another big event

today my sister get's married. i'm still in Den Haag and she's across the world's second largest body of water. i'm not going to make it. she told me about this when i was in bucharest (let's be fair, she hinted at the potential when i visited her last time in Greenwood. that was the day after Christmas), which was in early May. she told the rest of the family about it during this past week, inviting them to Garfield Park. i barely know the guy, Ben, but this should not come as a surprise as i really do not know my sister very well, either. we haven't really spoken much since our mother died. that was nearly five years ago. she's 19 now, the same age our brother was when he married.

when i think about this, i wonder how things have changed since mom passed away. however, this goes back about five months prior to that, late June 2000, when I arrived back home on terminal leave, with about two weeks left of my active duty committment. the last three months that i had spent at Ft. Carson were amazing and there was no shortage of fun and friendship. the next ten months would see a major overturn in all that. when i had arrived home i was told that mom had a small lump in her lung. we didn't know what to think about that, but things were being checked out. things were much worse than a small lump. the "small" lump had made some new brothers and sisters in her brain and lymph nodes.

my mom and i weren't close, either. sure, we had our conversations when i came back home but there was always this distance between us, some sort of unseen and misunderstood barrier that had been raised long ago. i always knew it was there but it just seemed that she and i couldn't bring that down together. thus, my going to germany may not have been difficult for which to give her blessing. after about a month at home, in late july, i jumped onto a plane and flew out to Fairfax, VA (i had been there once earlier in the month for an interview) to begin training/inprocessing for my new career.

in september, i got the call. mark nisbet had died. annie, jim's wife, was the one who called me. i didn't know what to say. i had only known him for a few years. a sixteen-year slice had been taken out of my life when it came to knowing about the paternal side of the family. i had only visited him four times between mid-April 1998 and June 2000, when, after leaving Carson, i made my way to Phoenix to visit family down there. Nana had found him. she had been laid up with going through chemotherapy for lung cancer, of which my own mom was dying. Mark didn't take it too well. at this point, he started declining and, suffering from Type II Diabetes, it wouldn't be too long before i was halfway to being orphaned.

between parental deaths, i did some work in Bosnia with some very unfavorable people and thus my mental predicaments worsened and began to drink profusely and with total abandon, far beyond reckless. the army physique, though never exquisite and sculpted, fell apart and gave way to near-obesity. in short time, even with circumstances as they were, i would have few friends and really no one to speak with about what was going on in my life.

the expected, though not really, call came during the evening of 29 november 2000. two days later, i was back home.

and this brings me back to my sister...with whom i haven't had too good of a relationship with since this time. i was home only two weeks and for the most part, we got along, a few words here and there. when i would return home again in mid-August 2001, the time passed between us was very similar to the previous December. However, we had a huge fight but we talked about it i thought that things would be better soon. no. i won't go into all the problems, but i will say that that time was really the last time we ever laughed together or joked or could really speak with one another.

and now she's getting married. she's 19 and she's getting married. i don't know how this is going to play out, if it's going to work out. Jake, our brother, who's also two years younger than me, and his wife are still together. maybe things will bring us together at some point, but then again all of this seems like we are following our own trajectories which lead us to territories completely alien to one another. this seems more like two friends than family members.

and now this all seems like i can keep going and almost whine about the situation. but i won't. like i said, today my sister is getting married.