Sister Ship

Painting by: LYUDMILA OLENEVA

I recently started watching “Tiny Beautiful Things” on Disney. This new series is based off of the book of the same name by Cheryl Strayed. It is a compilation of letters and responses from Strayed’s advice column “Dear Sugar”. I read this book years ago and loved it as I adore Cheryl’s writing. She has such a beautiful, unique way with words that get’s inside your heart. The third episode includes excerpts from a letter entitled “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us” where Dear Sugar is advising a man who is wondering whether or not to have children. As I was watching the episode the words of this letter and the poem she refers to came back to me so vividly. The poem is called “The Blue House” by Tomas Transtromer. In this poem Transtromer writes, ” I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real… We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route.”

In her reply Dear Sugar looks at this idea that we all have a sister ship that follows a different route that we did not take in our lives. The one we didn’t choose but instead opted for a different path. I love this idea of a sister ship because it is so brilliantly and devastatingly true. Similar to the old adage “when one door closes, another opens.” or vice versa, it implies that choosing one thing means letting go of another. These other lives that we do not live sail along beside us just out of our reach. Strayed replies “the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.” She also explains that whatever we choose contains some loss. We miss out on the other option, that door closes and we are forced to move along wondering if we made the right call. I have been turning this idea of a “sister ship” over in my head since revisiting this essay. I have a disability and have had since birth. I was born into this body but every now and then I wonder if there is a sister life where I do not have this condition. I meditate on what that life would look like. I didn’t choose to be disabled or to travel this path, that choice was made for me but I still ponder, would I be happier? Would I have accomplished more? Would I be in an entirely different place at this stage in my life? These are all questions I don’t have answers to. Although my questions are very different to the man who wrote in to “Dear Sugar” to ask advice about becoming a parent they are still full of a similar uncertainty. We will never know if another life would be better or worse. We just have to live the life we have and accept the choices we made that brought us here. “Undecided”, as Dear Sugar calls him doesn’t know which path to choose and asks for help in deciding the right road but perhaps neither one is better than the other. Perhaps they both contain as much joy and sorrow as each other in different ways. 

Dear Sugar suggests that this man ask himself the question, what is a good life? I suspect the answer is different for everyone. Sugar instructs “undecided” to write down everything he associates with a good life, lay it all out on a sheet of paper so that the sketches of his real life and his sister life, are right there in front of him in order to help make this decision. She also tells him that no matter what he decides this sister life will remains. The uncertainty does not disappear just because we pick a route. All the other things you could have been and done still hang there. Although there is no decision I could have made that would have meant I could have lived in another body, there are still decisions I made and continue to make, that effect my reality. I must continue to choose to live into this body no matter it’s complications or what the world thinks of it.

The writer and painter Emil Sands writes “I am still grappling with the ways I have been made to feel that my body does not belong, and with the conviction that it is easier for everyone that I be a failing normal rather than a normal disabled.” The truth is that I do belong. It is not a mistake or some error in judgement. This life belongs to me and so does this body no matter how I, or anyone else might feel about it from day to day. That sister body that is not disabled and is without imperfections was not the ship I boarded at the beginning of this life. She does however linger in the background occasionally, like a phantom. We are all haunted by the choices we made and didn’t make, after all not deciding is a decision in itself. As I grow older and have to contend with ageing in a body that is more complex it seems I must continue to salute that life, that sister body, the ghost ship that didn’t carry me.