Carly Presley, Lindsey’s sister.
I think there was a day that the universe got creative and thought, “should be interesting” and then made the Presley girls. “These things don’t go together at all; let’s put them in a family!”
Always, always, people that got to know our family remarked that they couldn’t believe how different the three of us were. Part of it, I think, was just that we didn’t really look alike. Hayley looks like a Presley, Lindsey looked like my mom, and I thought I was adopted. Mostly, though, I think it was just the oddity of seeing three people grow up so closely, to then become so comically distinct.
Lindsey and I were a particularly odd pair. We were opposites in almost every way. Where Lindsey was fastidious, I was easy-going. Lindsey had to have her hair done (half up-half down) in the exact same way every single day and I… well… at least I brush it now. In middle school, she began to organize my binders for me because my system of just stuffing my backpack with homework in no particular order was too stressful for her. I have always been more concerned about approval from others and being a people pleaser. Lindsey was not. Even as a toddler when my parents had friends over, she had no problem telling them, “You need to go home now.” She wasn’t a leader; she was the leader. And I was more than happy to follow.
She really liked having a younger sister to baby. Her love for me was unconditional and pure, but she also took a no-nonsense and practical approach. Anytime I was sick, she would come into my room. “You look disgusting,” she would say, “here I made you tea.” I was always wild and loud and took too many risks, and Lindsey was cautious, and considered, and planned. It was a funny combination.
We became particularly close in middle school. We were so attached that when parents in the neighborhood asked one of us to babysit, it was understood to be a package deal. Not one without the other. When she was in 8th grade, she was able to get credit by being a “helper” to the teachers, and for an hour everyday would print and make copies of work sheets and then go around the school delivering them. She almost never had anything to drop off to my teacher, but every day, would come to the door of my classroom just so that I could see her and wave. It really felt like Lindsey was my other self. I felt like I always had a place with her.
My freshman year, I became such a fixture in one of Lindsey’s science classes that the other students knew me and the teacher stopped questioning why I was there. That’s where Lindsey was, so I was there too.
Looking back to our time in high school, especially now knowing what lay ahead of her, I love that we got to have so many perfectly typical, stupid, teenage experiences. One of my favorite things about that time period was driving to high school every day. There was one year when Hayley, Lindsey, and I were all in high school at the same time and we drove to school everyday just the three of us. Lindsey and Hayley both had their license, so every morning there was a fight about who would drive, and while they were fighting, I was sleeping through my alarm and then they had to stop fighting with each other so that they could wake me up and get in a fight with me because I made everybody late every day. It was chaos.
Now though, it’s comforting to me to remember a time when the biggest fights we got into were about who would drive and if I was making them late. I love thinking back to a time when, for 30 minutes every day (twice a day), I got to just be in a car with my sisters.
I feel like everybody kind of knows the next part. It’s almost like one of those commercials for a true crime documentary where they show a picture of two people seemingly care-free with a gravel-toned voice-over announcing, “They were best friends,” and then they change the picture to be two-toned and radioactive looking before the voice comes back to say, “where did it go so wrong?” Except in our case the problem didn’t turn out to be a serial killer… it was just severe illness.
I was a sophomore in high school when Lindsey got her transplant, and I remember my routine became: Go to school, get home from school, take a shower, go to the hospital to visit Lindsey, come home from the hospital around 9 pm, eat dinner, try to do homework, go to bed. And then the next day do it all over. My dad stayed with her at the hospital during week nights, and on the weekends I spent the night with her. That’s where Lindsey was, so I was there too. And it was going ok. I remember it being a hopeful time and words being used around us like “warrior” and “journey” and “fight.” At the beginning it almost felt like there was an air of adventure.
And then things started to unravel a little bit and reality started to set in, which is that childhood illnesses are an absolute breakdown in family structure and dynamics and they really, really suck. So, you know, unsurprisingly, it didn’t go super great. And our relationship really suffered. We were dealing with pretty big deal things, and we were teenagers, and just were not equipped. We were really angry with each other.
There reached a point where I started to grow up a little bit, and I really started to consider and empathize with what it must have felt like to be Lindsey. You know, what it must have felt like to be in pain all the time, or to see her peers from high school get to go to college, and get careers and families. Or even just the inability to have a concept of your own future. We’re taught to be so concerned with aesthetics. What must it have felt like to walk through the world as a woman that didn’t have hair? People have breakdowns after one brush with death… what must it feel like to have several?
I began to consider the depth of difficulty of her life. She was often thrown into situations that only super-humans would be able to deal with adequately. And she wasn’t super-human… she was just human. Deeply, deeply human. I came to really admire the courage it took to just do her life.
So we began to slug it out. And to have the fights we needed to have so we could keep each other. Things could still be difficult, but I appreciated the times where we once again got to have perfectly typical sister experiences. One of my favorite memories that I think about often now is when she and I sat at a motel bar together and drank margaritas in Tucson. It was so delightfully normal and we were laughing and I loved it. I’m so grateful for those memories.
I really miss Lindsey. Most of all I miss her nerve. Maybe we never really change, because in a lot of ways I think that even as an adult she was still the little toddler that was telling the big kids to go home. My cousin Christina and I started using the phrase “what would Lindsey Presley do?” It started off as a joke when I had a roommate from Hell that I was trying to avoid conflict with, but quickly became an actual litmus test for times when we knew we needed to stand up for ourselves. What would Lindsey Presley do? She wouldn’t have stood for that.
All of this culminated into a phone call in November.
My mom let me know earlier that day that Lindsey had trouble breathing and they were in the Emergency Room. At first, they thought it was a blood clot, and then they thought it was COVID, and then they weren’t sure if it was COVID but it definitely looked like some kind of pneumonia… and it was just a very hectic and confusing day. And from the beginning, it just felt different than other admissions. I remember getting an update about how she was doing and going to bed thinking that she would be in the ICU by the morning.
I was really worried, and there were visitor restrictions which meant she was there alone, so I texted her, “hey bud, you doing ok up there on your own?” She texted me back, “No,” and that she was now on 15 L of oxygen and they were trying to play tetris with the ICU beds so that they could get her transferred. We texted back and forth for a while and then I didn’t hear back from her. Next, I got a call from her phone, except when I answered it was Lindsey’s nurse that was talking to me. Lindsey hadn’t been able to hold her sats on the 15 L and had so rapidly deteriorated that she now had the rapid response team in her room, trying to decide what to do.
They asked her, “who do you want us to call?” and she said, “my sister Carly.” She was really afraid that she was dying and it was in that mindset that she picked me. They put us on the phone together and that was the second to last time Lindsey and I got to talk to each other.
In an instant, it all became worth it.
I really want you to think about that. Think about all the people you know- even your closest friends and family- how many of them, when faced with the belief that they are imminently dying with one opportunity to call one person, would call you? Who are you that special to? Who do you matter to that much?
It has been the greatest honor of my life to have been that person for Lindsey. It was the most difficult conversation I have ever had, but I just loved her like that. And how could I not? In her deepest moment of vulnerability, she put her trust in me to be what she needed. That I would comfort her, that I would console her, that I would say the right thing. Because she loved me like that.
It’s a deep level of love. And we had it because we fought for it.
Wherever Lindsey is, I am too.