To Bright Eyes,
I am not disposed to talking much about this, nor even to think much on it. Though today is an anniversary, and I do feel strongly that remembrance is the true afterlife. And as such, I can grant her that.
Twenty years ago this day, I was picked up from Stonebridge Elementary by my dad as any other day. We stopped over at Grandma’s house to pick up my sister, Greta May. Pulling around the curve of the driveway we could see that there was an ambulance pulled up to the house. Nether of us spoke, but each of us was thinking the same thing, that something happened to Grandma.
Entering the house, I was pulled aside by my older cousin Shawna. She was probably like ten, but that was older. We always stayed at Grandma’s house on sick days, I think that is what she was doing. Shawna told me how she had gone upstairs to check on my sleeping sister, and how Greta had been turning colors, turning blue. The ambulance had arrived just before we did. Even then that had seemed like a heavy burdened discovery for a ten year old, my cousin.
That much of the day remains clear. I know that my folks went to the hospital with Greta. I went with an uncle to pick up Shawna’s brother, my cousin and best friend, Jakob. The family was converging at the hospital and the school bus was going to drop him off at an empty house, so we went to collect him. My sister was blue in the hospital, I wanted to go see Jakob. He was after all, my best friend. I remember waiting for the bus.
I think it was our living room later that evening, where my parents taught me one of my first acronyms, SIDS. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is what killed my sister. It really did not seem to explain much. A baby just dies. Many things are a mystery to a six year old child, but above all is the death of his five month old kid sister.
Twenty years have harvested a disconnect, to where the memory is more fact and less emotive. I have gone a great stretch in which I have neither shown nor experienced any emotional response to this loss. It was out of respect that I write of her today. Yet, somehow in the process of finding my words I have found something else. I have given a voice to feelings I thought dead and faded. To living memory, alive and well.