In Her Absence

article by MEREDITH MCKINNIE

A sudden family death, particularly of a young person, is harrowing. When that death is your Baby Sister, it’s isolating. We aren’t taught to ponder the mortality of our siblings. They came into being relatively close to our own births, and to contemplate their mortality would force us to contemplate our own – shivers. The odd timing of my sister’s death shortly after I turned 40 has me thinking not so much about my own mortality but more so about hers. It’s been 7 months since she passed, and though it still feels odd and unnatural, life keeps happening. It dares to go on without her.

I haven’t cried much in the last two months. I don’t feel I’ve cried enough since her death. I do believe crying is cathartic – it always has been for me. But the permanence of death makes crying about it seem insubstantial. My cry will end, but she won’t be coming back. I can’t cry her back into existence. I’m used to crying as a means of closure, but I can’t close her absence. It just is now. And it always will be. I feel I’m both coming to terms with that and fearful of fully accepting it at the same time.

For Easter, we gathered the family for an egg hunt on my parents’ property. The toddlers and young children excitedly hurried to find the eggs hidden the night prior. I noticed the somber mood among the adults. We all smiled and acknowledged the children’s findings, but we couldn’t escape the absence. Perhaps it was only me thinking about her not being there, but it felt collective. I wouldn’t call it grief, but awareness. She won’t ever be there with us in that place again. This was the first holiday without her in the world, and this year will feature several more. I dread Christmas; she loved it so.

We’re at that stunned silent stage, you know when someone’s name is brought up and no one quite knows how to respond, and so the silence lingers. The impulse is to avoid eye contact, to stare off into the distance, as if she might be out there. My six-year-old mentions her name the most. She’ll say, “I miss Aunt Bonnie,” and “Can we go see Aunt Bonnie’s grave?” I’ve never been much for visiting tombstones, only accompanying someone else if I didn’t have a choice. But when Wilder asked, I took both girls to Marion. My four-year-old Fable kept asking where she was, as if Bonnie would walk out of the woods surrounding the cemetery. I searched the names of nearby tombstones, committing my sister’s eternal neighbors to memory. Wilder just stared at the overturned dirt, spotted the small marker with Bonnie’s picture, smudged some red dirt off her face. She stood in silence, not knowing what reverence was but displaying it nonetheless. She looked like all of us since Bonnie’s death, unsure how we feel, or how to feel about not knowing how we feel, resisting the urge to name it by just sitting with it. My little six-year-old leaned into not knowing, instinctively. She didn’t look toward the woods or rest her eyes on the tombstones with unknown names. She didn’t try to distract herself from the reality in front of her. She just stood there and sat with it.

As I watched from four feet away, again resting my eyes on anything else but the grave, I thought perhaps this child’s reaction to death could provide some guidance. She is not rehearsed in how to perform. She has not experienced loss up close. She is feeling her way through it much like she is every interaction in her relatively short life. Society hasn’t dictated a response that she’s aware of. She just expresses what she feels when she feels it, the norms unfamiliar. I’m trying to do the same. I don’t know how I feel about losing my sister, I don’t know how our family dynamic will evolve in her absence, but I will continue to stand and when necessary, sit with it. My child showed me how.