“You’re my sister (blood is seven times thicker than water and Henry
VIII’s second wife had six fingers (which is a condition known as
hexadactylism)) and I love you.” Pat Loehmer
No one ever
made it a secret as to why I came to this Earth, why I was sent to this particular
family in northern Wisconsin very early in the 1960s.
After one
year of marriage, Mom and Dad had a son. Another year later they had a
daughter. Mom’s brother and sister were each rounding out their families to
four kids each, but it didn’t look as though our immediate family would have
any more children.
Until twelve years later when Patricia Ann appeared on the scene. Dad’s 8mm movie camera
was still a novelty, and Patti Ann became his star. He recorded her walking
down the road, and up the road, and through the snow. And laughing. Holy cow,
did she laugh. All the time. And Dad got it all on film.
I don’t know how my brother and
oldest sister felt about it. In the home movies, they were usually following
Pat around, doting on her, picking her up when she fell. Oh, except for that
time when Tom hit her in the face with a snowball.
A little
over a year into that, someone realized that Pat was going to be spoiled rotten
in no time. Not only in her own household, but as the youngest cousin, within
the extended family.
Which
explains how I came to be. I was conceived and delivered to be the baby in the
family and steal just a little bit of Pat’s thunder, to accept my share of
being spoiled. And last but not least, so that when all the other kids
graduated from high school, moved out and started families of their own, Pat
would not be alone.
I came home
to not only be her younger sister, I came home to be her best friend.
1993 – the day life changed
I stood up and stretched my back. Only a few
more beans to pick, I decided, looking down the row of leafy plants. Eating
frozen green beans throughout the winter took me right back to my childhood,
and those hot summer evenings when Pat and I just wanted to be lazy, but Mom
would chase us out to the garden with a pail.
As I bent down to reach for more
beans, the phone rang inside the house. A moment later, my seven-year-old Nick
came bounding out the front door, waving the portable phone.
“It’s Aunt Patti,” he announced,
bringing me the receiver.
“Hey, you’re up awful early on a
Saturday morning.” Raising two kids on my own, I never had the luxury of
sleeping in, but my sister relished her weekend mornings in bed.
“I don’t feel good,” she answered
groggily.
“What’s the matter?”
“My stomach is killing me.”
Who knew, as I stood there in my
garden, what this would mean? She’d already had her appendix out and at 34
years old, what else could it be? Kidney stones? Gall bladder? Since I worked
in health care, the family tended to call me with every medical complaint.
I didn’t have any answers for her, so
she decided she would give it a couple hours and then have her husband take her
to the emergency room. Twenty-four hours later, I stood by her hospital bed.
“It was a fibroid in her uterus. Just
the size and shape of a bratwurst.” Dr. Skye, the gynecologist who had
performed surgery late on Saturday afternoon, held up her hands to show the
exact size. I worked with Dr. Skye at the clinic and had been glad she was the
doctor on call that weekend. She and Pat had an instant rapport. “We had to do a
hysterectomy though to get it all.”
Pat lifted her head and thrust out
her chin. All was good now. She would recover from surgery and get on with her
life.
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