Friday, April 30, 2021
Already nine months have passed since my sister’s demise. It has taken this long for me to put my thoughts down on paper. Maybe it is because I did not want to accept the fact, so simply submerged myself into my workload. But this week I had no choice –tomorrow would have been her 88th birthday and no matter which country I was in on that date, in the earlier years either a card or telegram, and in the later years an email or a telephone call was delivered or made. Speaking to her on her birthday was always uniquely different from at Christmas, when the family was involved. We could reminisce about old times, laugh about the idiosyncrasies of our father’s habits, share secrets about our husbands and children, or in my case, lifting me up by reminding me that one is as valuable as one allows oneself to feel and to be.
Looking back at old photographs from the first half of the 1950’s I remembered that Cyrilene was like a second mother to me – 16 years separated us. She took me everywhere that her three girlfriends and their boyfriends went. Picnics, cinemas and open-house lunches never happened without my being present. For some reason my hair was very slow to grow, so that I was given the nickname of Henry, as I would promise to keep all my observations secret in return for the then famous Oh Henry chocolates!
Then 1955 saw the first of what was to be the start of several partings. Cyrilene had the opportunity to travel to the UK and study nursing. I remember so well the dress she wore, as I stood crying and waving her off to the French owned liner called the Antilles. During the years that she lived in the UK she kept her promise to write me often We didn’t see each other again until 1962 when Cyrilene returned to Barbados for the first time before continuing to Canada where she worked as a nurse. After her marriage to Lincoln Crichlow, she moved to New York, and from then our meetings were only ever during holidays for short periods when I was travelling back and forth to the UK for my further education, and later on from residency in Austria, Japan or Switzerland, with my own family. Thankfully, with the arrival of SKYPE telephone costs were drastically reduced, so it was possible to speak more frequently.
Cyrilene’s short illness in the spring of 2019 that then resulted in her passing was very difficult for me. I had to accept that I would not see her physically again. Covid-19 opened my eyes to the fact that we really have very little control of so much in the passage of our lives. It was good that she did not have to experience the real force of the pandemic and/or the ugliness and racial hate of the past months. As a nurse, she would have understood and valued the sacrifice being made by those working in the medical field. Being someone who loved people of all shades, social and ethnic backgrounds, the lawless killings that were often recorded and shown on television would have made her most unhappy and helplessly angry.
I still feel emptiness when I think of her – which is often. Mostly I miss her selfless warmth, kindness and love which she had for all those around her.
With gratitude, sadness and love –
Cyrilene’s “little” sister -
Elaine Kaps-Webster
