“In the summer of ’65, his mother brought him a sister. And she told him, we must attend to her needs, she’s so much younger than you. Well, he ran down the hall and he cried, oh how could his parents have lied? When they said he was their only son, he thought he was their only one. He left home on a spring day in 1983, and he hoped to find all the love he had lost in that earlier time. Well his sister grew up, and she married a man. He gave her a son, ah yes a lovely son. They dressed him up warmly, they sent him to school and taught him how to fight, to be nobody’s fool. Oh, what a lonely boy.”
Again, I took the liberty of changing a couple of these Andrew Gold song lyrics to fit the description of my own life (mainly the years that are mentioned in the song). Because it was during the summer of 1965, when my mother and biological father brought home a sister, my only sibling. And much later in life on an early April day in 1983, I left home for the last time after enlisting in the Air Force. However, the rest of it is true, well except for one glaring fact that is? My sister unfortunately didn’t survive till adulthood, so she never had the chance to grow up and marry a man, or give birth to her own son, or any child for that matter. And because of that, I was very much a lonely boy throughout most of my adolescence. Looking back now as an adult in his late 50’s, the memories from all those years ago spent with her do get more hazy as the years go by. I do have flashbacks of what my life was like with a sister, and I can remember making her laugh (god she loved to laugh). How much I would give right now to make her laugh.
The last three years of her life were spent in and out of the hospital. And each time she would come home, she would be much weaker than before. Of course at such a young age myself, I didn’t know what leukemia was, or why it was taking so much of a toll on her fragile body. Or the pain she was having to endure by way of bone marrow injections, as well as blood transfusions and many other countless medical procedures. After a while, it just became a way of life for our family. Or maybe it was just a way of life for me? Now today, those faded memories come to me at times of her and I playing in the snow, or sitting around the table at my grandparents’ house, or the excitement of those Christmas mornings, racing to the tree to see what Santa had brought us. And yes, sometimes of us even getting into trouble (mostly because of my doing of course). And even now all these decades later, many times I still ask myself “why her and not me?” Quite possibly she would have accomplished so much more in her life than I have? What was the purpose of her being taken away at such a young age and not me? Some times I do wish it would have been me instead of her. She was the love of my mother’s life for god’s sake, I at times felt like I was probably the disappointment in her eyes. I was always that mischievous little boy with way too much energy, a clown basically. She was the kind one, and she would have had a great life I have no doubt. Because she was the one who I would do anything to make laugh. How much I would give right now to make her laugh. And so in many ways, I’m still very much of a lonely boy.