Life and Death in the Family Structure

This essay is purely subjective, and I am going to let that be for this post. I wanted to discuss a recent psychological experience that was extremely freeing and the way I think that it corresponds with family structure, adulthood, and mourning. About a month ago I made a clear decision to think of my schizophrenic sister as dead. That is, I think I finally allowed myself to understand that I felt her dead and have felt her to be dead for some years now. I remember clearly the day I came home after a five-day stay with family and found her eyes were vacant and her steps uncertain.
I remember the disconcerting conversations wherein all her prior beliefs were as vacant and self-doubting as winds blowing this way and that. And I remember the sorrow I buried, not sure what to do with it. She was never the same; I was never the same. Though our family continued, I would argue that the structure was never truly the same, either, though it was hard for most of the other members to really tell. My sister had, three or four years before this, disappeared from family life into a nether-world where she lived only in her bedroom, coming out for a few hours each day and in the year before this 'death' had insisted upon wearing a long, black wool cloak no matter what the weather - as if she had retired to a life of perpetual mourning, monkhood, or death.
When I came home that evening after being away, it seemed like monkhood had turned to death. And that somehow, my absence had killed her. I began to swirl into a deepened depression, as depression had haunted me, too, in that already-haunted house, and now the guilt and the loss together with my inability to understand them took me over in an iron grip of complete emptiness. That would be the best way to describe the feeling. A numb disbelief, and suddenly all my experiences seemed somewhat dissociated as I watched for my sister to resurface from the darkness and the fog but she never did. It got worse after that, she started experiencing hellish hallucinations, which my parents took for spiritual sightings and she was never more the sister that I had known.
I felt horrible a month ago when I let her die. I cried and I couldn't reconcile myself to the decision except for the amazing feeling of relief and understanding it seemed to give me, as well as the feeling that after all these years, the decisions I had made were not wrong, that instead it was my sister who had sunk into some sort of oblivion, not me. Because after the death she was stronger in her judgment of me, and abusive toward my life and my existence in a viscerally cruel way she had never been before. I don't know why.
Now my family lives still with this uncomfortable living memory. I don't know how they conceptualize her disappearance; perhaps they do not notice it, she wasn't close to them as she was to me before that break, that 'death'. She did not trust them and she did not abuse them in the same way before it, using sometimes the trust and the relationship as a weapon as she did with me. I know only that on those afternoons while I was away she died, and she is gone. And it has become clear in the intervening years that she will never return. It's almost ten years now. If she were to come back, I must admit, it would be shocking and very upsetting for me. I want her to stay in that cool place where death comes to relieve me of all the complexities her life made for me. I wish, I think, within me what she always accused me of wishing - that she were dead. But I realize also, it is not a wish, rather it is a reality that hasn't quite come physically true, and the woman who lives in my parents house is not my sister, my sister will never return, and I loved her, very very much.

All by myself, a photo story by magnum in motion, seems relevant, and I'm posting it in conjunction with this essay in order to bring in the valence of mourning, loss, and isolation that this experience caused me as I struggled to come to grips with it.