Cathy

“When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

– Kahlil Gibran

I am going to be perfectly frank here: I have struggled to write this post for a while now. I’ve struggled not because I have a hard time talking about Cathy or my relationship with her – just ask anyone who has ever found themselves in a conversation with me about my family. I have no shortage of stories to tell about Cathy: her laughter, her humor, her impulsiveness, the crazy situations she often found herself in, the way should could tell a story, how much fun she was, and all of the ways she brought so much fullness and richness to all of our lives. Instead, I am struggling because I don’t know how to adequately describe, in such a small space, someone who was so much larger than life. How do I convey all of a person who was complicated in the most beautifully human ways? How do I describe my relationship with her and how it evolved and all of the ways she showed up for me? How do I name the empty space her death has left in our lives in any sort of a meaningful way when this loss so radically changed everything for everyone who loved her? I don’t think I can. 

But I also recognize that some who may be reading my words never had the chance to know her, never had the chance to hear her infectious laugh, or listen to one of her stories, or watch the way she drew others to her. Some who are reading this didn’t know the me that existed when Cathy was alive. I feel like I need to at least try to capture some of what she was in my world, some of what she was to me. I don’t think you can begin to understand what her loss has meant to me, to those of us who loved her and continually miss her, if you don’t first get a glimpse of who she was when she was alive. So while I hesitate, worried that my words won’t do justice to the force that was Cathy, that in trying to pin down my memories and my feelings about my sister and friend I will unintentionally minimize her energy and her impact, I also feel a deep need to at least introduce you to her. Just know that whatever I write here will inevitably fall short and feel woefully incomplete.

To start, you should understand the dynamic within our large family. Growing up as the youngest of six kids – 5 girls and 1 boy – I desperately wanted to be a part of whatever any of my siblings were doing. Cathy and her twin, Cory, were the next in line above me in the staircase of our ages and, at seven years older, they represented all that was cool and worthwhile, and I wanted to be wherever they were. It didn’t matter what they were doing, I followed Cathy and Cory everywhere, whenever I was allowed. I followed them to the Sarvers’ house across the street to play (where I slipped and fell on a tile step at 6 years old while playing “school” with all of them and split my chin open, requiring many stitches and leaving a scar I still have today) and to the O’Briens’ next door to swim in their pool. They were often forced to take me along with them when they went to Knott’s Berry Farm – the local amusement park – or to the beach. I proudly wore their hand-me-down clothes and shared a bedroom with them and frequently crawled into their beds at night so that I didn’t have to sleep alone. When I entered 1st grade and got to spend my only year in the same school as them, I reveled in the attention I got from their friends who called me “Little Schlegel,” feeling popular even at a time when I didn’t have many friends of my own at school.

Though all of my siblings had moved out of our family home by the time I hit middle school, Cathy returned when I was a sophomore and junior in high school, moving back into our parents’ house to save money while she worked as a waitress at Wild Bill’s dinner theater in Buena Park. In the time she lived with us, while I was struggling to find where I fit in with the social circles that buzzed around me, Cathy became my confidante – the one who cared deeply about all of the details of my dramas with friends and with boys, the one who knew all of the gossip about what had happened at school or at the party I’d attended that weekend, and had opinions on it all as if she were just as much a part of it as I was. She was also the one I had explosive fights with. Whether about clothes, taking each other’s things without asking first, or who was using the phone too much, we could quickly launch into a screaming match, and then just as quickly make up. It was not uncommon for us to go from hurling insults at each other in one moment to her asking me, “you want to go get lunch?” in the next. Though I never would have admitted it to her at the time, I tried to be like her in so many ways. I borrowed her clothes and her make up and her jewelry and tried my best to copy her style. She’d make me mix tapes of her favorite music: Concrete Blonde and When in Rome and UB40. She even convinced my parents to let me go to my very first concert with friends – UB40 at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater – because she said she would be at the same concert with her friends and would look out for me. She took me to get my first set of acrylic nails because I was a chronic nail biter, and she paid for my sessions at the tanning salon before prom because she knew I was self-conscious of how pale I looked in my backless dress. She’d drive me around in those days before I had my license, speeding around in her little Honda Del Sol, always with the hard top off, music blaring and the wind whipping our hair. I remember one time when she drove me down to Sunset Beach where we jumped in the waves, laughing and playing like we were little kids as the sun went down behind us. We returned to the sand only to find that her keys had fallen out of the pocket of her shorts, and we were forced to dig through the sand in the fading light, trying to find them. She spotted a man down the beach, headphones on as he swept the sand with a metal detector, and she ran down to him and convinced him to come aid us in our search. He found our keys, and we were on our way, armed with just another story to add to her arsenal that kept her friends constantly laughing and entertained. This was how Cathy was – never afraid to ask a stranger to jump in and help, especially when doing so would make for a good story later. One of my favorite Cathy stories was from a time she was in Las Vegas with some friends and had stayed too long at the roulette table. She was winning and couldn’t be pried away when it was time to head to the airport. Never a great judge of time and how long things would take, she ended up rushing to the airport in a cab only to hear the announcement that her gate would be closing soon as she ran through the crowded terminal. She was struggling with her luggage and was winded from running. Without hesitation, she turned to the woman – a stranger – next to her, and said, “Take my bags and run with me!” The lady looked confused for a moment, almost like she was about to do just as Cathy had commanded before shaking herself out of it and yelling back, “I will not!” To be honest, I can’t even remember if Cathy made her flight or not. It was the story of telling the lady to run with her that became the stuff of legend among those who knew Cathy, the kind of story they would beg her to tell again and again.

In college, though I lived 2 hours away, Cathy was always there when I needed her. I can remember a time during my first year at UC Santa Barbara, I was in the midst of finals at the end of a semester in which I had struggled to find my stride both academically and socially. I had been studying all night for my last exam in a course I had not spent sufficient time reading for or even attending. I was fighting a severe cold that wouldn’t go away and hadn’t slept well in a week. On top of it all, I was feeling deeply lonely and homesick. I longed to go home, to sleep in my old bedroom and eat my mom’s cooking, but I was also preparing to leave for Colorado the day after finals ended to attend a week-long ski trip with the ski and snowboard clubs of every UC campus. I just wanted to feel something familiar, to feel like I didn’t have to keep trying to be someone else, this persona I had been working on for the past four months I’d been away from home. I called Cathy just to vent and to cry. Four hours later, just as I arrived back to my dorm room after completing my exam, Cathy called me from the payphone in the lobby of my building to tell me she had driven up to spend some time with me. I felt this wave of relief and comfort. She was just there to spend the night, leaving early the next morning to make it back in time for a shift at work. And that’s how I will always think of Cathy: impulsive in all of the best ways. 

During my early 20s, she often invited me to join her and her friends when they went out or had parties (thanks to the fake ID she had procured for me). She treated me like one of her peers instead of as her baby sister, and I always felt so much more mature, more sophisticated when I was with her. When I was home from college for the summers or holidays, I’d spend many of my evenings driving over to watch The Real World with her or to walk from her apartment to Hoff’s Hut in Belmont Shore for dinner. Throughout those summers, Cathy and I worked together at the Shorehouse Cafe (along with Cory and sometimes Christy), serving heaping plates of food to drunk 20-somethings after they’d spill out of the bars on 2nd Street at closing time. She introduced me to the music of Enya and Sarah McLachlan and to the writings of Wayne Dyer and Eckhart Tolle and a Course in Miracles. She comforted me through my first real heart break, offering advice that I can now look back on as some prescient wisdom. As I struggled with the end of the relationship, she told me to imagine this scenario: I had gone on vacation to Europe and, while I was there, I happened to run into a friend I didn’t know would be there. Imagine, she continued, that although my friend and I’d had no plans to meet up, we’d spent several days together, reveling in the chance to share such an exciting adventure together, one that neither of us had even expected. Then she asked me to consider: when the time came for my friend and I to part, I wouldn’t be heartbroken that the time had been so short; instead, I’d feel grateful that I’d gotten the chance to spend that time together at all; that, even though we’d been on a huge continent made up of so many different countries and cities, filled with so many people, my friend and I had somehow found one another and enjoyed these precious moments together. Life, she said, and relationships were like that. We shouldn’t mourn the end of the relationship, but instead be joyful that we’d had the opportunity to meet up with that person for even a short time while we were here on Earth together. I never totally recognized it at the time, but Cathy was full of deep, profound wisdom about life, spirit, and faith. And she shared so much of it with me at a time in my life when I couldn’t even imagine how much I would need it later.

When I moved to Prague in 2001, Cathy decided she would visit that summer. She had never before travelled to Europe, and she was excited at the prospect of using my new home base as a jumping off point for our travels. In my time living abroad, she was the only one of my immediate family who would ever have the chance to make it over to visit, and I was equally excited to show her this new life I had created. We spent more than a month together, starting in Prague and then traveling for several weeks throughout Spain. Despite the excitement of seeing each other, of setting off on an adventure together, we immediately began bickering. Everything that I had thought was cool about my life in Prague – the places I liked to frequent, the people I thought were interesting or funny – she wasn’t impressed by. While I took her to places that I specifically chose because they weren’t places tourists would typically go, she understandably wanted to see the sites that she’d read about in her guide book. When I introduced her to some of my friends, the guys that I thought were painfully cool and sarcastic and funny, she found them to be pretentious, superficial, and uninteresting. And when she met the girl that they had assured her was annoying and boring, Cathy ended up talking to her for hours, finding her to be sweet and interesting. She didn’t think the local guy, Patrik, that I had been dating in Prague was good for me, and she wasn’t afraid to let me know it. And though she wasn’t altogether wrong on any of these counts, all of this annoyed me to no end, and we spent a good deal of our time together trading biting jabs with one another. 

Above all, she was annoyed at my lack of any sort of planning for her visit. In this, she was 100% right. I had spent the previous 5 months sort of flying by the seat of pants when it came to my travels outside of Prague – catching trains at a moment’s notice and just finding a hostel once I got there. I figured it would be the same when she and I traveled to Spain. I took her to my local travel agent to buy our round-trip tickets to Barcelona. I had several friends that were going to be there at the same time, so I had suggested we start our trip in the thriving coastal city and figure out our plans from there. This turned out to be a terrible idea. I hadn’t realized (or even thought to ask anyone) that the very weekend we arrived in Barcelona was the lead-up to the running of the bulls in neighboring Pamplona. The city was completely packed with young tourists preparing to try their luck at not getting impaled by the famous bulls as they careened through the streets of Pamplona as a part of the annual San Fermín Festival. When we arrived at the airport in Barcelona, I assured Cathy that we’d simply call one of the hostels in my guidebook, then take the high speed train into the city. Easy! But as I dialed each number in the book, I grew increasingly anxious as each and every call ended with the same, “No hay vacante.” There was not a single room available in any hostel or hotel I called. In the end, we got lucky and ran into a colleague of mine from the school I taught at back in Prague who happened to already be staying in Barcelona and was at the airport picking up a friend. He was able to guide us to his hostel off Las Ramblas, the large boulevard that runs through the heart of the city and is the most widely identified landmark for tourists in Barcelona, where – thankfully – they had two beds available. Cathy was able to get the spare bed in a room already filled with a large group of giggling, teenage Japanese girls, while the final bed available to me was the bottom bunk in a room with three men – two 20-year olds from Norway and a heavy set older man who worked on a fishing boat and wreaked of fish. It was, to say the very least, not ideal. Nevertheless, we had a great time in Barcelona together. We swam in the ocean, took a bike tour of the city, went out dancing every night, and even met up with my good friend from back home who was traveling with a group of buddies through Europe in a VW van. After several days there, as everyone else set off for Pamplona, Cathy and I continued our travels down the coast to Valencia, then inland to Madrid, and south to Granada, Malaga, Cadiz, and Sevilla before returning to Barcelona for a few days before our flight back to Prague. 

Our time together in Spain was filled with adventure, relaxation, good food, laughter, and deep conversations, but it was also punctuated by our bickering, our continued barbs at one another. In retrospect, I think we fought as a way to avoid dealing with our own personal situations. She was struggling with significant questions about what was happening with her relationship back home, trying to decide where she and Freddie were heading and whether she was ready for lasting, monogamous commitment. I was dating someone who was living with another woman at the time and feeling deeply guilty and conflicted about finding myself in the kind of relationship I had vowed I would never choose. Perhaps by deflecting and projecting, we were able to focus on what the other was doing that was wrong while failing to address the ways that our situations were actually pretty similar. 

After 5 weeks, her visit came to an end. I can still vividly recall standing outside of my apartment building on a cold, foggy summer morning. Hugging her as she stepped into a taxi in my Vinorahdy neighborhood on her way to the Ruzyne Airport, I had no way of knowing then that it would be the last time I ever saw her alive, the last time I would hug her, feel her arms hugging me back. One month later, she would call me on the phone while I was out in the Czech countryside teaching at a summer camp for East German kids with the exciting news that she and Freddie were expecting their first child the following spring. In the weeks and months that followed, we would talk about their engagement and their plans to buy a house for their new, growing family; talk of the possibility of me moving in with them once I returned from Prague to help them care for the baby while they both worked. Even from that distance, she was still the one who knew all of the details of my life there in Prague, of my relationships, my dramas. She was the one still giving me advice about how to navigate it all, talking me through the complexities of dating someone who was already involved with someone else, and encouraging me to end it and move on. She was the one who suggested I travel back to Spain to visit my good friend who was living there and to spend Thanksgiving with him when I called her depressed about the fact that my roommates had all decided to return to the States in November. She remained my confidante, even from 5,000 miles away.

Just four months after that last hug in Prague – that last smile, that last wave – I would receive the call that would forever change my life. I’d fly back to the United States to face a life that no longer felt anything like the one I had known before I left. I’d return, not to live with Cathy and Freddie and their baby as we’d planned, but to bury her and her unborn baby in my parents’ plot at All Souls Cemetery. I would move back into my parents’ house and try to figure out where my life was supposed to go from there. All of us – my parents, my siblings, Freddie, Cathy’s close friends – were left with this gaping hole, trying to figure out how we were supposed to reshape ourselves around that hole and go on living. I wrestled with the constant guilt of believing that I had wasted our last experience together by arguing with her. I felt as if I was drowning in shame and regret, wishing I could turn back the clock, go back to those weeks together in Spain, and reclaim them for us. 

In the years since, I have worked hard to try to forgive myself, to understand that the degree of closeness and connection that made her one of my most trusted friends, one of the people I had the most fun with, and the one whose advice I so often relied on, was the same connection that allowed us to feel safe enough to argue like we did, knowing the other would always be there, would always forgive whatever insults we’d flung at each other in frustration or anger. Several years after she died, I was looking through some old notebooks of Cathy’s that my mom had found packed away. In one, she had written about the trip to Spain and talked about her own regrets at how we’d argued while we were together. I felt some relief reading those words, knowing that she had experienced it the same way I had; knowing that, despite being part of the last experience we shared together face to face, our arguing didn’t define or diminish our relationship. It helped me to let go of some of that guilt, and that has helped me to focus more on the feelings that carry me through my grief instead of drowning me in it. 

I am trying to take Cathy’s earlier advice to heart, to remember what good fortune it was that, in this whole wide world, in this vast expanse that is human life, I was lucky enough to meet up with her here on Earth and to call her my sister and my friend for 24 years. And like the two friends she asked me to imagine who happened to bump into one another in Europe, I am finally, after nearly 20 years, beginning to focus on my gratitude for what a gift that was instead of the sorrow of losing her. Knowing that I had the chance to know her and love her for as long as I did can help me feel joyful even in her absence. I feel that joy when my young daughters talk about “Aunt Cathy” as if they knew her, when I reminisce with my sisters and brother about our times with Cathy and we inevitably fall into laughter so deep that tears stream from our eyes, when I share her story and our relationship with others in a way that feels genuinely honest if uncomfortably vulnerable.

Still, what I wouldn’t give for one more conversation with her, one more chance to see her smile and to hear her laugh and to listen to one of her stories. As always, even in my gratitude, in my joy, my grief remains, as I now know it always will. I am beginning to understand that grief is not the opposite of joy. It is simply the other side of the coin, both emotions coming from the very same source. Like souvenirs from a trip can reawaken my memories, taking me back in time and reminding me that what I saw and experienced was real even as it has come to feel a little dream-like, I’m starting to see my grief as the proof, the reminder of all that I shared with Cathy when she was alive, even as those memories have receded a bit, feeling less immediate, less sharp. And as I sift through these souvenirs, these memories of the time I spent with my sister while she was alive – of the times she comforted me through my tears, laughed with me through our adventures, even of the times we fought in only the way two sisters can – I know that my joy and my grief come from the very same source: the deep love and friendship we shared. Though grief often feels like something I want to move past, push aside, or bury down, I have come to believe that to do so would also push away my memories of Cathy and bury the very gift of joy she gave me that now allows me to survive my grief. I believe that, for all of us, the love we shared with those we have lost is the source of both our joy and our grief, and when we can face both and embrace both, we honor that love in the realest, most meaningful way possible.