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and A Birth
by Rolf Gates
I was staying with my sister Wendy and her new husband one night when they got into a
terrible argument. “I don’t know what to do,” I heard Wendy say. “I don’t know what to do.”
Wendy’s life had caught up to her.
The next morning her husband woke me. He was frantic. He dragged me to their room, where
I found Wendy, dead. She was thirty-one years old. She had committed suicide, with the same
determination and decisiveness that she had done everything else in her life. Moments later
I was on the steps of their porch, listening to the sirens of the ambulance that was arriving
too late. In rapid succession I was being questioned by police, then bringing the news to our
parents, and then getting ready to go to a funeral.
My parents adopted Wendy from an orphanage in ill with tuberculosis and complications
from that ailment. My parents loved her immediately and nursed her back to health. My older
brother came some time later, also from Korea, and I was adopted in 1966 after spending
the first two years of my life in an orphanage in Albany, New York. My first memory is of the
night I was adopted. My new family and I were in a hotel room, and I became tremendously
ill from the chocolate the nuns at the orphanage had given me as a gift. I woke up several
times in the middle of the night to throw up more violently than I ever have since. After one of
these episodes I lay down in my bed and realized someone was sleeping next to me. It was
Wendy.
As a young woman, Wendy was smart, very funny, and almost always kind. She did not have
the physical courage of an athlete; she had the moral courage of a leader. It was her fate to
be a small Asian girl in a small white world. She was required to move through childhood and
adolescence as a subhuman. To her family she was everything; to the rest of the world she
was nothing. She bore this burden with unimpeachable courage and integrity.
My love for Wendy was a blend of reverence, hero worship, and delight. She knew all of my
failings and loved me fiercely nonetheless. I could screw up a thousand times and she would
be there the next day expecting me to do my best. There was never a moment when I did not
want to impress her.
At the funeral home, I stole a moment to be alone by Wendy’s open casket. I did not know
what I wanted from her. I touched her hand, refusing to accept what it meant that her hand
was cold. I knelt to tell her how much I loved her, but anger overtook me, and instead I told
her, “I will not die this way.”
The death of my sister was a shattering experience. When I collected my broken parts I recast
myself in steel. The person who was born from that death was unyielding. In my grief it felt
good to be implacable. But Jasmine has taught me the value of suppleness. I have found that
the ends may indeed justify the means, but our experience, what we live, is the means. My
family is the means. My life is the means. The end is just death.
A teacher of mine says that the ordinary is the way. The shining path is the care that we bring
to the everyday. I am learning to touch life as though it was something exquisite, something
fragile, something beautiful. I am learning to remember Wendy and to remember Jasmine
with each breath.
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