My Thursday Blog: A Tale of Two Sisters

Yesterday marked the birthday of two remarkable women in my family history. Both are gone now, and the memory of one has faded more than the other, but both have made a profound impact on my life and my family.

Blogging world, meet Elizabeth and Eleanor Gray.

Elizabeth (or Betty, as she was known throughout her life) was born several weeks premature in a snowstorm in 1916. Her father put her in a cigar box on a wood-burning stove to keep her warm and miraculously, she became something that would define her for the rest of her life: a survivor.

Her little sister Eleanor's birth story is less well-known. As in, I can't tell you any details; I don't know them. All I know is that she was born on her big sister's birthday exactly two years later. This detail somehow seems significant to me. I wonder sometimes if, from the very first day of her life, Eleanor felt as if she lived in her sister's shadow. Maybe this is because, in my memories, she lives in her sister's shadow still.

I know a few stories from their childhood, growing up in the backwoods of Montana in a logging camp. To Betty, every day in the mountains was an adventure. She took after her father. To Ellie, I can't help but sometimes think that every day was a struggle to get the hell out of there and make something better of her life. I am thinking she took after her mother.

Once, when Ellie was about three years old, the gypsies came around. Betty thought this a prime opportunity to make some extra cash, so she sold her pleasing and pretty little sister (whom, I'm told, was great at dancing) to the gypsies. Don't worry, their parents got Ellie back, and all the event is now is a memory lovingly shared with a laugh. I heard the story often as a child, and oh! how I wished I could sell my little sister to the Gypsies, but unfortunately gypsies are hard to find in Cache Valley, Utah. I have been looking for them for over twenty years.

Once, when the girls were still little, they were playing "house." They set up a small square in the dirt with cans and leaves for a home and Ellie played the housewife, sweeping the dirt and making an effort to keep things clean. Betty, playing the drunk husband, bashed through the walls yelling and screaming and having a jolly old time. Betty told me this story with a twinkle in her eye. Betty lived life with "wild abandon" as the phrase goes--everything was fun and people--other people were the best part. Every person held a new adventure. Especially the children. My little sister is similar in many ways. I get the feeling that for Ellie, the game was not so fun.

Once, when Betty was a young teenager, her parents sent her to live with Quaker relatives in Pennsylvania so that she could go to a girl's school there and be properly finished. She didn't want to go, but they made her, and she spent most of her adolescence there. Ellie, who would have loved to be somewhere prim and proper, stayed home and watched their parent's marriage unravel and helped her mother take care of her five younger brothers. Sometimes, when I heard Betty talk about her time at school, I wondered if Ellie was relieved to stay or if she longed to be back East, learning all the things that Betty had no interest in. What if she had been the sister sent away? What would have happened to her then? What would her life have been like?

What would my life have been like?

As they grew, their lives continued to follow an opposite path. One married her one true love, the other didn't. One worked on a farm and as a teacher to keep her family afloat, the other became a Senator's wife surrounded by beautiful things that she loved. One had a son, the other two daughters. One kept on surviving as the years got more difficult--the other didn't.

The one thing they have in common--perhaps the only thing besides the fact that they are sisters--is that they loved their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren very much.

I have two memories of my great-grandma, one I know is my own and the other one I have adopted from my mother's memories. The clear one comes from sitting behind the veiled curtain at her funeral as a seven-year-old, thinking how weird non-Mormon funerals were. Actually, since hers was the first funeral I attended, it was probably just how weird funerals in general were. The part about non-Mormon funerals must have come later, at her sister's funeral, held the day before I turned twenty-four.

All the memories I have of my great-great Aunt Betty come from the time in between those two funerals. There are so many, I can't number or even remember them all. They float like snapshots through my mind: field trips during the summer, craft projects, watching her do my mother's mending (a whole year's worth, actually), eating and laughing together, watching game shows or cooking shows on TV, comparing our diabetes numbers, visits for graduations and mission farewells and even my wedding, trips to Montana to take her home, how she fed the sister missionaries the whole time I was in Texas, introducing her to my fiance, making a trip through a Montana blizzard just to hear her stories, helping her do the most basic of tasks--getting dressed, putting on lotion, doing up her bra--and just being glad for her company.

That first year without her was hard. We all mourned her loss, my grandmother and my mother and my aunt and my little sister especially. I feel like everyone has that one person in their life that they know loves them best out of everyone in their family. For my sister Liz, that person was Aunt Betty.

I always wondered why I wasn't the one named after the four "great" women in my mother's life. I was, after all, the first born girl in the family. I was always jealous of the heritage behind Liz's name, but I think it is obvious to anyone who knows us that I am not the Elizabeth in the family. I was never meant to be, and that's okay. And while I knew Aunt Betty loved Liz best and I respected that, I must also make it clear that Aunt Betty made me feel special also.

Perhaps she got that from her sister.

The other memory I have of my Great-Grandma Ellie is one that I don't remember at all. I was three years old when my little sister was born. I was accustomed to having a brother, but a sister was a whole new ball game. A sister meant I was no longer the only beautiful child. I was no longer my parent's only little girl. I was no longer the youngest, no longer known as "Baby." And while everyone else was celebrating my sister's entrance into the world, Grandma Ellie was the one that celebrated my entrance into the world of being a big sister. She gave me a dress, something to make me feel special, pretty. Something beautiful. Something for me.

Isn't it interesting how you can know a person without really knowing them, just by knowing the people that loved them?

She was not perfect, I know. I've heard those stories. Life handed her several hard turns. Perhaps she did not face them with the courage and optimism that her sister had, but she still faced them. Today, she might have been considered OCD or clinically depressed. They didn't have help for that in her lifetime.

But there were moments of joy in her life, I know that. She loved her home, and she took pride in it always being immaculately clean and well-cared for. It was not a place for children. Being a mother, a grandmother was not something she came by naturally, but she tried. She really tried. She gave beautifully-wrapped (with a little too much tape) gifts. When my aunt was on her mission, my great-grandma sent homemade cookies every month. Even on the smallest holidays, a card was sent.

Everything I know about my great-grandma, I know from the people that she loved: her sister, her daughter, her granddaughters and grandsons. Most of the facts of her life are still just speculation to me, but it is in the wondering that I come to know what kind of strong woman she was. And I know she was strong, because the people she left behind are strong too.

While my grandma isn't her mother reincarnate, she has a certain intelligence and resourcefulness and appreciation for the lovely things in her home that I know came from her mother. And every family holiday, my mother finds all the little ways to add beauty to our table, and she always pauses for a moment to say, "My Grandma would have been proud of this."

I realized last year that I always celebrate Aunt Betty's birthday, but my grandma gently reminded me that two great women were born on this day, and both of them are part of me.

Perhaps giving my family and me so much love and adoration was something Aunt Betty did to remember her sister, to serve her after she was gone. Maybe she would have done it anyway, but maybe there was a small part of her that thought of Ellie as she spent time with us.

Those two sisters, they could not have been more opposite.

But there is something about being sisters, they've taught me. There is something about being sisters even when you have nothing in common. Having a sister is a beautiful thing. Having a sister completely different from you is an adventure. Having a sister is a blessing.

And maybe it's genetic, but in every generation of our family since theirs, there is at least one set of sisters with nothing in common but the fact that they are sisters.

And the fact that they are loved.