Losing Maureen
Patti Davis on her sister, dead from melanoma at 60

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By Patti Davis
NEWSWEEK

Aug. 20 issue — The moon is waning, but it’s still round and bright enough to turn the night silver. I am waiting for the phone call that is now inevitable. It will be my mother telling me that my sister, Maureen, has died. We have all been waiting—family members in different cities—knowing that her death is imminent. We have respected Maureen’s wishes, and those of her husband and daughter—letting them have these last days and hours to themselves. She wanted to devote what little strength she had left to them. So, we wait, and pray, and watch the sky a lot.

WE ARE, TECHNICALLY, HALF SISTERS, sharing the same father. This, I think, made us wary of each other. We both clamored for more of him and his approval, and blamed each other when we felt we didn’t get enough. I didn’t understand that before, in the years of distance and tension, but I do now. It must have been very hard for her to watch her parents divorce, to watch her father begin a new family and hold another daughter in his arms. Many times we just seemed angry at each other, although neither of us thought to analyze why. None of that matters now.
       There is much I don’t know about my sister. We never sat up late at night talking about boyfriends or clothes; we never went shopping together or took a walk on the beach. I’m not sure if she liked rainy days better than sunny ones. But I stood in awe of Maureen’s crusades—for women’s rights, for Alzheimer’s research.

I don’t know when Maureen and I dropped the word “half” and began referring to ourselves as sisters; it’s only important that we did. When I was 20, she took me to the airport to go visit a boyfriend on the East Coast. We kept my trip a secret because we knew it was a scandal in the making. It was the first secret we ever shared.

On my wedding day, she reached over and fastened a tiny pearl button on the back of my wedding dress. She said, “That’s what sisters are for,” and I knew that we were trying to get it right.
        Last month, in the white hum of a hospital room, I sat beside her and said, “I’m so sorry this is happening to you.” The cancer that had begun with melanoma was invading her brain. In reply, Maureen simply smiled and said, “I know.”
        The call came the other morning. My family will try to honor what John Donne said: “When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language”—one that resonates with life.

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