Sorry you went through that, Sveltington. All of it.
Having grown up in an abusive family, I can totally get having complex relationships with siblings. There are five of us, and it takes a diagram to see how is still talking with whom. I get the anger. I can understand developing into enemies and not allies, despite the supposed common sense idea that shared distress brings people closer.
Even siblings growing up together in the same environment can react differently. Of the five of us, the youngest is homeless. One sibling is on disability for emotional issues. One is seemingly normal, but distant from everyone in her life. Another is quite narcissistic. I had my issues with alcohol.
I’m really sorry that happened to you and your sister. It really sucks that she wasn’t able to see that you didn’t have any responsibility for it. In time it may help to understand that childhood abuse or neglect (including emotional neglect) can continue to have a strong impact on adults.
She wasn’t you and you weren’t her. It’s possible that things impacted her differently than they did you, and that she wasn’t able to escape.
I do hope you find peace. I third the suggestion of finding a community with shared experiences.
Again I would like to thank everyone for their kind and helpful posts.
I wrote the OP at 2:54 AM my time and if I’d had any booze in the house you would never have heard from me.
I am glad I did post because I received a range of excellent perspectives and good advice which I have already utilized. Also I have never been good at sharing the bad with people I know. I am certain that is a symptom of something.
When we were little our imagination was an excellent coping mechanism. One of our favorites was “Rose Covered Cottage.”
We would be very old. We would abandon our glamorous lives (me a pediatrician*** and she a famous actress) and spouses (me Fess Parker* and her first one Richard Todd** - she planned to have many husbands; discarding them when she got bored.) We would live in a cottage together drinking lots of tea while wearing cardigans, peter-pan collar blouses, wool skirts and sensible shoes. We would both be so old, with translucent pale skin and curly silver hair.
Not everytime I heard a car in my driveway but at least once every couple of months; I would expect her to knock on my door. I would rip it open and say “WTF do you want Bitch?” But then I would grab her and hug her hard and show her room. And I would make some tea.
So what is my plan B?
*yep Daniel Boone/Davy Crockette
**some British actor, may have been Richard Greene?
***unable to have children of my own in Med school I decided to devote myself to their care.
Suicide is complex and happens for many reasons.
While none of us can know for sure what was going on in her head, it’s reasonable to assume it was not about you, not about you at all.
You could not have saved her.
Your feelings of anger and longing for something that now can never be is natural and normal. Your childhood and younger adult experiences are not normal “family” doings (as much as anything we do with blood relations is “normal,” 'cause that varies wildly).
She foreclosed on the dream that she might come back to you in a loving way and bind up these wounds you have carried since you were a child. That is a terrible loss.
Again, that is nothing you did or did not do. It’s all on her and whatever demons that drove her.
When you carry these open wounds from so long and there is no way to resolve them, for people to make amends, for that little child inside the adult to feel better about everything that happened, then you have to talk to that child yourself. This may sound all foolish to some, but write a letter to that child. Just sit down and say all the things that child needs to hear: That they were an innocent party to the heartaches and cruelties of others, that while no adult listened to them or paid attention to their pain, YOU do. You know what happened, and you couldn’t stop it from happening, but you can comfort that child now. Acknowledge all that was hurtful of that time and those experiences.
This is how healing begins. It started with you telling us, which was a brave thing to do, and I hope it resolves with you able to ultimately, eventually be at peace with all these painful experiences and feeling better.
Sveltington, a bump just to let you know some of us have been thinking of you. And hoping that you have found some support for yourself in the real person world too. Best wishes.
Sveltington, I just stumbled on this thread-- I haven’t been around much for a while, Jewish holidays, blah, blah. Anyway, I just wanted to say that it sounds like you sister was depressed for a long time before she killed herself. Her erratic, dismissive, and often hurtful behavior toward you when you were doing your best to reconnect was probably part of her depression. Some depression manifests in hostility, especially toward people that the depressed person feels is putting excess demands on them-- but depressed people often cannot express themselves well, and come out and say “I can’t work on our relationship right now; I have too much else making demands on my emotions, and I’m feeling overwhelmed, but I love you and think about you.” It’s just not the way they operate. They tend to rather piss people off until they get left alone, and then the isolation contributes to their depression-- it’s a vicious circle.
I am not a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist, but I have worked closely with many when I did social work, because I helped people who were depressed, or bipolar enough to be on social security disability for it to find housing in the community, and find suitable part-time work, if they could do it, get their bills paid, and attempt some kind of social life, so I’ve gone to many, many seminars that covered this stuff.
Now, by that, I don’t mean to imply that you should have seen it coming; far from it.
I just mean that it sounds like the you did everything you could to build a relationship, and you were doing nearly all the work. When the other person is depressed, that’s not terrible surprising.
Feel free to be as angry as you want; maybe even be a little angry at your sister for not seeking help, or not complying with it, if she did (or maybe she did comply like heck, and it just didn’t work, I don’t know). Be as angry at her problem as you want.
I hope someday you can understand that it wasn’t her choice to be that way, though. There may be lots of blame to go around: her problems may have appeared early enough that the parent who had her should have sought treatment when she was young.
You can blame depression for being so damned nasty, and so hard to treat, and mental health research for not being further along in treatment research.
I hope some day you can work through it, and see your relationship with your sister as a casualty of her illness. I hope it doesn’t take too long for you to get there.
But if you don’t, it’s understandable. If you have to wash your hands of the situation, that is understandable too.
I hope that however it happens, something brings you peace.
I’m really sorry for your loss.