The Phone Call I Expected… and Still Wasn’t Ready For

I tend to write when my emotions turn complicated, and today is one of those days. It’s been five years since my oldest sister passed away.

I was at work when my husband called. I stepped into the back room, away from the sales floor, and answered. He told me they had found her in the bathtub. She had drowned. I sat on a wooden stool, taking slow, steady breaths as the weight of his words sank into me.

The magnitude of it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, the ocean far below—one of those moments when life reminds you just how small you are and how quickly everything can change.

“Okay,” I think that was my response.

I didn’t cry.

What I felt first was relief. Then sadness, and a deep ache of empathy for my parents. That concern wrapped around my own complicated feelings like a cloak.

Her death was a shock, and yet it was also the call we had quietly expected for years.

In the world of grief work—something I’ve devoted myself to since losing my son—there’s a term called “complicated grief.” It describes mourning someone with whom you had a painful or difficult relationship. Often this person caused harm. That was my experience with my sister.

We weren’t close. For more than a decade she battled addiction, slipping in and out of reality. And in her darker states, I became the focal point of her anger.

As children, the conflict between us wasn't typical sibling spats people assume. She beat me. Regularly. I often had bruises along my arms, on my ribs, missing patches of hair. She would pin me against a doorframe and slam the door into my head. She was ruthless in ways that are hard to explain to anyone who didn’t witness it. Because I was closest in age to her, I instinctively stepped between her and our younger siblings when her rage flared. At first, I did it to buy them time to run. Later, when I grew tall enough to hold my ground, I did it simply because someone had to. In high school, she was popular and petty. She would enroll the cheerleaders and jocks to line main hall before I walked through to bark like dogs at me as the "dog face" girl. Even now, I sometimes wonder if some of her volatility came from the ill health she suffered as a young child—years when she was prescribed narcotics long before anyone understood the impact those medications could have on a developing brain. It doesn’t excuse it, but it adds another layer of complexity to who she became and what she battled.

The truth is, she was one of the hardest relationships of my life. As adults she sent long, vicious messages about my appearance, my parenting, my children, my successes. She would call extended family members, spreading rumors and repeating the most painful parts of my past—divorce, eating disorders, mistakes I made as a teen. In our conservative religious family, she branded me with names that stuck for years.

When she was incoherent from pills, the messages often dissolved into fragments. I could sense she was trying to say something, but the meaning was lost inside her.

When I tried to explain what I felt the night she died, the only comparison I could think of was this:
“It’s like the tax man who shows up a few times a year—suddenly he’s not coming anymore.”

Her husband told us she had actually been doing better recently, which made it even more traumatic that it was her young daughter who found her. I can’t imagine the weight of that moment.

It’s been five years, and I’ve never written publicly about any of this—out of respect for my family. My parents and siblings didn’t experience her the way I did. They didn’t get the messages. They didn’t witness the cruelty in the way I did. In her mind, I was the villain.

The more I accomplished, the more she resented me. When I was in the newspaper or speaking at the Parliament of World Religions, she would comment things like, “She’s just a slutty thief; don’t listen to her.” A reference to a shoplifting incident from my teenage years she clung to like evidence.

Decades outside those rebellious years, she still threw my past at me whenever she could.

I’m writing today because it’s complicated. Her death reminds me of her life, and she wasn’t all bad. She wasn’t evil. She was human, deeply wounded, often lost inside addiction. And in that haze, I was the target she shot at most.

You can’t win arguments with someone drowning in chemicals and pain. For years my replies were always the same:
“This is over the line. Stop. I’m open to a healthy relationship someday.”

That phrase often triggered another wave of attacks. Over time I learned to ignore them—she knew my deepest insecurities and used them precisely.

It was hard. She was hard. 

In many ways, navigating her death brought unexpected validation. When family members helped clean her home, they saw glimpses of the chaos she had been living in—the instability, the struggle. Others had to confront the reality of how long she’d been drowning.

I also had to reconcile years of not being believed. When I tried to express concern before she died, it was brushed off as childhood grudges or exaggeration. Over time I stopped saying anything; the response was always, “You need to let the past go.”

But I wasn’t talking about the past.

Shortly after she turned forty, she messaged me:
“Katie, we have to let this war stop. I’m forty, I want to let the past go.”

I remember staring at my phone thinking, What war?
I wrote back, “I’m not in a war with you.”

We were never friends. At best, there were simply windows of time that could be described as temporary "cease fires."

Through her distorted lens, she saw her own attacks as a two-sided battle. For me, they were a chore—something to brace for a few times each year.

As I write this today, I feel guilty. I don’t want to bring pain to my parents. Losing a child is the greatest heartbreak a person can know—something I understand personally. My intention isn’t to shame or wound anyone. It’s to clear my mind and honor the truth of the relationship.

And when I think of her as a sister, there is one memory I hold close.

We were early teens, visiting my grandparents’ ranch. The pasture stretched endlessly, green grass up to our knees. The sky hung low with thick white clouds casting deep purple shadows across the hills.

We raced through the pasture, trying to stay in each moving patch of shade, laughing so hard we could barely breathe. When my grandparents finished their work, we leapt into the creek by the gate—much to their frustration—and they made us ride in the bed of the old Ford on the long drive home.

We lay side by side for seven miles, shivering and laughing, trying to keep warm in the wind.

That’s the memory I keep.
That’s the one I turn to when I think of her.
It reminds me she was more than her hardest moments.
She was human.
And regardless of what came before or after—
I still have that one good memory.

Find me at katiejofinai.com 

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