The Sister Who Asked Me To Drive, And Not To Talk

The phone call I did not expect

My younger sister and I are close now, but we were not always. There is a five-year gap between us, which is nothing when you are adults and everything when you are children, and for a long time I was more like a bossy aunt to her than a sister. I gave advice she did not ask for. I had opinions about her choices. I thought, in the arrogant way of older siblings, that I knew what her life should look like better than she did.

So when she phoned me one evening a few years ago, and I could hear from the first word that something was wrong, my instinct was to start solving it before I had even heard what it was. She stopped me. She said, I do not want you to fix anything, and I do not want you to have a view. I want you to drive me somewhere on Thursday and wait, and not talk. Can you do that.

It was the hardest thing she could have asked of me, because talking and having views were the two things I did most naturally. But I heard something in her voice I had never heard before, a kind of flat, exhausted steadiness, and I said yes. Of course. Thursday. I will not talk.

What she was carrying

She told me the shape of it in the car, in her own time, looking out of the window rather than at me. She was pregnant, and she had decided, after what I could tell had been a long and lonely reckoning, that she was not going to continue the pregnancy. She had made the appointment herself. She had thought about it more carefully and more privately than I think I had thought about any decision in my whole comfortable, opinionated life.

I want to be honest about my first internal reaction, because this story is worthless if I pretend I was instantly perfect. I felt the old reflex rising, the urge to weigh in, to ask questions that were really statements, to make her decision a conversation with me at the centre of it. And then I looked at her face, at how much it had already cost her to say the words out loud, and I understood that every single thing I might add was for me, not for her. She had not asked for a jury. She had asked for a driver.

So I drove. And I did the hardest thing, which was to keep my mouth shut and let her decision belong entirely to her.

The waiting room

The women's clinic was a plain building on an ordinary street, the kind you would drive past a hundred times without noticing. From the outside you would never have guessed it was an abortion clinic; it looked like a dentist, or an optometrist, or any other quiet place people go to be looked after. Inside it was calm and unremarkable, which surprised me, because I think some part of me had braced for drama, for a place that matched the weight I had loaded onto the day. Instead there were chairs, and soft light, and staff who spoke gently and without fuss, and other women waiting, each inside her own private version of a hard day.

I sat in that waiting room while my sister was seen, and I did something I am not proud to say was unusual for me. I looked around and I did not judge a single person. There was a young woman who could not have been twenty, alone, scrolling her phone with a stillness that was not really about the phone. There was a woman my own age with a wedding ring, quietly reading a pamphlet. There was someone who had clearly been crying and someone who looked simply, deeply tired. I had no idea what had brought any of them there and, for once in my life, I understood that it was none of my business, and that the only useful thing I could offer any of them was to not have a face full of opinions.

I had spent years, if I am honest, thinking of abortion clinics as an abstraction, a thing people argued about on the radio, a topic. Sitting in that room turned the abstraction into people. Ordinary, exhausted, brave people, each one having thought harder about her own life than I had ever been forced to think about mine.

Staying

My sister was in there for what felt like a long time and was probably not. I did not read. I did not scroll. I sat and I stayed, because staying was the entire job she had given me, and I was determined not to fail at the one thing she had trusted me with.

When she came out she looked pale and steady and relieved and sad, all at once, which is a combination I did not have a word for and still do not. She found me across the room and something in her shoulders let go when she saw that I was exactly where she had left me. We did not talk on the way to the car. I opened her door, and she got in, and we sat for a moment in the car park before I started the engine, and she reached over and held my hand, hard, and said only, thank you for not talking. And I said, any time. And I meant it in a way I had never meant anything.

What it changed in me

We drove home the long way, without discussing it, both of us just wanting the quiet of the road. I stopped and bought us both a milkshake, which was a stupid, childish thing to do and exactly the right thing to do, and we drank them in the car like we were teenagers, and slowly she came back into herself.

What that day changed in me was not my politics, which I will keep to myself here because they are not the point and never were. What it changed was my understanding of what it means to love someone. For my whole life I had confused loving people with managing them, with having a plan for them, with being useful in the loud, visible way that is mostly about how good it makes the helper feel. My sister taught me, in the most difficult way she could have chosen, that the deepest form of support is often the quietest. It is sitting in a plain waiting room. It is keeping the engine off for a minute. It is not talking.

The thing I tell people now

I do not tell this story often, and when I do I tell it carefully, because it is my sister's before it is mine and she has generously let me share her part of it. But I tell it because of one thing.

We spend so much energy in this world deciding what other people should do with their own bodies and their own lives, and almost none learning how to simply be beside someone on a hard day without making it about ourselves. The women in that waiting room did not need my thoughts. My sister did not need my views. She needed a car, and a chair, and someone who would stay exactly where she left them.

She and I are closer now than we have ever been. Some of that is time, and some of it is that she once trusted me with the most private crossroads of her life and I managed, for once, to be worthy of it by doing almost nothing at all. Sometimes the whole of love is just staying in the room, and driving home the long way, and buying the milkshake.