Thinking of You

I remember the day my sister died. I remember it clearly, as I do the birth of both my children. Where I was when I found out. How I reacted. The way I cried. The thoughts that passed through my mind. I remember others too. How they reacted. How we held each other. The vulnerable, heartfelt moments we shared. I remember the stark naked reality of it, and how it chewed my life up and spit it back out. I don’t think a single day has passed in 6 years when thoughts of her have not crossed my mind. The first couple of months were the worst. Staying up late because the feeling that you had made it through another day was a relief you wanted to cling to. Waking with her being your first thought, and wondering how you were going to face another day. Going back to work was awful. So many people just looked away uncomfortable, not knowing how to respond. Some who were not afraid to respond spoke words they meant to comfort, but instead they were callous. I don’t recall how many weeks had passed before I could drive home from work without shedding tears.
I remember feeling too broken to sleep at my own house. Every room held scenes of her from a former life. Every bad day cycled back to my grief and I struggled to separate grief and bad days. Her grave became my place of solitude. It became the place I could run to and cry and breathe thoughts of my brokenness and suffering. I talked to God there. I spoke to Him by sitting in the grass, staring at the sky, gazing at nature through my tears, and listening to the sound of the wind. I felt the need to see her name inscribed on that headstone with 2 dates underneath. The reality was painful, but necessary. Her death ignited something within me. Never had I felt so sure of my own feelings. No one was going to tell me how I should feel, or that how I felt was wrong. I felt, and I felt, and I felt. It was liberating. It was excruciating. I think it was then that I began to realize my life had been a series of living a life I thought I had to live to keep others in it. It was then that I felt myself falling. Dropping lifelessly into God’s hands. I remember nights where I had no strength and the only prayer I could mutter was, “God, please just hold me so I can sleep. I have nothing else to say.” All that was only the first couple of months.
I’ll never forget how it has changed my life. I had pills in my purse when she died. The very thought of them after made me sick. Days later I threw them out. I had struggled with many addictions. Her death took them away. I could no longer throw my life away when hers had been stolen. I remember nights on my sofa, curled into a ball, fists clenched, my entire body wracked with pain. The grief was intense. Now I look back and wonder if some of those nights were withdrawal all swirled in with the ache of death.
It has changed us all. All the members of our family have become different. Our love for each other is different, more honest, and full of more effort. Some days my heart aches when I think of my son, and how he will never know her. In his mind she will always be like a character in a story. A character he never knows very fully, just bits and pieces of stories put together in his mind. My daughter was only 4 years old at the time, so the stories she tells are only stories she has heard us tell. I don’t know that they are truly her own.
My life has spun in a new direction since she left us. Life has gone on, but with more intention. The truth is I think we ask to be changed, and then when change happens we resist. We ask God to take it away. We know there is suffering, death, pain, sorrow; yet we are horrified when these things show themselves unexpectedly. I would love to grow older not wishing I would experience these things, yet hoping and learning to be submissive when they come. I want to be someone who doesn’t see these small parts of life as monstrous, but as mere opportunities to grow and be made new all over again.