Lessons from my sister for tough times

As Cheri would say, watch each other’s backs

Cheri with her son, Sean, in 2012.

I write this on the day of remembrance for my sister Cheryl Lenart-Cann, who would have turned 61 yesterday. The feeling of loss I felt after she died in 2013 comes to haunt me today, with the weight of collective grief for our struggling democracy.

In the months after my sister Cheri died, I often found myself unable to muster up concern for things. Plants need watering? I don't care. I’m supposed to be planning a workshop? I don't care. Is this a good color to paint the gate? I really do not care.

Before watching Cheri slip away in a matter of eight months, I could envision many ways to hope we could turn things around on our ailing planet. I wondered how some people can apparently not care about the troubling state of our planet, or our country. The problems we face seem so obvious to me, and so in need of remedy.

Yet after losing my vibrant sister to a fast-moving cancer in 2013, a year that also took down half a dozen friends and family members, I suddenly understood how personal problems can push out the ability to care for aspects of life beyond immediate survival. It was tough, even painful, to think about planetary woes when I was just trying to get through the day without breaking into tears.

As the pending death of my cheerful, charming sister loomed, my hope withered. I lived a life with fewer rays of sunshine, even though I lived in the Arizona desert when I wasn’t visiting Cheri at her Cleveland-area home on Lake Erie.

My mom and I stayed with her for weeks on end, making meals, doing dishes, sweeping the floor, and bringing her tea. We handed her freshly squeezed juice of carrots, beets and apples. She accepted the juice but kept it with her for hours, sipping it slowly as if it tasted like cod liver oil. I had better success feeding her busy husband, a podiatrist, and their teenaged son.

Out of love for her son, Cheri insisted he go ahead with the week-long hiking trip his new college offered as a way for incoming freshmen to launch friendships, even though her opportunities to spend time with him were waning. When she died at the start of his first trimester, his new friendships served him well. Still, we all took it hard.

In retrospect, I can see that Cheri’s passing took with it my long-treasured identity as the firstborn of a gaggle of sisters. As the third-born of five girls, Cheri technically was in the middle. But we were only 6½ years apart from oldest to youngest. For a few months in the 1970s, all five of us were teenagers at the same time—while living with our single mom in a duplex with only one bathroom.

I remember those years mostly as an adventure, with the six of us regularly sitting down with my aunt and her two daughters who lived upstairs to share a pot of tea or a box of wine along with a good laugh. The camaraderie took the edge off the divorces.

The nine of us developed a rapid-fire manner of speaking. You learned to throw in a sentence or two if you wanted to join the rolling conversation. If you missed your chance, you let go of your thought and waited for a different one to pop into mind in response to the ever-shifting topic at hand.

Cheri was more laid back than some members of our boisterous group, but her laughter would often ring out above the fray. She was a stable, steady presence who also managed to be a badass—something we prized on the South Side of Chicago.

We all loved going barefoot, but she took it to another level. She used the bell bottoms popular at the time to hide her naked feet so that she could walk around barefoot all day even in our high school. Even in winter. One snowy day, she borrowed my high-heeled black suede boots.

“They look great on you,” I told her. “You can keep them, if you want.”

Her look of gratitude made it easy to part with the boots I wore only every few months. She wore them with everything, pulling off the look as part of her mystique. She had been a beauty from an early age, somehow bypassing the awkward stage that left gangly me with buck teeth and, later, braces.

Decades later, when her husband told a story at her memorial, I learned the backstory about her barefoot and black-boot phases. It turns out her fashion sense related to a Salvation Army pickup. Whoever agreed to it forgot about it. So we had set out no used clothes or furniture on the porch, as promised. But there was a big box of shoes at the front door.

By the time we realized what had happened to all of the footwear we shucked into the box when we came in the front door, our shoes had been distributed to secondhand stores around the Chicagoland area. They were irretrievable.

Unlike me, Cheri had all of her shoes in the one box. But she didn’t push for a new pair from my mom, whose waitress job along with meager child support barely kept us fed and housed. Cheri just went barefoot until her oblivious sister finally gave her a pair of boots.

Another side of her comes through in a story from when we were in our twenties. About eight of us sat in the upstairs loft area of a Chicago bar toasting a cousin’s engagement. Amid the laughter, I heard a menacing male voice behind me.

I looked back and saw young man in a black leather vest hit a woman he had pushed against the guardrail to the open floor below. Without stopping to think, I jumped up and approached. He didn’t seem to notice me there, so I tapped him on the buttocks with my right foot.

He whipped around and started yelling at me, fists up. But Cheri was behind me already. Another sister and several cousins glared at him from the table. The guy retreated and sat back down, the young woman across from him. While my cousins howled with laughter, saying “You kicked his butt!” (gently, I swear), Cheri gave me a solemn stare. “Don’t go out there without your backup.”

She played backup for a lot of family members.

Thinking of Cheri now, I realize I’ve been looking for lessons in her death. But the lessons come from her life. How Cheri lived her life has something to teach me, and perhaps us, about dealing with these trying yet crucially important times.

It’s challenging not to fall into anger about the ongoing coup, with an unauthorized civilian plundering the Treasury and the president usurping the money-dispensing role of Congress. Into fear of not knowing what to do about it. Into grief for the soul of our country. Americans had been striving to embrace inclusion and respect. Now we’re back to greed and bullying by those who imagine themselves above the laws of the land.

Somehow, we must prevail.

Ideally, like Cheri, we can do our best to remain loving and kind through it all—whether it’s radiation treatments or supply chain shortages.

We can watch out for the children and young adults. The weight of the world has increased for younger generations. We need to be compassionate and respectful.

Like her, we need to be resourceful. Stock up on staples. Start a garden. Consider keeping your own chickens. And share with others. Share laughter, too.

Most importantly, whether barefoot or in black suede boots, we must stand up for ourselves—and each other. We’ve got to have each other’s backs.

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This post has been updated to clarify the timing of Cheri’s death on September 10, 2013. It came at the start of her son’s trimester, not a few weeks into it.