The Thread that Remained: A Memoir

            But let's go back to 1957 for a little while, as my siblings begin to arrive. My mother licked her finger and ran the wet finger around my milk-stained mouth. She then took my hand and we walked up a set of stone stairs to the house and knocked on the blue door. I was wearing a dress, a cardigan and my little white sandals, so I knew this must be important business. Dad was behind us holding GiGi, my little stuffed lamb. She’d been my playmate during the long, long drive. Every morning when we woke up, there was more driving. The blue door suddenly opened and when the tall man inside saw us, his face broke into a grin, causing a line to run down each cheek from his eyes all the way to his chin. He called over his shoulder, “They’re here!”   “This is grandma’s brother”, my mother announced. “Uncle Drum.”   Uncle Drum knelt down, taking GiGi from dad’s hands and placing the little lamb in my arms. “I see you brought your special...

Our dad gave each of us kids a nickel when we turned five with the year of our birth on it. He loved collector coins and later bought us each the commemorative 1967 Centennial Canadian coin set. It included a $20.00 gold coin, which was a real prize in those days. He'd been trained as a jeweller in his home country and always dabbled in gold.      A knock at my door at 8:30 in the evening surprised me.  I opened it, and there stood my sister with a large bottle of red wine. "I came by to see how you're doing," she said. She was 28 and had just returned from living at Pink Mountain and Fort Nelson, in northern British Columbia. I was 34 and reeling from a very new divorce.       "Oh my god," I said. My eyes filled with tears. The kids were with their dad and this was my 3rd night alone. "You are an angel."       She seemed all grown up. Five years earlier, I'd seen her off in her gold 1972 Chevy Nova, packed with her f...

     I wondered if his name was real. I'd never met him, but I knew that he had a beard, that he loved to cook and that he had a beautiful wife who had been a Swedish model. Her name was Victoria and she had long hair. My sister loved to cook too and Merle showed her how to peel and chop garlic and then place the flat edge of the knife on the pieces and smash them with the side of your fist, to release the oils. My sister taught me to do this too and I still do.      She started hanging with them sometime after her break-up with her partner of 10 years. Reaching out and growing a wider circle, she called it. They're nice people she said, but for some reason not the kind of friends she'd invite me to meet. Merle this and Merle that. They were chill, she said and she needed chill after the nasty last few months of her relationship. I was already living in the Cariboo, a six hour drive away. I was in the throes of starting a new business, worried whether I cou...

     They say that siblings share 50% of their genes. We are equally related to our siblings, as we are to our parents. This is a story of how two sisters grew closer as addiction deepened, but our stories are very different. Warning: some content may be difficult to read. Some names have been changed. Mine was a world of accountability, while hers hovered between the blurry landscapes of mental illness and addiction. Drawing on our sibling birthright my sister and I made a pact. This memoir shows that whatever happened, our relationship perservered. But our bond hadn’t always been that way. I felt as if I was living part of my life in a dream. Anchored on the one hand by two young children and a husband, my marital relationship was precarious. My baby sister's battle was more visceral. Ultimately, she opted for addiction over mental illness. It carried less stigma and even now, in Canada, there are more resources and endorsements for addicts than for the mentally ill...