Remembering Stephanie

[Remarks written about Stephanie Hiers for the occasion of her celebration of life on May 14, 2022 by Valerie Livesay]

Stephanie was the keeper of our childhood memories.  Even after her brain surgery, she could remember the details of our early life far better than I could. With her passing, I’ve been in fear of forgetting. And perhaps out of preservation, the scenes of her life and ours together have been appearing to me in snippets.

We are 4 & 6 playing “run and get em” the tickle game we played every night after dinner with my dad. He called her Poopsie & I was Mopsy – and of the two options, I was grateful for the nickname I had been given.

We are 5 and 7, sitting on the couch with our parents when they tell us they are divorcing. We must choose who we will live with. Stephanie chooses Mom, and though I want to go with Dad, I can’t bear to be without her. I choose Stephanie. 

We are 6 and 8. We are visiting Dad in Indiana. We go for an early morning walk and are enthralled by the dew drops clinging to the wispy web that a spider has spent the night spinning on the iron gates of a Victorian mansion. Steph and I play chasing games on a hillside and Dad immortalizes the moment on film, later running the photo in the Vevay Reveille with the caption “Joy.” I remember an endless roll of paper and brand new 64 count crayons with the sharpener built into the box. And hours more making up dances to the song “Vevay, Indiana" playing on repeat on the 45.

We are back in Memphis in the Service Merchandise parking lot taking turns sitting in our mom’s and Aunt Sue’s laps as we drive the car. I see us making homemade ice cream on the concrete slab porch at granddaddy’s farm. The video reel of my mind plays us singing and dancing to Jim Croce in our grandparent’s living room; styling granddad’s hair to look like Elvis’s as he napped on the couch; snuggling boodies in the morning after sleepovers at Grandma’s.

We are upstairs in our bedroom at the townhouse “playing” hairdresser. I walk downstairs, apparently completely unaware to face a horrified mom. Steph has cut my bangs to the scalp and gave only the middle bits of what had been my long blonde hair a bob. I wore pink scalloped tape on my bangs every night for months to train them to lay flat as they grew out.

Around the time Steph was 11 and I was 9, the memories turn darker…harder to see, to acknowledge. Steph was a rule breaker, and perhaps because she claimed that role first, I assumed the default role of rule follower….and goody-two-shoes, and tattle-teller, and general pain in the ass little sister. Steph and I grew apart in those years as she found herself in a much different part of her development than I was and confronted a darkness in our own home that I only peripherally understood.  

Now the playback screen flashes us at 15 and 13. We’re living in Indiana, each of us finding our own way, together, but separately into this new place and time. The film fast-forwards to us lifeguarding together at the local pools; to us on the way home from a party in high school, sucking on pennies so we wouldn’t get caught with beer on our breath.

The camera of my mind pans to Stephanie, hours from turning 18, and me at 15. We sit together in her bed, holding each other, crying in anticipation of her telling my dad that she is moving out at the stroke of midnight. Steph was ever determined to live her own life, by her own rules. Another triumphant stand.  

Now she is 23, living in Charleston, South Carolina. I visit her there. I can still see the way the morning sunlight filters through the blinds in the guest room; see us drinking flavored coffee out of fancy cups in her dining room. We are at the discount store with her determined to have every sticky note, desk organizer, colored pencil they sold. We drink tropical cocktails at a restaurant called California Dreamin’. We see a Counting Crows cover band and eat burgers at 3am.

Steph is 27 and has come to visit me in San Diego with her boyfriend, our mom, Aunt Sue, and Lindsey. We throw a party, drink champagne, and sing karaoke -- ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

Then a blank screen plays in the reel of my memories of her. Stephanie and I were estranged for over a decade. We never resolved the hurts that had caused our separation, our long years of silence. We just picked up when we were able, when the time was right for both she and I, and we moved forward. I don’t regret the time that we were not in each other’s lives. It felt necessary. We both needed to confront the demons within us and come into acceptance of the demons that lived within each other. We needed to grow. And, we needed to find our way back to love. The invitation to that reunion came in the form of Stephanie’s brain tumor at the age of 42.

Now Steph is 46. I’m 44. I pick her up at the airport and the woman is a hot mess. So many bags for a 5 day stay. Digging through each of them for a cigarette and a lighter, she mentions in passing as we are exiting the airport, “oh, and I don’t know where my ID is.”  I stop short and make her stop, too. I tell her, “We are not leaving this airport until you find that ID, because without that ID, I can’t send you back!” There we stood by the baggage claim, Steph’s belongings strewn around us. But, by God we were going to find that driver’s license!  And we did. 

I have to acknowledge the courage that she showed in boarding that flight after all of our years apart. She was coming to my home, my territory. I had “my people” surrounding me. She was flying solo. Though in truth, I know she had her “bench” on standby. I know I did. So many texts flying in about “how’s it going?” And it couldn’t have gone any better.

My husband, Sonnie, recalls hearing us come in through the front door cackling.  He said, “I thought, my God, there are two of them! But this new one is even louder!” And my children were enthralled!  She was like a grown-up version of them.  She taught them “bird is the word” and serenaded them with “love to love to love ya.” They taught her that the proper response to “Guess what?” is “Chicken Butt.” She called them her creamies and proclaimed they were her children that she was letting me raise.

In a profound act of fairness and equanimity she insisted I cut her hair to make up for the haircut she had exacted on me nearly 40 years before. We Skyped my Mom in for the occasion at her insistence. We three needed to be there to witness the rectification of the harm she had done to me. Of course with four decades on her, I am a far better hairstylist than she was at 7.  Still, I was touched by her insistence on making things right. 

Indeed, Steph, for all her flaws—and there were many, because she, like each of us, was human—had the most amazing capacity for and dedication to thoughtful reflection and righting her wrongs, her harms against others. In fact one of the last messages I received from her in the days before she passed was her doing this very thing—owning her acts of unfairness…making things right. 

Five days following the grown-up haircut, we are back at that same airport. I watched her walk through security and I felt like my heart was leaving with her. Steph was sick then, too, and I knew she was not long for this world.

It’s 2019, and I’ve come to visit her in Indiana for her 47th birthday. We’re getting me settled into my room, and she’s in so much pain she can barely catch her breath. She lays on my bed, and I read to her from the fucking hilarious book Let’s Pretend this Never Happened by Jenny Lawson. We gut laugh, she through her pain, and she tells me I’m a good reader…not as in I know how to read, but as in she loves to listen to me read to her.

It's a few days later, and we’re sitting at the counter in Hinkles Sandwich Shop, she next to a flirty septegenarian who clearly has become smitten by his counter companion. She and he swap tales about brain surgery and heart issues and myriad other medical dilemmas that had beset them both…she in her 40s, he in his 70s. 

Throughout her life, and even as her body began to fail her, Steph burned bright and so many of us basked in her glow. It was warm and inviting and she made you feel like the most important, special, extraordinary person in the world, capable of anything. And, with her in your corner, you really thought you were.  As did this gentleman on a March afternoon at Hinkles.

Most of us live somewhere in the middle of our expression of self, rarely braving the outer reaches of our capacities. It allows us to be even, more acceptable to others, showing up in a way they expect and can handle. But Steph lived into the extremes of the full spectrum of her being, and her shadows were as dark as her luminosity was brilliant. The fullness of Steph, both the light and dark, deserves to be acknowledged. She was multi-dimensional, demanding to live in full color. 

In her demands, throughout her life, she often made a triumphant stand. As her body increasingly failed her in the final year of her life, taking a stand, living the way she wanted to live, as a sovereign being with the right to make her own decisions, became harder.

Many of us who loved her pushed against the triumphant stands she attempted to make these last few months. We so desperately wanted her to get better, to follow the rules, to work within the system. We, I, so often failed to hear what she was trying to tell us. For years, she had so bravely, and patiently, and hopefully, and with her signature wit faced into a life that had stripped from her of all its joys. And she was done. She took her last triumphant stand in the weeks before her death, determined to go home, to find some comfort and peace in being with her kitties and the things that she loved.  And I think she was ready.

I learned so many things from my big sister throughout her life. I so wanted to be like her when I was little. I still do. I want to be able to face fearlessly into the full catastrophe that life presents to each of us. I want to offer myself the grace and patience to be, to feel, to experience whatever it is I need to experience for 3 days…and then come up with a plan. I want to possess her capacity to offer that grace and patience to others. I want to be more forgiving, as she always was, in the face of tremendous harms. I want to take more moments to make others feel like they are extraordinary and capable of great things. I want to be more childlike. I want to live more fully into the full spectrum of who I am as a human.

[Stephanie Anne Hiers passed away on April 20, 2022. Fare thee well, my bright star.]