Month: April 2025

The responsibility of the remaining sibling

We were two, a dynamic duo, a complete set. Everything about how I fit into the world was shaped around this truth. My understanding of my future was built upon the foundation of my sister’s existence. I don’t think there’s a single life milestone I imagined that did not include her in it. My sister was just as essential a component as the sun in the sky.

But then she quietly exited the frame, never to return. This structural pillar of my reality was just suddenly gone, and I found out the hard way that the engineers hadn’t tested for this scenario. I honestly didn’t know for a long time whether the rest of me would collapse. These days, I don’t worry about a complete cave in. But I feel now like I am walking around an apartment unfamiliar to me in the dark. I keep bumping into obstacles I didn’t know were there and tripping in holes I didn’t realize my sister’s absence left.

I feel sort of boxed in, at times. The spectrum of options has narrowed, because I lost my partner when she died. There’s a pressure, most intensely from our parents, but also from others, about all the things I now “must” do.

Sarah must pick her job assignments and the places she lives to optimize her safety and closeness to home.

Sarah must answer messages from family quickly and consistently, because there’s now only one person to respond.

Sarah must find love, get married, buy a house, be happy, and live out the most perfect life journey possible, so everyone can pour all the emotion and excitement into one life when it was meant to be shared among two.

Sarah must be prepared to not only bear the legacy of the older relatives, especially her parents, but now also her sister. Her sister that was supposed to be right there alongside her.

Sarah must be okay, because everyone worries about Sarah’s parents but sees Sarah as just the support to prop up her heartbroken parents.

Sarah must constantly figure out the right amount of honest to be when talking about her sister, still. Sarah shouldn’t make anyone uncomfortable; she should hold that all herself.

And honestly, sometimes Sarah must sit in front of her laptop writing and crying the kind of ugly cry that makes your whole face stuff up and stay red for half an hour. Because someone else probably knows exactly what Sarah is trying to say, and she wants that person to know they’re not alone.

I wish you could have met her

Whenever I try to explain my sister to anyone, I inevitably tell them I wish they could have met her. It’s a sentence steeped in meaning, as everything feels like it is lately.

I wish you could have met her… because that would mean she is still alive. And no matter how much time I put between me and the transition from Before to After, I cannot let go of the part of me that wants to inhabit a magical place where my bargaining and pleading will change the simple biological fact that her body stopped, her self-driven narrative ended.

I wish you could have met her… because I do a mediocre job capturing her with my words. People are such complex creatures, aren’t we? Layers upon layers of context and history and whim and mystery. Everything I can think to say falls flat. A single sentence needs another seventy just to try to give it the shape it deserves.

I wish you could have met her… because the fact that you can’t means I am stepping even further into the rest of my future as the sibling left behind. You’re in my life and she isn’t. It’s a bittersweet tradeoff to welcome new people into my life knowing that the list is an involuntary revolving door. There’s not just gain, there’s loss.

I wish you could have met her… because now it’s up to your conjecture, based on imperfect information, you understanding of me and the shape I’ve had to become healing over the gaping emptiness her death left inside me. I think it would be easier to understand me as I am now if you knew her as she was.