LETTER TO MY SISTER IN OUTER SPACETIME

TO ANNIE WHEREVER WHOEVER YOU ARE NOW

When I arrived at Via Ortigara last week I put my hands on the sealed wooden box in which your body had been lying since Saturday the fifteenth of October when you left this planet.

I put my face against the pale brown coffin but no words or signals came up into my ears. There was only the heaving of my breath facing the reality of your departure.

Now the fire you requested has reduced your shape to ashes, the Annie crumbs sit in an urn waiting to be dispersed into the Atlantic ocean, as you demanded years ago when death was not even a flicker on the horizon.

We were so different you and I but both of us are rebels. Not because we want to break the rules but because we don’t believe they apply to us. I’m sure you told the gatekeepers of Wherever that you don’t need a password. Of course they let you in. Of course.

We had different kinds of anger you and I, different passions. The sandpaper wall between us could be painful sometimes and until I finish this letter I’ll still be angry with you for not waking me up on the morning Mom died. So I couldn’t hold her hand when she took her last breath.

I was asleep on the sofa in the living room, you were sitting beside her in the bedroom. You woke me only when she was already gone. I asked, enraged, why didn’t you call me sooner? You said: You were so tired, I wanted to let you sleep.

I wasn’t holding your hand either when you last breathed in but you are with me forever. Ti voglio tanto bene,je t'aime. Bon voyage my dearest nomad.

How and where to send this letter? I’m sending it electronically, in public and I’ve turned WIFI on because maybe cyberwaves have access to your present location.

Natou

MY SISTER ANNIE, GONE

Today my sister, Anne d'Arbeloff Guerrieri, died peacefully in her sleep at home in Rome aged 97. There is too much to say about her. It's all going round in my mind now, some of it is online in my unfinished autobio, some of it other people have written.

I just want to sit for a while in silence where one question only is written in huge neon letters on cosmic walls:

WHERE DO WE GO WHEN WE'RE GONE?

I don't want to hear all the answers that already exist, whether they are religious, anti-religious, humanist, new age, old age, spiritualist, philosophical, scientific, devil-may-care, devil-may-not-care, or WHATEVER. I just want to stare at the question. Meanwhile here are some photos of Annie. These are for her wherever she is, my amazing, unique, irreplaceable, impossible, infuriating, exasperating, unforgettable sister, with eternal love.

The first photo -left to right: our mother Blanche, Annie, me - was taken in 1986. In April that year, her husband Gerardo Guerrieri drowned himself in the Tevere river in Rome.