*Quick Summary: The author writes about his sister’s life, death, and aftermath of her passing.*
My sister Michelle was five years older than me. Being closer in age than our other two siblings, we spent the most time together. She was very smart but also a great underachiever. She could get very good grades in school, yet she could be somewhat flighty and unfocused at times. She was an interesting study in reality versus potential. I have no doubt she could have accomplished anything in life she wanted to do. Her ambition seemed quite strong at times, and an amazing future was always just out of her reach. At other times, she appeared to have very little motivation at all. I never understood what caused these fluctuations, but I eventually came to accept them as just part of who she was.
She would “daydream” quite often. It would get on my nerves as a little kid, and I didn’t enjoy the “game” of her pretending not to notice us during her daydreams. Being the annoying little brother, I would make loud noises, wave my hands in front of her face, poke her, or do any of a thousand aggravating things to get her to “wake up”. Being one of the middle children of four, Michelle was prone to occasional bouts of fabricated drama. Never anything terribly serious, but there were times when she felt she’d been overlooked, and she made sure that wasn’t going to be a regular thing. I was convinced this was just another ploy to grab attention, so I didn’t tolerate it without extremely annoying measures of my own. What we didn’t know is she had epilepsy. These were no daydreams; she was having seizures. No one knew that then, and she wasn’t diagnosed until much later in life. As you may guess, it made us all feel horrible for not knowing, or in my case, taunting her while she was having them. What a little jerk I was. Kids don’t understand these sorts of things, but if I could take all that back, I sure would.
Michelle was sexually assaulted when we were young by a local teen. She was walking through a small patch of woods between our apartment and her school, when a boy took her by surprise. He forced her to do some horrible things, then when the police caught him and they all went to court, he smiled, smirked, licked his lips, and otherwise taunted her and my parents during the proceedings. Looking back, that incident had a profound effect on her future relationships. I know seeing her and my parents deal with it certainly affected me as well. It caused me to feel very protective of her, even though I was so much younger.
No matter what Michelle and I said to each other, we always told each other, “I love you!” before we were done. Always. That was a very comforting feeling. It made me realize she and I would always love each other, no matter what, for the rest of our lives. She moved away, had children, married, and our parting words always remained consistent – “I love you!” It was those words that deepened a bond that would seemingly never be broken.
While she was still in high school, she met an older man at work named Lee that she fell absolutely head over heels in love with. She met him at a local Bojangles’, and would follow him to a few other restaurants, working under him in different capacities. We didn’t know whether to like or dislike Lee at first. He didn’t seem like a bad person, but even as a kid, I knew something seemed off about him. I now recognize that feeling and stay far away from those who put off that vibe, but I hadn’t learned that lesson yet. Neither had Michelle, but she was also quite obsessed with him.
Michelle and Lee moved in together, started a family, got married, he enlisted and they moved to Germany for a while. It was then things seemed to begin to get out of Michelle’s control. Whether it was due to abuse, isolation away from us, her ever-growing list of physical problems, or some other thing, she changed. Her relationship with the family changed along with it. The joy and personality she always possessed seemed to disappear and be replaced with a weary sense of depression and dread. She had become very negative, and seemed truly defeated. They moved back to North Carolina, settling in Greensboro. Eventually, she told us she was working towards a divorce. This brought a level of both sadness and happiness to our family, as although we didn’t have the full picture of their relationship, we knew things were terribly wrong. In NC, a couple has to be physically separated for one year before they can be divorced, and Lee had no intentions of ever leaving Michelle. Ever. Due to her physical issues and her children, I don’t think she ever felt she could truly be on her own. As co-dependent as their relationship was, it didn’t seem it would ever end, and Lee made sure she felt that way.
Despite that, by all accounts, while in cohabitation, they were living somewhat separate lives. They had a single-wide, two bedroom mobile home, and one was living on one side, sleeping in bed with one child, while the other was living on the opposing end with the other child. Eventually Michelle met another man. Not being a particularly motivated sort, he was quite content to move in with Michelle, her husband, their two kids, and a bunch of animals in this single-wide, two bedroom mobile home. Her relationship with my family had become more and more strained due to choices centered around the relationships with these men. This was not a good situation for anyone. Then Michelle got pregnant again. Her and her boyfriend were now about to bring their own child into this extreme dysfunction. The boyfriend would scarcely hold a job, and for some reason, maybe because he didn’t want to let her go, Lee was funding the entire household, boyfriend included. I specifically remember one time when Lee came back from the store with the boyfriend when I was there, and the boyfriend bragged proudly that Lee had bought him some clothes. I just shook my head. It was clear they were very good friends, and neither seemed to think as much of Michelle or the kids as they did each other. The saddest part for me was my sister was allowing this. She was letting them treat her as so much less than she was. So much less than who she was capable of being. She was smarter than this. She was prouder than this. She had been raised better than this. She was far more capable than the situation she was seemingly stuck in.
They had systematically stripped away her self-esteem, played on her giving nature, and used her for all she was worth. The situation she was in was doing damage to herself and her children. The trailer was such a mess. There was an immediate smell of ammonia from animal urine when you’d open the door. Piles of clothes on the floor, being used as a litter box by the multiple cats. The children were forced to find the “cleanest” of the dirty clothes on the floor to wear. Dishes stacked as high as you could get them in the sink. Roaches and other bugs crawling everywhere. Just a narrow path to walk through that wasn’t covered by something. The children were calling both men “Dad”. Everyone in the house stunk of animal urine and feces, body odor, and the rest. The situation was just bad. Really bad.
I finally decided to confront her about all of this. I was tired of seeing my parents cry every time they would talk with her, and I knew she was not living her life as I wanted her to live it. Yes, I said I. My judgement of how she was living was not up to my expectations for her. I still wrestle with how judgmental I was, at the same time, knowing she was indeed in trouble. Perhaps I should have done more, spoken sooner, been louder. Perhaps I should’ve minded my own business. I will never know. What I do know is I will never feel like I did enough, or did the right things at the right times.
The last time I saw her was the most unpleasant time I’d ever spent with her in all my 26 years, and it was the only time in our lives we didn’t tell each other, “I love you!” before parting. In fact, her last words to me were, “I hate you!”.
A few days later, just before Christmas of 1997, we got a call from Ann, Michelle’s best friend, telling us she was dead. She suffered a massive seizure in the night that took her life. She had one seizure, woke up, took her medicine, and went back to sleep, only to have another seizure that killed her before the medicine could be processed by her body. The ultimate culmination of her lifelong battle with epilepsy. A battle made much worse by a blow to her head when she lived in Germany. A blow she would quietly admit to her friends was not from a fall off a stool in the kitchen as we were initially told, but from her husband Lee. The same blow that would increase the frequency and degree of her seizures from then to the end of her life at 31 years old.
Despite the fact she had daily medicine to control her seizures, she stopped taking it because it made her feel bad. She had been plagued with depression, made worse by several physical issues, and a systemic lack of support by the aforementioned men in her life. She left three children with two fathers, and a ton of trouble for my parents, her friend Ann, her children and I to muddle through.
For six months after she died, her words, her voice – “I HATE YOU!” played on a loop in my head. I have since forgiven her for those words. I know she didn’t mean it. At least that’s what I choose to believe. I also forgive her for not taking her medicine, and after many years I have forgiven her for making such a huge mess for her children to live through. I have realized she only wanted the best for them; she was just so very lost. She was certainly not blameless, but it was her children’s fathers who were the biggest problem. They wore her down and stripped her of her dignity and self-worth. Yes, she had allowed these men to destroy her life, but she certainly wasn’t alone in the destruction left behind.
After her death, my parents paid for her funeral with the understanding her husband and boyfriend would pay for her marker. They did not. Another lie from those two. Sad to know they didn’t think enough of the mother of their children to pay for a simple marker for her grave. We later paid for it, even as we learned Lee emptied his father’s life savings, and took out loans and credit cards in his young son’s name.
Her trailer was repossessed as they had stopped making payments on it. It was only a few months old, but had holes in the floor from the urine. I understand it was destroyed after it was repossessed. A new trailer, too damaged to fix.
Despite trying to maintain contact with her children, we, and more specifically, I, was not allowed to see them or have contact for years by their fathers.
For the longest time, the hardest thing for me to do after she died was one of the easiest things when she was alive – telling her simply, “I love you”. The first time I said it again was while she laid in the casket at her funeral. That was also the hardest, because I didn’t really mean it. I was still so mad at her for dying and for leaving behind such a terrible mess. Yes, I still loved her, but those didn’t seem to be the right words at the time.
I am so happy to be in contact with her daughters Jennifer and Katie again, though sadly her son Charlie died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in March 2014. The girls know the truth about their upbringing and their parents now. I prayed for so many years that one day they’d figure it out, and they did. She would be quite proud of her girls. I believe they have learned from her mistakes and are determined to be better people. In fact, they’ve already succeeded in that.
UPDATED June 5, 2020: Michelle’s former husband Lee passed away in June, 2019. I have since updated this post with his name, and some other things about him and their relationship.
Below is a gallery of nearly all the photos I own of Michelle. You will notice not many of them are from her teen years and above. It’s just what I’ve got. Other family members do have a few other photos of her, and if I get copies, I will include them here.
