Sarai in her final months was not always feeling her best, she still found the time and energy to spend with her nephew, Roshad Washington. Despite it all, Sarai lived her life her way. Along the way, she enriched the lives of her family and her many friends.”

There isn’t much that I’d change about what I wrote last July, other than the two or three minor grammatical errors that I didn’t catch because I was working on less than five consecutive hours of sleep per night. But I do wish that I’d been able to do more for Sarai while she was alive. I think about her almost every day, wishing that she’d stayed with me in Silver Spring long enough to look into Howard University Hospital’s work on sickle cell anemia.

Mostly, I think about how I wish the quality of Sarai’s twenty-seven years, four months and two days had been better, that her parents had been better, that my life could’ve somehow made her’s better. It just wasn’t to be.

Sarai, A Poet In My Heart

09 Wednesday Feb 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Youth

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Sarai, circa 2009. Unknown.

Today, if she were still alive, my sister Sarai would’ve turned twenty-eight years old. To think that I was only six weeks past my thirteenth birthday when she was born. Sarai was the one sibling I didn’t want because she was born in the middle of our plunge into welfare, my ex-stepfather’s abuse, and my mother’s inability to make any good decisions for herself and for the family.

But her life was a miracle in and of itself. Sarai was born a sickly sickle-cell anemia child, another sign of my mother’s indecisiveness and the collective stupidity of adults in my life. None of that really mattered after the first few months, though. From the time she was six months old until I went off to the University of Pittsburgh four years later, I made a point of looking after her, of getting her extra food, of making sure that everything she ate was fortified with iron.

Sarai was my little princess, the only girl I could relate to, the one I could dress and attempt to comb hair for (I say “attempt” because she didn’t have much hair before she became a teenage and my hair-doing skills were mediocre most days). I didn’t want to love her, but I did anyway.

As she grew older, her status as my little baby changed too. But only in a few ways. Whenever I came home

Sarai, Yonkers Apartment, December 23, 1995. Donald Earl Collins

to 616 for the holidays or visits, Sarai would say “hi,” give me a hug, and hold out her right hand for some money. Sometimes I gave her some walking around money, other times I didn’t — I was a poor student for most of the ’90s. It took awhile, but the little girl who was my sister grew up enough to live on her own a few short years before she died. That’s part of how I’d like to remember Sarai.

The first song I ever sang to her outside of lullabies was Starship’s “Sara.” It was the winter of ’86, a quarter-century ago, and Sarai didn’t care too much for my rendition of the song, with my high-falsetto flourishes and adjustments of “Sara” to “Sarai” throughout. (By the way, for those of you who aren’t practicing religious Jews or Judeo-Christian scholars, Sarai was the name of Abram’s wife before God ordained that their names would become Sarah and Abraham.) Of course, I usually sang it to her when she became petulant or when she was teasing her older brothers.

But what I should’ve been singing to her was Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara.” I should’ve been singing “wait a minute baby, stay a little while…” It would’ve been so much more appropriate. Sarai was a “poet in my heart.” She never really changed, and luckily, she never stopped living her life. And now she’s gone, and has been gone for more than seven months now. My life seems more empty, my family even less of a family, than it was before. Hopefully, I’ll see her again, whenever I’m finally called home.

My Mom, Birthday 63

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

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My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

This has been a rough year for my family. But even with my financial difficulties and writing struggles, teaching, looking for additional work, my wife in grad school and Noah turning seven, nothing compares to what my mother’s gone through in the past few months. In July, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven after a lifelong struggle with sickle-cell anemia. Earlier this month, my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died after a battle with cancer and dementia at the age of eighty-three.

 

That’s difficult enough, to lose your only daughter and your mother three months apart. It became a hardship almost immediately. Neither my sister nor my mother made any preparations for Sarai’s death, funeral or burial. “It cost too much,” my mother said after I asked about next steps the morning Sarai passed. It took three days’ worth of work to get Sarai’s afterlife arrangements done. In the case of my mother’s-side grandmother, they were never close. My mother had been back to Bradley, Arkansas to visit her father and mother only two times since she left for the Bronx and Mount Vernon in ’66. Once in the summer of ’69, when she was pregnant with me. The other was in ’04.

Because my mother married and remarried at an early age, I’ve had a front-row seat for watching her in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. My mother has always avoided looking back in her life, reflecting on her mistakes or triumphs, or talking about anything that matters other than God. But one thing that was obvious to me when I went home to 616 and Mount Vernon to help with my late sister’s funeral and cremation arrangements was the sense of regret that I could feel coming out of her body. It wasn’t just grief, mourning, the rage that I’ve seen and felt when others dear to me have died. No, there was a sense of deep, repressed regret, about all the things that could’ve and should’ve happened, but never did.

I heard that same sense of missed opportunity in my mother’s voice a few weeks ago, after my mother called to let me know that my grandmother had passed. I’d only met my grandmother once, when I made arrangements during what I called “my Southern poverty tour” as part of my social justice fellowship job to visit Shreveport, Louisiana and Bradley, Arkansas. So while I didn’t feel much for the woman, I did feel for my mother.

I felt for her because unlike my mother, I’ve said everything that I could’ve left unsaid to her years ago. The family intervention (see “The Intervention,” January 21, 2008) I orchestrated nearly nine years ago. All of the arguments we had when I was growing up. My PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon in ’97. My I love you’s to her now.

I may regret that our relationship isn’t closer, but at least I know why. I certainly regret how I’ve said some of the things I’ve said to my mother over the years, but not the meaning of my words. The only serious regret I have now is not being in a financial position to do more for my mother than I have over the past quarter-century, to make some aspects of her life easier. Still, all I can wish for her is a Happy Birthday, or at least, a day in which she can find peace. Hopefully, one birthday, she’ll have both.

My Sister Sarai (Partial Repost)

13 Tuesday Jul 2010

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Sarai & Noah, November 2003

Yesterday, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven from complications from sickle-cell anemia. It’s a disease that can often claim one’s life before they reach adulthood. Even with our advanced medicine, the average life expectancy of someone with sickle-cell anemia is forty-five years. Not to mention the pain and infections involved in having such a body-draining disease.

As much as I love her, the fact is that Sarai probably shouldn’t have been here. Between the disease and what we were going through as a family in ’82, it’s hard to believe that Sarai managed to survive in the worst of our worst times. I had just gone through my summer of abuse at the hands of her father, my mother had struggled through picket lines because she didn’t want to lose her job (only to get her hours cut in half anyway), and we were eating as if there was a global famine crisis. By the time I found out that my mother was pregnant with Sarai, with my mother working part-time, I knew we were up crap’s creek without a lifeline. My cold and adult-like argument with my mother about aborting my future sister left me even more in search of escape than I had been (see February 9, ’09 post “Sister Sarai”).

For some reason my mother didn’t listen to me, giving birth to my only sister, Sarai Adar Washington on the ninth of February ’83, born in the middle of a snowstorm. I refused to visit my mother in the hospital in New Rochelle. I didn’t want Sarai, and was tired of watching my mother make incredibly bad decisions.

Sarai came home a couple of days later, obviously stricken with the disease, as she looked like she was in pain then. I was so mad whenever I was home in Sarai’s first days. Not mad at her. Mad with my mother. Even at part-time, she could’ve seen a doctor about her sickle-cell trait, and screened to see if her idiot husband had the trait also.

Even in ’82, even without his participation, through my brothers Maurice and Yiscoc, my mother could’ve learned early on whether both her and my then stepfather Maurice had the sickle-cell trait. She long knew that she had it, and I’d known about my trait since I was seven. I’d learn about a year later, in ninth grade Biology with Mr. Graviano, that with two parents, there was a one-in-four-chance with every pregnancy that full-blown sickle-cell anemia would be passed to a child. For the first time in my life, I saw my mother as an idiot.

By the middle of the summer of ’83, Sarai was obviously in trouble. She hardly gained any weight, all of her food had to be fortified with iron, and she only had “three strands of hair,”as my mother put it. It was more like a few dozen in three spots on Sarai’s scalp. She always needed help. Sarai even then was in and out of the hospital, in need of the occasional blood transfusion, and at time in excruciating pain.

With all of this, my mother would say to me, “See, that why you shouldn’t wish for an abortion,” as if I was supposed to feel guilty about what I said to her the year before because Sarai was sick. As if I had anything to do with her being here. I just gave my mother a weak smile whenever she’d say something like that, trying not to reveal my disdain for her path-of-least-resistance decision-making.

Despite all of this, I grew to love my sister, if only because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t her fault that her parents had about as much common sense as a wino on South Fulton Avenue in Mount Vernon on a hot day in August. Sarai wasn’t to blame for her own condition. And me suggesting that my mother get an abortion — it was obviously too late to get one by the time I yelled the idea at my mother — didn’t make Sarai one sickle-cell sicker than she already was.

Over the years, Sarai did get better, then worse, then better again. I stopped babying her by the time she was a teenager, but my mother didn’t know how to stop treating her like she was a toddler. By the time of the family intervention in ’02, Sarai was obviously ready to leave 616. She moved to Alabama for three and a half years, between ’05 and ’09, to live with her high school friends and to live a slower life away from my mother and the rest of us. Even though she still had many days with pain, and more in the hospital during those years, Sarai lived her life her way. I’m happy for her that she had those years away from 616, from Mount Vernon.

Of course, the story didn’t end there. Sarai’s sickle-cell anemia complications got worse, so bad that she ended up quitting her job and moving back to Mount Vernon from Alabama, where the medical facilities were allegedly better. The last week or two before her death, while far from pleasant, and somewhat expected, was still a shock to the family. For me, most of the shock occurred months before Sarai was born.

I only hope that someone somewhere finds a cure or at least a way to help people like my sister experience less pain and a richer, more vibrant life because of this disease. The good news was, that for most of her last years, Sarai carried on as if she didn’t have a disease.

Brandie Update

24 Monday Sep 2007

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After several weeks of looking for additional information, I confirmed through my father, who’d talked with my mother, who talked with Brandie’s mother, that Brandie Weston indeed died in August in California. I don’t know all the details yet, but it appears that my former classmate was not only homeless and mentally ill, but also seriously ill (physically speaking) as well.

It’s been a hard couple of days. As much as I held out hope that maybe this was all a rumor gone awry, I knew deep down that Brandie had died. The Google searches, the calls to the coroner’s office in L.A. and the area homeless shelters had given me a fragmented picture of her life in the last couple of years, just enough for me to know that her last days were far from pretty. Although we weren’t close by any stretch, I still have felt some sorrow for her hellish life and far too soon death.

Brandie’s death is a reminder, at least to me, that we must strive to live our lives to the fullest, that tomorrow isn’t a guarantee and that the important things we need to do with our lives ought not wait. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have fun or be happy, for in reality, all the important things in life, if we were to pursue them, should bring us fulfillment and joy and give us the opportunity to have fun.

So many of us want to be seen as special, as important, as successful in our careers and in our lives outside of work that we forget that life is about connecting to others and to ourselves in ways that enable us to be true to ourselves. For all of the horror of Brandie’s last years and months, the one thing that might have been the most heart-wrenching of all was her giving up on herself, her dreams, her ever connecting to another human being in a fulfilling and wonderful way.

Brandie is a character in Boy At The Window, a character that won’t be revised as a result of her sad end. She confirmed much about the value of taking an optimistic approach to life. But she also confirmed how life can run each of us over when the mind and heart betray us, when by will or force end up living life in our heads, in our imaginations, in our hopes or dream or nightmares. I managed to fight my way out of my own imagination ages ago, to temper my heart and head with an acknowledgement of reality beyond my own mind, as well as the realization that I could use the hope of imagination to change my reality.

Brandie in her last years wouldn’t get that chance. I’m just glad that her suffering is over and hope that in all of my searching threw her life that I’ve learned something about myself as well.