One summer evening at my grandmother’s house in Burlington, North Carolina, I was doing what many six-year-olds were doing that night.  I was in the yard, trying to catch fireflies in a pickle jar.  So was my eight-year-old sister.  The activity was innocent enough.  Catch a firefly or two, watch them glow through the glass, and release them to the night air.  

My sister caught a couple.  It seemed easy for her.  I was a bit more impatient, I suppose.  I attacked my first one like a gator would attack a lamb in a swamp.  I slammed the metal jar lid so fast and so hard on my first prey that I cut the little guy in half.  His tiny little taillight was still flashing in the jar as my sister broke down, cried and called me a murderer.  I was devastated - by my sister’s reaction more than anything.  But I was clearly not as devastated as my sister.  She actually felt the pain and death of that single firefly.

I should have known from that one evening how my sister’s years would unfold.  But it took a while.  It took years of watching her bring home stray cats, catching and releasing house flies instead of swatting them, standing in the middle of rush hour  highways with cat or dog food, trying to feed obviously homeless animals.

For some time now, my sister’s attention has drifted from insects and animals.  Not much, but necessarily so.  She cared for our dad a few years before his death in 1992.  Since then, and especially the last 5 years, she has cared for and kept a watchful eye on our mom.  She knows our mom more than my mom knows our mom.  She feels her pain and her fears.  My sister has saved Mama’s life more than once - at times when hospital staff members were clueless.  She is saving her again.

Our mom is very ill.  On a daily basis these days, my sister goes to the hospital to keep our mom alive.  She arrives to see the results of hours of apparent patient mismanagement, only to share what she knows of our mom with the hospital staff.  Within minutes or short hours after advising the staff as if she were the attending physician herself, our mom responds to “Marilyn-treatment.”  Mama comes back around.  

Marilyn and I talked last night by phone just as we have every night since mid November.  She recounted a story of rescuing three pups living beneath the steps of a warehouse.  We were both grown at the time, and I had moved away.  I remembered only two of those dogs at the house when I would come home for visits.  Marilyn told me of the third last night.  That one was very sick, and shouldn’t have lived at all.  But it did.   For a while anyway.  Marilyn kept her alive for as long as she could.  She told me that Mama named that sickly pup.  Her name was “Miracle.”

There will come a time, a devastating time, when Marilyn won’t be able to save Mama.  But for now and for a while to come, she is again doing what she does so well.  She’s doing her best.  

My sister’s initials are “MMM.”  If Mama could right now, I bet she’d add one more “M.”  So would all those fireflies, houseflies, dogs and cats.  Well, maybe they can’t.  But I can.  

I‘ll call my sister by her new name.

Her name is Miracle.   

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