The night stalker

My sister stalks the night. She tells my mother she is afraid to go to sleep. So she walks. She goes into her craft room. She goes outside and lights a cigarette. The hospice nurse says let her smoke, so long as she does not smoke around her oxygen.

Eventually exhaustion overtakes her. She falls into fitful, shallow, medicated sleep in an armchair or across the daybed in the spare room, her knees on the floor. But mostly she walks laps around a four-bedroom house.

She signed up for this. She quit the chemo and got two or three months of real quality out of it. For a couple of months she wasn’t sick all the time. She got a respite. But her cancer got a respite too. Her cancer recovered its strength. It’s flexing now. It’s hard and tight in her gut. It doesn’t want her to eat. It laughs at her fentanyl patches.

My sister still has good days. She goes into her craft room and stitches 30 packets of Halloween favors together for a grandkid’s class. She goes to Walmart. To Aldi. She doesn’t drive, but she navigates the stores.

My mother doesn’t try to, but she overhears the hospice nurse counseling my sister. Laying out options. My sister wants to stay in my mother’s house. She needs something to make her sleep, though she is terrified of sleep. The Ambien just makes her loopy, walking her zombie-zonked circuits.

It’s not easy for anyone. People get short with each other when they are exhausted, when there is no sleep to be had and a constant thrum of dread. Things get said. My sister drops her cigarette onto her leg. There are burn marks she claims are insect bites. She is going to burn the house down.

My sister’s husband counts out her pills. He is in charge of them. The hospice people have supplied a pill organizer, a plastic tray with a lid divided into 21 separate compartments. Three times a day, seven days a week. The hospice people say if you fall behind, there is no catching up. If you race ahead, you receive no extra benefit. The schedule is important.

Thirty years ago my sister was a teacher in Grand Saline, Texas, a place that has a certain reputation. You can Google it. Grand Saline was where, in 2014, an elderly Methodist minister named Charles Moore decided to immolate himself in protest of what he called his “hometown’s history of violent racism.”

Depending on who you talk to, my sister was either run out of Grand Saline, or she shook the dust of that town off her feet as she left town. But for a while she was a fourth-grade teacher there, and assigned the kids in her class some books to read. One of those was a retelling of an African folk tale by Louisiana-born writer Mildred Pitts Walter called “Brother to the Wind.” (Walter, as I write this, is still going strong at 101 years old; she had been a teacher and civil rights activist who took up writing children’s books in her late 40s after she realized there were very few books for young readers about Black children written by Black authors.)

“Brother to the Wind” is about an African boy named Emeke who dreams of flying like a bird. Some of the parents of my sister’s students didn’t like that book (the particular edition my sister used is beautifully illustrated by interracial husbandand-wife team Leo and Diane Dillon). Some of them said a drawing of a goat’s head in the book looked satanic to them. Some objected to Christmas decorations in my sister’s classroom noting—I’m not making this up—that “Santa” was an anagram for “Satan.” Another parent offered the opinion that impressionable chil

dren shouldn’t be exposed to fairy tales.

My sister’s then 7-year-old daughter was harassed at school. “What’s a devil worshipper?” she asked her mother.

My sister began receiving anonymous threatening calls late at night. They held a town meeting where one parent said she didn’t want her child to read anything about “death, abuse, divorce, religion or any other issue” at school. Some of the parents literally told my sister they didn’t want her to teach their children “to think.”

They claimed my sister—a church-going Methodist—was an atheist and practicing Satanist. Some of them even called her the Antichrist. They demanded that the school board fire her. The school board, comprised as it was of spineless simpletons, was preparing to do just that when my sister resigned.

And sued those idiot parents for defamation. And won.

I can’t tell you how big the settlement was, but my sister and her husband moved to Dallas where they bought a house in Highland Park next door to a starting defenseman for the Dallas Stars hockey team.

I never wrote about my sister and her adventures in Grand Saline, but Nat Hentoff, the irascible columnist, jazz critic, novelist, free speech advocate and all-around troublemaker, did. In his nationally syndicated column he called her an example of an “authentic American.”

He didn’t write more about her because she didn’t return his calls. She didn’t want to be written about. She didn’t know she was in Hentoff’s 1998 book “Living the Bill of Rights: How to be an Authentic American” until I told her.

Moving to Highland Park would be a good place to end the movie about my sister, but life seldom wraps up things that neatly. My sister was in her early 30s then; I’m sure she couldn’t have imagined ending up where she is now.

Most of us only talk big. Most of us are lucky that we are never really tested in a public way, we never have to declare and stick by our professed beliefs. Most of us live with mitigation and compromise and aren’t asked to do anything extraordinary. That’s a good thing, to live without undue drama. Most of us are never called upon to do anything genuinely brave.

And so we can maintain, at least to ourselves, that if we were ever to be pressured, we would do the right thing, even if it was the hard thing.

My sister stalks the night. She cannot sleep. That’s the irony: She should sleep well.