Today I put pink roses on my sister’s grave with my parents. It was cold and brisk and our fingers went numb cutting the flowers and placing them just right in the vases on each side of the headstone. It didn’t matter because I couldn’t really feel them all that much anyways. We stood and looked at her beautiful picture engraved in the stone and I heard my mama say “We keep changing Maegan, but you never do.” At least once a year, sometimes more, we find ourselves in that cemetery on the anniversary of her death eleven years ago. It’s true, we keep changing but the day she died will be forever locked in our minds and hearts. I was 26 years old when she passed away and I was divorced with a one and half year old baby. She never got to meet my would-be husband but she did see my first baby. Sometimes I wonder what she would think about our little family of six. I wonder what kind of aunt she would be. She was so thrilled when my oldest was born. I could tell her love for him was so pure. She lit up anytime she saw baby Caleb and made sure to bring him a toy on her way back from the rehab center. It was a little garbage truck that she found in a store and knew he would like the fun sounds it made. I wish I could show her how God worked out so many parts of my life for good. I wish she could meet all four of my children now and that they could wrestle aunty Mae Mae to the ground. I know she would show Evelyn how to do a proper cartwheel and I can picture her jumping on the trampoline with the kids teaching them how to backflip. She truly was a gymnast. I wish we could meet up for coffee and tea and shoot the breeze. She loved coffee and I can’t stand it. We were complete opposites of each other in so many ways. I used to hate rap music and she would blast it from her car stereos whenever she got the chance. Now I find myself listening to a rap song now and then, and smiling to myself knowing she would have loved it. We do change over time and in some ways we don’t.
Perhaps, it’s good to stand at a graveside at least once a year. We need to see the spaces where it didn’t go as planned and there was no tomorrow. The place we will all reside and have no control over the “when.” It’s a humbling space, especially in the darkest coldest months of the year. It was snowing the day we buried her. It was only a few weeks before her 22nd birthday on February 27th. I was also numb then. I remember kneeling in the snow, tears dripping down as they lowered her white coffin in, and not feeling the cold at all. The night she died I was watching a movie and stress eating while she overdosed in the next room. I was a teacher and it was Friday. I was exhausted from a long week and after all, we always have the next day to say all the things we wish we could say to loved ones, right? We didn’t find her until the next morning. Do I have guilt about all the “What if’s,” you bet. Every single one of us in our family wonders what we could have done differently. Could we have changed the outcome? Maybe, but maybe not? The past may have still played out the same way, because the past is the past. It can’t be changed now or manipulated to fit my own narrative. It is my own uncomfortable little puzzle piece that will never quite fit. I will never have all the answers to this. I move forward, for my parents, for my family, for my sister. We keep marching on and once a year, we visit the cold graveside of someone who was once warm in my life. I don’t have any grand morals to this story or redeeming conclusions except that death sucks. For a person that loves words and believes they can convey such beauty, forgive me for my lack of words today. But my sister Mae Mae was always blunt and to the point. She loved calling things out as they were and I think she would agree wholeheartedly with my conclusion today. Death sucks.
