Life is always moving forward and changing around us, even if we don’t take the time to notice. The people in our lives don’t seem so different day to day or week to week. new parts of our communities or our physical surroundings can pop up suddenly but are only surprises at first, then become the backdrop to our lives. Even the seasons change with gradual measure. Time doesn’t stand still.
Years ago our school district opened two new elementary schools, and very suddenly some of the people I was closest to were moving on to different workplaces and stepping out of my daily life. Seeing each other each day turned into occasional text check-ins or Facebook likes, and maybe getting together to catch-up every year or two. They were relationships both sides held important enough to maintain, but even doing that meant redefining what they once had been.
New times and new faces come along to fill the holes left behind in our lives when shifts like this take place. Maybe it’s brand new people coming in, maybe it’s the people who have always been there coming together to share closer friendships than they once did. When I was thinking about what to write this year to commemorate October 5th, the date of my sister Erin’s far too early death, it occurred to me that most of the people in my daily life now have no idea about her. Only a handful of those around me would have been around during that time, and so many people I’m close to now wouldn’t know much of anything about what had happened, or who she was. Today I’d like to take steps toward rectifying that.
Erin was the third child in our family, the youngest, three years younger than me, almost to the day. She shared a bedroom with our older sister. She played the trumpet in high school band. Whenever we took family trips, she rode in the middle of the back seat. She played Star Wars with me using our shared collection of action figures. The days and evenings we spent playing soccer in the yard helped her develop into a player skilled enough to be a captain of her high school team.
She worked a short stint as an EMT, then worked as the activities director for an assisted living community after finishing college. She loved being around the seniors there; it’s ironic now that she never had the chance to see what she’d be like as a little old lady herself. As much as she loved her seniors, she loved dogs even more. As shy as my boy Freddie is after whatever scary misadventures he endured in life before he came to live with me, she would have won him over and made her love him through sheer force of will.
I suppose she was around thirty when she developed a persistently annoying cough. Her friends convinced her to get it checked out, and after a time we all learned she had a slow-growing cancerous tumor the size of a racquetball in one of her lungs. The lung was removed, and after her body had adequately recovered from the surgery she began a long series of radiation treatments. After that was done, she had a grace period lasting one entire follow-up appointment of being declared in remission before tumor spotting began to appear on her remaining lung. Her doctor put her on a brand new medication and set an appointment at the end of the summer to see how the tumors responded. Holidays and parties were more frequent during those months, with guests traveling great distances to see her. The drug did nothing to deter the tumor growth, and by the end of that summer we knew it was a matter of when instead of if that her life would end, and the cancer would be responsible.
Our family was suddenly thrust into that position of oncoming tragedy, the kind that when it happens to other people is easy to feel both pity for what they’re going through and relief that it isn’t happening to you, except this time it was happening to us. There was nothing we could do to change things, so we relied on the smaller ways we could help her that we had control over instead. There were many weekends when I would have her energetic dog Milo staying at my house. I promised myself I would try my best not to treat her any differently than I had before, as much as the awkward darkness of the situation permeated our every interaction. I began writing her eulogy more than a year before her funeral, and revised it more times than I can remember.
Erin outlived her oncologist’s expectancy prediction by several months, which may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things but was precious time for us. She worked with a deacon she knew from the church across the street from where she lived, the same church we’d grown up attending, which connected to the same elementary school we’d gone to. She planned out every detail about her funeral, down to selecting her pallbearers and choosing the shirts they would wear. In her final days we were all there, staying in her home, grabbing hours of sleep when we could. We were at her side in her final moments, when her body, which had been contorting itself to struggle for each fraction of a breath it could draw, was finally at peace.
My sister, our parents, and I have all gone through personal struggles over the years as we learned how to adapt to a life without her. I even got a novel written out of the emotional purge that became so necessary. Even though it’s been seventeen years now, the emotions never completely fade; you learn to make them part of who you are. Because of that, after all this time, she’s still a part of our lives, and, in what would be a great relief to her since it cancels out her greatest fear about dying, she has not been forgotten. Hopefully today the memory of who she was still spread just a little wider.
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