When Jessica Handler was 15, she began writing in countless spiral notebooks to document her feelings and observations about her parents and sisters --- especially her sisters. The journals would forge a lifeline between the past and the present.
Hers was no typical family: Handler's younger sister Susie died of leukemia when Handler was 10. Sarah, the youngest, was diagnosed at 2 with Kostmann's syndrome, and was not expected to live past childhood. In fact, Sarah would survive until Handler was in her early 30s. By then, their parents' marriage had crashed and burned, her father had been institutionalized, and Handler herself had a hefty drug habit.
But at 15, "I don't know this yet," she writes. "I am writing messages and sending them away in bottles that will wash up on future shore, where I will find them when I am an adult."
Assigning herself the role of "memory keeper," Handler saved letters, photographs, "yearbooks and elementary school report cards," and medical records numbering thousands of pages. What she couldn't save was the warmth of her sisters' hugs or how the three of them confided in each other. There are about 3,000 cases of acute lymphocytic leukemia a year, such as Susie's, Handler notes. But for Sarah, who inherited a rare genetic abnormality at birth, the odds were one in one-to-two million. For both to happen to one set of parents, says Handler is "unthinkable."
At first, her parents coped as well as they could, but years of mounting medical costs, paperwork and endless efforts to stave off the inevitable left them alienated and hopelessly divided.
On the day Susie was diagnosed, Handler wrote, while I slept, my parents began the slow and terrible turning away from one another that erodes families facing the death of a child."
Just as damaging was the way they plowed forward after Susie's death as if none of it had happened.
Neither parent discussed the looming fears they felt, nor did they talk about Susie or visit her grave. They expected Jessica to grieve in a socially acceptable way. In one particularly disturbing scene, Handler's father grips her hand at the funeral and commands, "Cry, damn it."
But they did not try to draw her out about her own reactions. At 10, instead of grief, she felt panic.
As a teen, she screamed soundlessly, banged her head, secretly pulled out hunks of hair, and faded into the background while Sarah's illness and her father's breakdown took center stage.After college, Handler escaped to Los Angeles and worked as a production coordinator in television, in what she saw as "finally, a world that could not turn without me." Cocaine helped quash her longing for family and home, but she was ultimately drawn to reconnect with what she had been so eager to forget. In 1989, she returned to Atlanta.
The opportunity to reclaim herself came when Sarah died in 1992. Still unable to mourn, Handler envies a friend who sobs at the funeral, and finally confronts her father, furious with him for leaving her sister's shiva early---and for leaving her, as well. "You still have a daughter," she tells him. "I'm still alive, and I don't want you to leave." It's the first step toward breaking her family's conspiracy of silence, and in refusing to stay invisible to him, or herself.
Handler moves through the debris, an archeologist labeling shards and the occasional whole pot, not necessarily in the order things happened. Consequently, "Invisible Sisters" is not always easy to follow.
"I could not save my sisters," Handler writes, "but I worked to save myself." In this arresting and heartbreaking story, she's really rescued the entire family.
Copyright 2009 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution