When my sister Erin died, fifteen years ago today, her biggest fear was that the people in her life weren’t going to remember her. This was a ridiculous thing for her to worry about, of course. However, this is the year I can kind of understand where she was coming from. It wasn’t so much the idea that we’d all forget she had ever been here and a part of our lives, but after so much time passed and the world would move on and carry us (but not her) along with it, she wouldn’t be the same presence for us she’d once been.
Truthfully I think that can be said about most of the people in our lives, though. Just in the years since she had passed, I’ve had relationships that, at the time, had seemed close enough that I felt for sure those people would always be with me, regardless of what paths our lives took. Things absolutely did not go that way, though; even though a number of these friendships had been some of the strongest of my life time, they’ve faded into little more than social media echoes. Relationships are living things that both ends have to work at to keep alive, and it can be a cold realization to bear witness to how easily things can disappear. Sometimes it can come from physical distance, or mental distance, or emotional distance. Distance itself isn’t enough to wrap things up; my closest friend lives two time zones away and has for at least a decade now. Not every relationship is strong enough to survive, as powerful as it might seem while it’s happening. Life happens the way it does, and sometimes it sucks.
I never worried about Erin fading out of my life. I have millions upon millions of formative memories of her, along with the memories held onto my my parents, my sister, some of our longtime friends, and so many others in my family. Unfortunately, but realistically, one of the things that keeps me tied to her now is this quietly pervasive pain that will never go away. I’ve said before that in grief, you aren’t sad all the time but the sadness is never far away. It’s an undercurrent to everything you do and think. It comes with a crushing weight, but it also twists into a version of nostalgia when you have happier moments and feel more capable of facing it. You can tell yourself you’ve found peace with the loss, and I believe it’s possible to reach a point when you truly have, but finding peace isn’t the same thing as being released from the pain. I know a lot of people seeking to be comforting, with the best of intentions, would try to fall back on the Thoughts and Prayers chestnut of “She’ll always be with you,” but I promise you that 99.985% of the time it does not feel that way. She is decidedly not with us anymore. Her time with us came to an end, and the rest of the world continued to turn.
I can honestly say that fifteen years out usually means it all doesn’t hurt anywhere as much as it has before. But times like the days or weeks leading up to important days, like this anniversary, can come back and smack you in the head like a boomerang you forget you had tossed. Fifteen years feels like a landmark anniversary number, and that got me thinking about how different the world is for those of us still alive since the time we lost her. Just to give you a perspective on how much distance there is now between our losing her and an understanding of how hard the pain can hit if it can still breach that distance on occasion, here’s a list of things I thought of while I spent a good amount of time lying awake in bed early this morning — fifteen of them — that Erin never lived to experience:
*She never knew anything about my brother-in-law David.
*Between my sister, my parents, and me, we’ve had a total of seven dogs in the family that Erin never met.
*There is not a single book I’ve written that she had the chance to read.
*The house where I’ve lived for well over a decade now, and the house where our parents are spending their retirement? She never saw either of them.
*The iPhone didn’t exist until three years after she died.
*Facebook had still been the domain of a few thousand college kids.
*She didn’t know anything about the car accident that came so close to taking our sister.
*The first Iron Man movie was still four years away, so she never saw any of the “Marvel Movies.” (Thor: Ragnarok and Captain Marvel would have been her favorites, and she would have giggled at never scene with Ned in the most recent Spider-Man movies.)
*She left the world when people still dominantly bought compact discs for their music.
*She probably never even heard the name “Barack Obama.”
*She never saw an episode of “The Office.”
*She never had the chance to read a single of the 500+ posts I’ve written on this blog.
*She missed the entire academic career, from kindergarten through starting the freshman year of college, of my youngest nephew.
*She never heard Green Day’s “American Idiot” album. To be fair, she might not have been all that interested in it anyway, but since it was released only weeks before she died and I listened to it almost constantly during that time to help purge the anger and frustration I was feeling, it would be impossible for me to disassociate that album from that specific moment of my life.
*She wasn’t at either my 40th or 50th birthday parties.
The relationships Erin had with those who love her did not end, despite the ultimate distance being between all of us now. We’re living in a different version of the world from the one we experienced with her, though. That can be a lot to think about.
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