My therapist called me by my dead sister’s name.
My therapist called me by my dead sister’s name once.
Actually, it was four times. In a row. Eleanor. Eleanor. Eleanor. Eleanor.
The repetition was meant to drive home a point, but it got lost as I tried to unwind the panic spiral forming in my mind.
I didn’t correct her the first time because I thought she’d realize her mistake and quickly correct it. By the third, it just felt as if it would make the situation more awkward to acknowledge it. I didn’t want to make her feel bad.
Maybe that was the point I missed. That I have to stop feeling a responsibility to manage other’s emotions. It is the whole reason I’m in therapy.
That, and the whole dead sister thing.
Eleanor didn’t live long enough as a girl for anyone to ever call us by each other’s names. She was dead before we ever had a chance. When we were kids, and my parents would yell for me across the house, they’d cycle through each of our names. My siblings’, the dog’s, the cat’s, before they ever got to mine.
But she had a different name then.
I wonder sometimes if she ever wanted people to confuse us. The Thanksgiving before she told us she was Eleanor, I was admiring her hair across my grandmother’s breakfast table, and remarked how similar ours looked. We made our brother snap a picture from behind, a funny “guess who’s who” moment.
In reality, we didn’t look much alike. She inherited my mom’s long angular face, while I got my dad’s softer, rounder features. Her hazel eyes matched the men in the family’s, while mine mirror my mom’s chocolatey brown.
But when we laugh(ed), our whole faces erupt, eyes squinting, mouths open.
2025 was the first year that New Year’s Eve didn’t feel like a threat. I always brace myself for another year rung in without her, when we should’ve been celebrating the anniversary of her coming out to us. I’m not sure what made this one different. Perhaps it’s just the tumble of time that softens the ragged edges of grief.
When I think about aging and all the ways people try to defy it, my heart sinks. I want to watch my forehead wrinkle and my cheeks sag, and to wonder if my sister and I would’ve grown to look alike. The way I see my uncle in my mother’s eyes, my grandmother in my aunt’s cheeks. I wonder about all the ways in which we would’ve wrinkled and sagged into one another. I wonder if anyone would’ve called her by my name.
When she died, I worried that people might think that I had died. She had only come out to some friends, and those outside her inner circle still knew her as a son. I wondered if an old grade school friend would see that a Bolding daughter had died, remember me with my two brothers, and briefly mourn my loss.
I wonder if my parents’ cat thinks I’m her when I come home and sleep in her bed, my hair falling in waves around my face. Does she know the difference? Does it matter? Not when we can curl up next to each other and share comfort in the quiet night.
Once, during my senior year of college, I told a new friend that I had a sister. “Isn’t it so fun to be able to steal each other’s clothes?” she asked. And I paused, a long silence filling the car, stretching through the 17 years of Eleanor before Eleanor. Lost years of stealing each other’s clothes or teaching her how to do makeup or braiding each other’s hair.
Not that I would’ve been very good at those things either. Once, in a battle over using a hairbrush, Eleanor retorted to my mom, “Well, you and Carson don’t try very hard to look girly!”
I like to think that maybe we modeled that being a woman can look different from the magazines. But I wish I had asked her if she’d like me to do her makeup. Just once.