It turns out that my little sister and Schroedinger’s cat hold one thing in common, at least in my mind: They are both completely alive and completely dead at the same time.
For those less scientifically inclined, Schroedinger’s cat is classic hypothetical experiment in which, by a series of unfortunate circumstances, a hypothetical cat is either alive or dead based on what some subatomic particles do, but until we observe the cat, the strange rules of quantum mechanics indicate that the cat BOTH alive and dead at the same time (perhaps using parallel universes).
On the other hand, we have my little sister. She currently resides a few miles from me with her lovely and entertaining family, complete with a husband, children, and dogs large enough to “counter-surf” for occasional snacks. She’s also a very good photographer and artist. By all accounts, she is what most of us would quite unambiguously classify as “alive”. So, how does she come to be simultaneously dead? The answer lies in how we perceive and recognize those around us.
Roll back the clock to 1978. I was 7 then, and my 3-year-old sister and I were waiting in the back seat of the car while my mom went into the piano teacher’s house for a few minutes. We got restless, as kids do, and decided to go inside. Now, the piano teacher lived on a very quiet street in a wealthy neighborhood with that Southern, old-money feel (or so I remember it, anyway). In order to get from the car to the house, we had to cross the street, so I dutifully looked both ways, and crossed. My sister was more hesitant, and looking back at her from across the street, I impatiently told her to hurry up and cross. As I watched her take her first few steps across, a car shot across my view, making a “wham!” sound, and was gone an instant later. Unfortunately, so was my sister.
From here, my own recall of events are highly edited for graphic content, so I’ll pass that benefit on to you. I saw my sister lying down on the street, looking as though nothing were out of place – other than her choice of where to lie down. Given the distance she actually traveled, I’m not sure how I located her or got there so fast. I told her to get up, or she’d get run over. No response. I ran to the piano teacher’s house and complained to my mom that that my sister was lying in the street and wouldn’t get up. From the doorstep of the piano teacher’s house, everyone else seemed to see what I didn’t, and immediately went into varying states of action, panic, and shock, all of which I thought were a bit much for a kid-sister who was clearly doing something she shouldn’t be doing. She survived the trip to the ER, remained in a coma for a few weeks, came home from the hospital, and life began to resume.
Years later, when I was married and going to school at Baylor, I had a dream. In the dream, I re-experienced the events, but without the edited perception. I woke up screaming, “Get up!!! Get up!!!”, holding my wife’s arm tight enough to leave a grip-shaped bruise. Further dreams that night revolved around silhouetted operating rooms, surgeons, and the sound of their tools against one another and the metal tray. I still don’t have conscious recall of how I saw things in the dream – I only know that it was “the uncut version”.
Over time, it became increasingly easy for something to trigger flashbacks to the event, but with the emotional response triggered by the dream. Sadness, loss, fear, panic, adrenaline. Once it even happened when watching a rather graphic “don’t text while driving” ad, which didn’t seem to directly relate. Most recently, they were triggered more powerfully than ever when a neighbor, having shot and killed his step-son, allowed his wife to leave the house, and after a police stand-off shot himself. Sitting with the mom as she grieved for her son brought back memories of thing my mom had said as my sister lay on the street.
The two events together were overwhelming, so I decided to get some resolution on my own early trauma. It occurred to me that my reaction to the accident would be consistent and reasonable if my sister had died. Put another way, I wasn’t convinced that I had a right to feel as I did. The couple of times I’d communicated with others who had lost someone close, I knew I could identify, but it sounded shallow – my loved one still lived.
I decided to see what things would look like if my emotional response were justified. I traded the assumption that my sister had lived for the assumption that she had died, and allowed perceptions to re-adjust. I began to recall or revise the meaning of more and more things which lined up a new perspective on old events. When my sister came home from the hospital, she had no recall of events prior to the accident. She had to re-learn games and various ways that we would play. She also didn’t show emotional responses, and spoke only in monotones, with very simple, concise answers – none of the usual babble or ramblings of most 3-year-olds. If she didn’t understand, she would just stare. I don’t know how long this zombie-like state persisted, and I can’t list specific traits that might have changed from before and after.
What I do know is that from my 7-year-old perspective. The moment that car passed before my eyes, sweeping her away like an autumn leaf, my sister died. In her body grew another sister with the same name, who I love and care for just as much, but in the sense that Schroedinger’s cat is both alive and dead, so is my sister. The rational explanation is that my emotional memory is inconsistent with observable reality. That my emotions are “wrong”. But this condemnation has proven not only not useful, but counter-productive, freezing the trauma of the event in a state where it can’t be assimilated into my thinking, or approached in any kind of non-toxic way. By making them true, releasing the need for emotional reasoning to match logical reasoning, the events are beginning to thaw and become part of the whole.
Recently, as I sat in meditation, I watched the car pass by, taking my sister in an instant. Fear, anxiety, and condemnation gave way to a sweet sadness and then peace as I raised my hand in my mind’s eye and waved a tearful goodbye. I offered her the meditation I’d offered to myself – and my living little sister – only moments before: May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.