Course Correction

It’s not something I talk about often, but I had a sister who passed away shortly after she was born. I was only three years old when it happened, and for many years I thought that it didn’t have a huge effect on my life. I knew I was getting a new sibling, but was too young to really understand much and, because she died before I ever even got to know her, she was a very distant memory. 

In fact, I only have one memory of her, and that’s when she died. I remember my parents waking me and Alex up very early in the morning. It was a muggy, hot summer morning and distinctly remember feeling how early it was because it was still dark. I knew in the summer, even if I wake up early the sun is already up. But on that day, it wasn’t. 

We had to go to the hospital and there was no time to even get dressed. Sitting in the back of the car, I remember looking out of the window and seeing the reflection of the red instrument cluster on our car reflected against the backdrop of the sky. The type of sky that has a clear delineation between the dark of the night and the light of the coming dawn.

It’s odd, but whenever I see a reflection of a car’s instrument cluster in a car window, this memory comes back to me so vivid it’s like I’m reliving it again. 

The next memory I have is me asking my parents why Cheryl isn’t coming back home with us. She was asleep, my mom said, and she won’t wake up. So we have to leave her at the hospital. What do you mean, she won’t wake up? Everyone wakes up! Will we come and get her tomorrow after she wakes up? My little, undeveloped brain was trying to make sense of a situation that I couldn’t fathom. 

For days after that I would continue to ask my parents about Cheryl. Then we went to the cemetery for her funeral, and my memories stop. 

As I write this, it’s harder than I thought. I never got to know Cheryl. I didn’t grow up with her. We didn’t get to be brother and sister. She didn’t have a chance to live and I didn’t have a chance to take care of her, to watch out for her, to argue with her, to be there for her. Why is it so hard? 

Family is family, no matter how little you might have known of them. Is this an answer?

Maybe. But I think there is another thing now, as I type this as a father of a five-year-old son. It affects me more because I have a child of my own and I cannot begin to even comprehend what my mother, and yes, even my father, went through. I’m a firm believer that we should never outlive our children. I remember everything coming up to my son’s birth. The pregnancy, the appointments, the worry, the emergency c-section one month before the due date. I can clearly say I would have been devastated if I lost my son like my parents lost Cheryl, and I can feel that deep within. 

This effect is something that I hadn’t felt before I was a father. I was of course always sad about Cheryl. I would mentioned to those I knew well that I did, actually, have another sister but she passed away when she was a baby. A quick condolence would ensue and I would say that it’s okay, because it happened when I was three. 

But it’s different now. 

Another way it’s different is the effect Cheryl’s death would have on the rest of my life, my family’s life, and the life of all of those people who were involved in my father’s cult. Years later, when I was a teenager, I found that Cheryl’s death could have been avoided. My mother’s doctor gave her experimental treatment during the delivery, which caused Cheryl brain damage. This eventually led to her untimely passing. She could still be here as I write this. 

If she was, I sometimes think about how different things would have been. My father just graduated law school when this happened and put his training to work and sued my mother’s doctor and the hospital for wrongful death. My father reached a settlement and received $25,000 from the hospital - or about $100,000 in today’s dollars (late 2023). 

When I was a teenager, I found out that this is the money my father used to build his law practice. He rented an office, bought furniture and office equipment, and placed advertisements in local newspapers for his services. He focused his practice in the areas that people were most vulnerable: bankruptcy, wills, and probate. The very law practice he started with this money was the same practice that he would run for the next 20 years and that would enable him to cause so much misery for our family and harm so many others in the process. 

For about a decade, my father’s firm was successful enough that he could have been able to save money for his family and live without financial worries. But he always wanted more and wanted to be better than he was, so he spent more money than he had. During the two decades he ran his law firm, I cannot remember a single instance that we were not stressed due to financial problems caused by his poor choices and, eventually, illegal activity. I remember once in the early 1990s taking over $40,000 in cash to deposit in his bank account. Yet he still was bouncing checks because he stretched himself too thin due to all of his hobbies, his cult, and purchases that were far beyond his means. At one point, he owned a Mercedes, a Jaguar, a Corvette, a single engine Cessna, and a twin engine turboprop airplane. He bought too much with money he didn’t have. 

What would have happened if my mother’s doctor didn’t give her experimental treatment and Cheryl survived? My father likely wouldn’t have been able to open his law practice. He wouldn’t have had a bunch of cash to use to make poor choices with, at least not then. Would he have been able to eventually purchase the church where he led his cult? Or the large house we moved into?  Would he started his law practice anyway, by taking out loans with bad terms? 

I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident that things would have gone very differently. Would there have been less suffering? Probably not, because my father was who he was. Influx of cash or not, that wouldn’t change, and perhaps we would have suffered even worse.

Sometimes I think, though, how different things would have been and where I would be today if Cheryl was still here. I’ll never know, but it’s amazing how much affect her passing likely had on the trajectory on the life of myself and my family. 

I’ve often wondered, too, how things might have been different with my siblings. Two years after Cheryl was born, my younger brother Daniel was born. Would he have been born then if Cheryl was alive and running around as a two-year old toddler? The makeup of my family would be very different, and this would have affected my entire family. 

It’s interesting how one event; one instant; one change; one time of chance; can change so much. 

When I mention Cheryl to anyone, it’s easy for others to overlook it as something that really didn’t affect me since it happened when I was so young. Now as I approach middle age with more perspective than I had when I was younger, I can confidently say that it is quite the opposite. She had a huge affect on the course of my life, when neither of us ever really knew it.