Inge-Sandra

If she were still alive, my sister would be turning 49 today.  At home, we called her Inge, but at school and work, she was known as Sandra, so some people called her Inge-Sandra.  Originally Inge Alexandra Cline, then Inge Alexandra Sitton after my she was adopted by my father, she changed her name to Alexandra Elizabeth Sitton when she joined the Navy.  She met and married Michael Heath, becoming Alexandra Elizabeth Heath.  I can't recall if her headstone says Alexandra Elizabeth "Inge" Heath or Alexandra Elizabeth "Inge" Sitton Heath, but whichever variation of that, "Inge" was included because that's how many people remember her.  When I was a child, if I was mad at her, I called her Inge-pinga-dinga-linga.  But most of the time, I wasn't mad at her.  Aside from my best friend from kindergarten, Inge was my best friend.

We were three years and eight months apart in age, making her my closest sister.  We used to walk down to Dairy Queen together and get a parfait.  Sometimes we would brave Jacksboro Highway and walk over to the Lone Star cafe and have lunch.  I always tried different things off the menu, but she would always get an open-face chili cheeseburger.  When I went away to college, I would come home on the weekends to wash clothes and restock my pantry, and she would sometimes take me shopping.  Our favorite thing to shop for was underwear - pretty matching bras and panties.

Perhaps it was fitting that she was born on a Friday the 13th.  She was the middle child as well, and always seemed to have trouble fitting in.  She could have been a great writer, but dropped out of school, got her GED, and joined the Navy.  As soon as her time was up, she moved back home with her new daughter.  She tried once to reconcile with her estranged husband, but it didn't stick.  So she came back, bringing her daughter, but her husband had his mother's money behind him.  Inge said she could probably afford to fight him in court once, but he was determined to have the baby, so instead of putting the child through a long, drawn out custody battle, she let Mike take Lindsay back to Virginia.

After that, Inge seemed to go through a long bout of depression, but she managed to get a job as a pharmacy tech at JPS.  She eventually got her own apartment as was doing okay, it seemed.  But after coming down with a bad case of mono, she moved back home, into my old room, as I had just moved in with my best friend.  A couple of months later, Bill Chappell broke in the house and shot her, Mommy, and Pappy.  She died at the scene.  Mommy died two days later, and Pappy died two months later.  The papers later reported that Bill was shocked to learn that he had killed Inge and not me.

So of course, I have always felt a heavy burden of guilt about Inge's death.  I've had therapy, and it helped a little.  I can intellectualize the fact that Bill pulled the trigger, not me.  But I still can't seem to get over the feeling of loss and abandonment caused by the death of my closest sister (and parents, of course).  We had a very close bond.  I have two older sisters, and they seem to share something with each other similar to what Inge and I had.  But I am not as close to them as I was to her because I wasn't as close to them in childhood as I was to her.  They were always busy, out of the house, trying to get me to not tag along with them.

I have some very close friends -- closer than most people have, I've come to learn.  Friends who have been to hell and back with me.  Friends who couldn't bail me out of jail should I ever be arrested because they'd be next to me in the cell saying, "wasn't that fun??"  Be that as it may, I still have this hole in my heart that was caused by the loss of my sister.  I miss her doing things like whacking her hairbrush on the window of the car I was sitting in, kissing a boyfriend.  I miss her fixing me Hamburger Helper for Thanksgiving when our parents let us live on our own a mile away while they lived in our grandmother's house.  I miss her setting me up on blind dates with friends of her boyfriends and telling them I was a French exchange student.  I miss you singing into the curling iron to K.C. and the Sunshine Band records.

Inge always asked my opinion about everything, clothes, makeup, music, guys -- except when it came to her true love.  Inge fell in love with her Social Studies teacher, Mr. Castillo, in the 7th grade.  He finally went out with her when she was 18.  They dated for a while.  He attended her funeral, even though he was married to someone else by then.

I will always wonder what Inge could have done if she had lived.  I visualize her as going to college and becoming a writer.  Perhaps I will always feel a sadness for her untapped potential.  But I know that I'm not the only one who knows that Inge-Sandra lived up to the hope most people have of being a true, loyal friend.