Category: Memories

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.

Memories, where have you gone?

For anyone who has been asking, “Why can’t I remember any memories about my dead sibling?” Maybe you will find comfort here.

Note: I write this particular post 52 days in the After.

I am unsure I can fully capture for you the absolute panic of realizing that I could not conjure almost any memories of my sister after her passing. I don’t mean they were hazy or I only had a few. I mean it was like a scene from a movie where I desperately ran toward a closing door but failed to slide under it in time before I was locked away from all of them.

I could remember general themes ⁠— childhood summers, after school activities, general holiday trips home ⁠— but I could not recall any specific event or interaction. It was like she took all of the specific memories with her when she died, and all I was left with was a watered down medley of what it used to be like to have her. I freaked out. For weeks, I was in a low-level state of panic about this additional loss, which I am sure did not help my fragile brain in any way.

Even now, more than seven weeks onward, I look at photos I am in and don’t recall the interaction around it. I’m starting to wonder if a lot of my memories were already this blended sense of the past. Like I had condensed memories down not to individual moments but to a holistic memory of just being with her. The conceptual things we shared, but not the individual days. I still haven’t decide if this makes me feel better or worse. I know this is partially because in the past ten years, I have been away far, far more than I haven’t.

Does it matter that I can’t remember the jokes from one particular virtual session of Jackbox games as a family during the peak of the pandemic in 2020? Or is it enough to remember we had at least a dozen of those sessions as a family unit (our parents, her, her partner, and I) and we laughed really hard and had a great time? Depending when you ask me, I will contradict myself in my answers.

Does it change anything that I can’t remember specific shopping trips we took or precisely when we bought something? Or is it just as poignant that I cherish this blurred sense of shopping and helping each other refine our personal style being a constant touchpoint throughout middle school, high school, and adulthood? The compulsive memory hoarder I have become wants it all.

If you’re also out there grappling with the secondary loss of your ability to remember, I’ve been there. Frankly, I might still be there, no matter how long after this post you read. Talk to people about your sibling, look at photos and messages you do have, and unabashedly write yourself notes in the moments you remember. But above all, whether you remember every day or not, you lived them and they’re still yours.

The pain of someone else’s birthday song

Eleven days after my sister’s death, sitting in a restaurant and hearing happy birthday was too much.

We went to Red Robin a few after we said our goodbyes at the funeral home. It was the four of us ⁠— our parents, my sister’s partner, and me. It was the first time we had gone out anywhere to eat or do much of anything. We watched a Memorial Day jet flyover in her honor and then went to eat. Eleven days in the After.

We prioritized ordering her favorite dishes ⁠— a pre-meal Oreo Cookie Magic Milkshake, some Clucks & Fries, a Whiskey River BBQ Chicken Wrap. These had been staples since middle school. We sat around the table doing our best to hold it together and look like a normal family out to lunch, but I know we were all lost in memories.

Memories of past meals at this and other Red Robins. Meals attached to high school sports and family dinners and then later to dates and fun life events. We were doing okay, until behind us the staff began a rousing round of the restaurant’s birthday song, wishing someone a happy 29th birthday.

29.

An age my sister would never get to be. Her time ended 7 months too early for that. An innocuous number that brought the world crashing down around us. We shrunk into our booth and avoided eye contact until we each had managed to bury back within ourselves the renewed grief.

I don’t have a witty end to this story, nor do I have some insightful way to turn it into something meaningful. Sometimes it just sucks to sit in the middle of a restaurant trying to survive when someone else’s celebration reminds you of all that you’ve lost.