My first best friend

My sister Regine died last night. Gine. Ginchen. Gina. Gina Dean. She was my first best friend. My playmate. My boon companion. My teacher. The lens through which I came to see the world.

She came into the world sixty years ago in uneasy circumstances, the daughter of an unwed refugee mother, but loved deeply by my mom, who provided all she could. For months she lived in an orphanage. When my dad came into the picture, a GI stationed in Germany and falling for this German waitress, he adopted her. Gine celebrated that day every year as the day of being wanted.

The only others who've known me my entire life are a dwindling number, all well into their eighties. For my first seven years, until a preemie brother arrived, and for another decade beyond, my life and Gine's were inextricably bound. The thick of it we gobbled eagerly and with joy. And the thin of bitter cumbersome family insecurity we swallowed down, each knowing the other stood alongside.

Much of those hardest times is stuck in some safe irretrievable quarter of my brain that I'm loath to access. But not Gine, who's lodged in my heart. It's not a place I could use to shield her from the darkest quiddities of her life — and certainly not from those fucking lung cancer cells or finally from from death stepping in to say, "Now." But as she grew weaker and smaller and her breaths became shallower, my heart expanded to see my nephew Brandon step up as caregiver and her husband Joe fight relentlessly for her and unexpectedly become my friend.

My faith starts with the color plates in my mom's German Bible before I could read. But Gine comes next and had even greater influence. She went to kindergarten at our church where they learned and sang hymns rather than kid's ditties like "London Bridge." It was a trickle-down hymnological economy that actually worked. I gained the language of faith from her. Like a tow-headed Paul who handed on what had first been given her. "My faith looks up to thee, thou lamb of Calvary, savior deevine." "Beau-tee-ful savior, king of creation." "Thine is the glory, ris'n conqu'ring son. Endless is the victory thou or death hast won." This was the playlist in the way-back of our light blue 1963 Ford Fairlane station wagon as we drove to our grandparent's ranch for Easter or home with two sides of beef after butchering in November. We sang the words that now have become my stock in trade, my syllabi, my lifeblood.

When I was six or so, Gine and I were running through the sprinkler of a blue-skied summer morning alongside our eight-wide trailer house. When she said we should play school under the Chinese elm in the corner of the yard, I demurred. I knew who got to be teacher, and it wasn't me. So I headed in for a glass of Kool-Aid. Coming around the front of the trailer, I grabbed the hitch, and a jolt of electricity discovered my body was the shortest way into the ground. Gripped by literal power greater the myself, I couldn't free myself. All my understanding and efforts, my wits and wrenching were useless. My voice was so weak Gine couldn't hear me yelling. But she came nonetheless. She sauntered over in her leather sandals, safe from the electrical demon. She casually grabbed my arm and pulled me free from death's grip. And she was singing. "I know that my redeemer lives."

Two weekends ago Mary and I heard our son Sam's professional choir perform Handel's Messiah with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. When we finally got to the soprano aria with that same text, "I know that my redeemer liveth," I was in tears. I recognized again the enormity of what Gine had done. Oh, she would never say it was anything at all. But I'm alive today because of her. And it's a life steeped in hope and resurrection.

I know how our Lord works. I know that my sister liveth. My Beloved Ginchen, co-traveler through pine forests and Dakota prairies, enchanted by the delicate and beautiful, creator of her own beauty, lover of snow. She and I are perishable indeed. Yet the perishable will put on the imperishable. And the dead will be raised. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. I know twinkling, for those were her eyes.