Last year when I wrote my annual memorial post to mark the date we lost my sister Erin — 16 years ago now — I listed things about everyday life for all of us that she had never been alive to know about. It put a cold perspective on how long we’ve been without her now. Here in 20-frickin’-20, everything comes back to all the forms of disaster that have manifested during this calendar year. There are more than 7 million cases of Covid-19 around the world, and more than 200,000 deaths (and counting) in America alone. As of the past few days, one of those millions of cases even includes our esteemed president and several of his best administration pals. I’ll refrain from going beyond that other than to say the problem has been with us for a long time and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. It got me thinking: What would it have been like if Erin had still been around to get through this with the rest of us?
She would have been the one driving out to deliver things to her friends and family confined to home to keep them safe. She liked knowing she was able to help people. She enjoyed being relied on. She once held up a shuttle bus at the state fair parking lot from leaving so she could help an older woman with a walker get on the bus.
She would have taken mitigation very seriously since she worked with seniors, and wouldn’t have wanted to be unavailable to them.
She wouldn’t have been following the politics of the election too deeply, but she would have known enough about what was going on to hate the president as much as she had hated any other bully she’d ever encountered, and she would have been taken over by the personality combination of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The cousins in our family who live locally and have small children would have had her coming over occasionally, probably bringing some simple new toys to leave behind, and playing with them in some socially distant way she had thought up on her own. The kids would just see this as a fun new game, and would probably refer to it as something like “The Erin game.”
She’d be unhappy about the Vikings and their 1-3 record, and would have opinions about Kirk Cousins.
She’d visit Jenny and me on occasion, but primarily to spend time with our dogs.
When our family would have some kind of event coming up like a birthday or holiday, she would figure out where and when we were going to celebrate and then give each of us our directions, and possibly tell us which of our masks were expected to wear.
She’d be on Facebook because so many of our cousins are, and her timeline would be dominated by memes. Half of them would be critical of the job the president has done (and likely based around jokes related to poop or farts) while the other half would be inspirational sayings and poems with calming nature backgrounds.
When she would come to my house (to see Freddie), she would occasionally bring me some kind of gift she had noticed in a previous visit that I needed. This would be indicative of both her wanting to show kindness to people, but also a way to keep the fires of sibling rivalry burning brightly, something like “The last time I was here I noticed that all of you kitchen towels are completely worn out and suck, so I got you some new ones.” This would be her way of showing she was aware of me and my surroundings, but also her way of sticking it to me to highlight how incapable I would be of having nice towels without her help. Like I said, sibling rivalry.
The thing about reimagining what the present would be like with her as a part of it was something I didn’t even realize until I was nearly done thinking my way through it: Every moment of my picturing her with us now saw her as she had been before she was sick. I didn’t see the Erin with the incessant cough or the crippling fatigue or the heavy knowledge of her fate. I saw the person she’d been at her peak, healthy and strong, living the life in front of her and struggling to figure out what was going to come next, like so many of us do each day.
It was good to have some time with that version of her again.
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