How a Bone Marrow Transplant Reconnected Me to My Sister

She grew up navigating the nuances of high school cliques, and I kept my head down in schoolwork. She had serial boyfriends, and I spent Saturday nights with girlfriends who shared popcorn and waited for phone calls. She followed her husband to a Manhattan apartment; I met a local boy and raised my family in our hometown.

Still, when we spend time together, we stay up late unraveling the questions of our childhood, spinning through stories to make sense of the decisions our parents made and the ones they didn’t. Ginny can look at me and know I understand. I can look at her as a witness to those fundamental and troubled years.

My sister is practical, direct. I’m sentimental and work hard not to offend. But there are moments when we find ourselves on the same page.

I’ve collected a house full of stuff I can’t let go of: our mother’s childhood tea set, the WWI medals of a great-uncle, a pair of electric scissors I used as a child. My sister downsized each time she moved, so now her life is spare, meaningful and not tucked into dark boxes to collect time. I need the comfort of the past; she needs to shed that which no longer serves her.

When we sorted through our mother’s house, we came upon a box of things Mom couldn’t part with: old report cards, construction-paper valentines in faded pink, letters from our aunts. My sister peeked into a white envelope and passed it to me. In it was my black ponytail from 60 years ago, still held together with a rubber band. I instantly smelled Breck Creme Rinse and felt my mother’s gentle hands brushing my hair, 100 strokes a night.

Keeping a piece of her

Ginny tells me a story I’ve never heard. When she had chemo 30 years ago, she felt a shift in her scalp when she was washing her hair. Then, while blow-drying, her hair fell out all at once and flew around, a whirlwind of sudden loss. She didn’t know which was worse: looking at her bald head or sweeping up her fine hair from every crevice in the room. She didn’t want that to happen again.

So this time, when Ginny tells me she’s asked her neighbor to cut off her hair, I ask if I can stay. She doesn’t answer, but time gets away from us and there is Kim at the door, scissors and shaver in hand. She asks if she could pray for Ginny, and the three of us hold hands and cry. Soon Ginny’s long blonde hair is falling to the kitchen floor. And I am a witness to the courage it takes to choose a wig ahead of time, put on lipstick, and allow me to take a selfie of us at Long Beach on this, the day before she goes into the hospital.

I ask my sister if I can save her hair.

“What for?”

I want to spread it in the bushes back home. “The robins will line their nests with it,” I say. It seems a fitting ritual on the threshold of spring, a petition for my cells to secure themselves in her body and make her healthy again. Only 1 in 5 patients like her survive the first year.

She shakes her head. “You’re whacked.”

Ultimately, I end up with her hair. She doesn’t need it or want it. But I need it to cement a new chapter for us both. Kim gathers Ginny’s fine hair into a bag, and I tuck it into my purse. It is somehow both featherlight and heavy as my thoughts that will darken the miles driving upstate: Roscoe, Homer, Auburn.

But before I leave, I drive over the Queensboro Bridge, its off-white paint peeling and brilliant in the weak sunshine. I’m meeting my sister and my son in Astoria for lunch.

We sit outside a ramen noodle restaurant. Parking spots have been turned into plywood and plastic seating during the winter months of the pandemic. We take off our masks to sip rich bone broth and peel tender meat from pork ribs.

As I pull out from my parking space, Ginny waves at me and says, almost as an afterthought, “You know, all those disagreements, they don’t mean a thing. It’s a clean slate from now on.” 

Boundaries giving way to bonds

On transplant day, I take her hair outside and spread it in the bushes. I wait for the birds to fly away with blonde strands in their beaks, but the wind takes it all. I hear my sister’s voice: Well, what did you expect?  

A few days after donation, I will be left with two tiny scars on my chest, and Ginny will lose the stubble of hair she has left. In a few months, she’ll learn if those 8 million cells are doing the work her body no longer can. And in a year, if all goes well, we’ll be digging our toes into the cold sand outside her Long Beach condo, the same blood nourishing us as sisters, our boundaries giving way to bonds.

Four years later, my sister is doing very well and has welcomed three new grandchildren ... and we still don’t talk politics.