In Memoriam: My Sister Katie, Leaving the Boat

   My sister Katie died one year ago on Christmas day, (2010).  In the year since, I've discovered that those we lose are the ones we learn from the most.  In part because we keep remembering things we had forgotten, . . . She brought me disposable syringes from her nurse's training program, and showed me how to practice injections on the skin of an orange . . . She had a wonderful ability to laugh at herself  even in situations when others would be angry and embarrassed . . .  She left the dinner table early one evening and soon we heard from the living room a loud crash. We rushed in and there she was, sitting in the middle of a collapsed piano bench, laughing . . . and she sometimes thought her parents and siblings were silly. . . She brought home a black female friend, whose last name was "White." This was thought to be amusing by the rest of the family .

   In the early 90s Katie published an article in a book entitled Whatever Happened To The Good Sisters? (easily findable by title on Amazon). In a family that had assumed the highest IQ was owned by the eldest child, she, the second born, proved to be one with the superior number. . .  Her piece was called "A Good Sister Story."  In it she described her entrance into the religious order, the Daughters of Charity; she chose an order that did not allow novices to make home visits. Ever. She wanted to get away from the rule of home.  She recounted what it was like to be a nun for twenty-six years, and how and why she decided to leave the order and live on her own.  All of those activities demanded courage, and Katie had that quality in abundance. When I was a school boy I found myself in the middle of a circle of goading males. I squared off against a bigger stronger boy, but she broke through, stopped the fight before it began, and dispersed the instigators. 
   In developing her narrative, she quotes a metaphor that was part of the culture of the convent.  "The community is the boat that will lead you to heaven.  If you leave the boat you will be in the water and God knows if you will ever get to heaven; or what will happen to you."  That dictate was freighted with the threat of spiritual loss. It served as a yoke that kept the young nuns on the prescribed path.  But over time Katie took the metaphor and turned it on its head.  "In the last five years that I was in the community, we began to have a lot of meetings, talking about where we were going as a community.  I longed for someone to sit down and talk with me about where I was going as a person.  But it seemed as though no one cared.  I didn't feel they had their own answers, let alone mine.  Finally, staying in the boat wasn't enough.  I knew if I did that I would never walk on water."  Katie did not aspire to miraculous locomotion.  The statement she sets down is her way of both pointing to and deflating the overwrought prediction of disaster for those with the temerity to "leave the boat."  But her departure--while a surprise to many, including herself--was not an angry exit.  Indeed, she concluded:  "I am very grateful for what I was given in the community; my entering was not a mistake and my leaving was not a mistake." 

   A family death creates not only absence but also a sobering sense of mortality.  We were both young and in the whole of our health, visiting in Mobile, AL, taking a stroll on a bridge.  Our talk turned to the worth of our work.  How long would our lives be?  What do we need to accomplish in our three score and ten?  She put things in perspective.  "I don't think we should fret.  We're all just passing through anyway." 
   For me, my sister's death  has confirmed the reality of "the undiscover'd country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns."  That's an uncomfortable truth.  But much later in the play, the melancholy Dane articulates a more settled stance toward finitude, one that reminds me of that conversation on the bridge.  "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,yet it will come.  The readiness is all." 
   So if it's time to leave your boat, do so.  Your next step may be to walk on water.