My half-sister, Sylvia, passed away last night. “Passed away…” Those two words always give me pause. Sylvia is so much a part of the reason that I survived my childhood.

We’re sitting there–anywhere, the dining table, the sofa–and Brian says, “Why did you sigh?” and I shrug.

I lie along the top of the sofa (it’s wide, it’s sturdy) like the cats do and stare. A bit numb. Missing Sylvia. Not feeling like doing anything.

Sylvia was older than my mother when I was born, my father’s second daughter with his first family, the family that his marriage to my mother broke up. She was half sister, half mother to me. The most upbeat person I know. Or is that knew? When someone dies, does knowing them pass into “knew them?”

Oh, the minutia of it all.

I do know this: Sylvia will leave an unfillable hole in my life. As it should be.

I’ve let too much time go by without posting.

We’re back home, missing snow.

I’m revising Starletta’s Kitchen and planning to give a writing workshop at a major insurance company tomorrow for a dozen of its marketing folks.

And I’m keeping watch, via phone and email, on my half-sister back east who is close to death. Sylvia is who I write about at the beginning of the chapter in Pen on Fire called “Using the Ones You Love,” the chapter that begins with: “Multiple marriages, remarriages and bigamy run in my family. My dad married my mother while he was still married to his first wife. My half-sister divorced her first husband, married her second husband, divorced him and remarried the first; and when he died, she remarried the second, who had been waiting for her for ten years.”

After I sent Sylvia the book, she said she liked it, “especially the part about me.”

Sylvia was from my father’s first family. She was older than my mother, so you can imagine the jolt to her family when my father, a native Sicilian, left her mother and the family for my mother. Must have been a major drag for everyone involved.

So now Sylvia’s in the hospital. I spoke to her the other day. She told me she hoped she would get into heaven.

“If you don’t, Sylvia, none of us will.”

“I don’t know,” she said, kinda slurry.

There were a lot of “I love you’s” and she then she said, “I’ll see you in heaven.” So she must have decided she would get in after all. Yesterday a priest gave her Last Rites.

It’s debatable whether the Eskimoes have 100 words for snow. Doesn’t matter. Today we have blotla, which is blowing snow and tlapa, which is powder snow.

This shows the view outside the condo.

I love snow.

Here’s the beginning of a poem by one of my favorite poets, Diane Di Prima (a podcast of her on my show is at http://writersonwriting.blogspot.com).

“First Snow, Kerhonkson” – for Alan

This, then, is the gift the world has given me
(you have given me)
softly the snow
cupped in the hollows…..

(You can find her poem in its entirety here: http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/diprima.html. Just scan down a bit.)

I do love snow.

We are going out
into the snow
now.
Make a new memory
with snow.

Trav and me…