Jon Flick

Redlands, California, USA

Taf

She used to make me mad.

My little sister, that is. 

I can still see Tammy’s tassels twirling on her bike basket as she lapped me around the oval dirt driveway. I was a gangly goof. Some would say still, when Dad introduced us to a ball and bat. She tripled off the pine tree. Me? I made contact all right. I fouled one off my noggin, whereupon I stomped into the house.

My family was like most I suppose. When one ticked the other off, we stewed on it rather than confrontation. Reality rocked my boat. I’ve got thin skin when it comes to criticism, and Taf (ever independent changing her name to her initials) would make me mad when she told me exactly what I did wrong.

Being two years apart, we were close. After Dad split to shack up with a chick named Spot at the end of Love St., we conspired on our bunk beds how we would get our parents back together. Side by side, we would comb the canyons that flanked our Southern California home. Canteens of Goofy Grape Kool-Aid slung over shoulder, dogs by our side, we sought solace in nature. 

She didn’t do cartwheels when I tore down her horse corral to build a stage for a rock band named Euphoria to play during a high school keg party but she got over it.

She may be my sister, but I will say she was a stone cold fox when she was a bridesmaid in my wedding. I must admit I wasn’t thrown for too much of a loss when we received the news that she had breast cancer a month or so after I walked down the aisle. If anybody beat cancer, it would be my sister Taf.

You see, she was one of those souls that barges into your heart after a five-minute conversation. She truly wanted to know about you and sometimes I thought she was interviewing my friends for a quiz show. But she just cared. She was the one that peeled the wallflower off the wall.

She led a vagabond life attending four colleges, working at various jobs like a female Kerouac. Waitressing, and stints at a toy store and museum.

She got married and chose to live in Jackson, Wyoming though she could have made more money teaching elsewhere. In Jackson, she could feed the starving elk in her backyard when the snow covered their forage. She could ride her two horses, followed by her hounds. She saved most of them from a certain death in the pound. In Jackson, her hunting guide husband left her as soon as she contracted cancer. She was devastated but she chose to smell the roses. The former track and volleyball star would beat it with the inspiration derived from the pines that cornered her corral.

Taf went to my fathers and stepmother’s for a while to receive chemo, radiation and alternative options. She always found comfort in the place called ‘Shady Acres’ 200 acres in the Northern California hills, sliced by a stream where wild pigs root and deer drink.

I visited her at ‘Shady Acres’ shortly after her husband rode off in her hour of need. Once again, she wanted to test me, to see if I could keep up with her. I had trouble doing so on the hike though she had no hair and was getting as thin as an Ethiopian refugee. We climbed up the mountain road, and finally to my panting elation, she stopped at the foot of a giant green redwood.

“This is my tree,” she squeaked, in the voice constricted by the cancer that had spread into her lungs.

My sister took my hand and we entered inside the blackened cave sized hollow carved out by a lightning strike.

You see, like Taf, it still lived on the outside, its branches reaching for the sun. Taf raised her eyes to the top of the tree that gave a glimpse of the heavens and piped, “Live Taf.”

She didn’t.

On Dec. 21st she died, after an evening in which Dad slept by her side. Often, he read to her in that last year and she giggled with glee like a three-year-old. She was thirty eight.

I mourn my sister. I grew up a Catholic, attended Sacred Heart school for eight years under the ruler of the Dominican Nuns. Played a folk guitar in youth masses and served as an altar boy. I don’t believe Catholicism is any better than any other religion, and I do confess I haven’t attended church much the past several years, I always believed things evened out in the end. Now I’m not so sure.

Just three months before, my sister ignored the advice of her doctors and hiked and rappelled up the Tetons. She had to breathe out of an air canister perched on her back. Being Taf she was a bit bummed she didn’t climb the whole mountain, one that strikes fear in me just thinking of scaling it.

If I could steal one of her traits, it would be her courage and her positive attitude.

A week before she died, she collapsed on the bathroom floor on her way to the restroom. When my mom tried to pick her up, she wanted to lie there for a while.

“This tile is so pretty.”

When we talked last, we said we loved each other. I told her I was proud of her and she me. But with the morphine masking her voice, I couldn’t make out her last sentence. 

“What did she say, mom?”

“I think she asked if you decorated the office for Christmas?”