She Still Does

article by Meredith McKinnie

They say that grief is unexpressed love, the realization that all your heart holds for someone can never be communicated directly to that person again. Our last conversation became The Last conversation. Our last argument seems more trivial than it did the day after. Our last Christmas together became the last time I would address a card directly to her. Every time I speak her name or reach to call, the realization will set in again. She’s gone, evaporated into the abyss, flying high someplace else, someplace I have yet to follow. What was present has become past tense.

When Sister died in January, two days before her 36th birthday, it felt unsurprising and unreal at the same time. Having struggled to connect over the last decade, I suddenly missed her. I checked my phone for our last exchange via text. She’d sent a message clearly meant for someone else and quickly apologized. I never responded. I checked my voicemails, a rarity for me, and found one from two years prior wishing me Happy Birthday. I listened for the first time. I smiled, teared up, and listened again.

Planning her funeral was akin to staging a Broadway production, one that was meant for me and my family, the “survived by.” I kept imagining what she would want, who would come, how I would feel, how I would pretend to feel, what I would say. I realized I was preparing as if for a performance. I guess, in a way, funerals are performances. I kept having conversations with her in my head. I would ponder a question and then hear her voice, that raspy, pithy comeback that sidelines any deeper thought. She had a way of squashing dialogue, an uncanny talent of making people feel completely seen or vehemently dismissed. I experienced both.

I received tons of calls over the next week, shocking questions of “What happened?” inquiries I didn’t know how to answer. If you didn’t know, you weren’t supposed to know. Grief does not warrant an explanation. I wanted to scream at everyone that I’m hurting and I’m mad at her and mad at myself. I’m mad that death crept in like this thief that burns your house down. Not only will we take something from you, but nothing will ever be the same again.

The most stunning realization after loss of a loved one is how life simply continues. Your world is rocked, and the earth keeps turning. The mundane tasks of daily living become a method of survival, a means of avoiding emotional collapse. The first few mornings after her death, when the mind was adjusting to a gaping absence, I’d wake up as usual until reality set in. Her memory surfaces in the most unlikely moments. Cleaning my daughter’s room, I remember Bonnie’s messy upstairs bedroom adjacent to mine. Someone cuts me off in traffic and I remember holding on for dear life as Bonnie veered in and out of lanes, always in a hurry for no reason at all. The car she left behind still bears the scars.

The first family dinner since her death was the most oddly peaceful in memory, yet empty. As Bonnie was notoriously late, we always fretted over eating without her to prove a point or enduring cold food. As we sat around the table, exchanging stories far removed from our collective grief, every warm bite settled us into unfamiliar territory, a space lacking in her spunk and spontaneity. After loss, that which annoyed us the most becomes that which proves they lived.

I don’t think of my grief as temporary, yet I don’t think of it as a lifelong burden either. Every reminder of her absence is further proof that she lived – that I had a little sister to love from her very beginning. I had a best friend even when we weren’t our best. When those inside sibling jokes surface, and she’s not there to catch my eye, I’ll laugh anyway, further proof that she once was there. When people ask what happened, I respond, “She lived, and in our hearts, she still does.”