Tomorrow would have been the 60th birthday of my kid sister, but she missed by a few years.
No one knows why she died when she did, especially medical professionals.
Severe depression was the majority conclusion.
She was physically different from all of her peers.
While that was not unusual among her six siblings, all seven of the children were affected differently and distinctly by their unlikenesses.
Doubtless she suffered more ongoing pain – physically and psychologically – than the rest of us cumulatively.
Disappointments, social and otherwise, slammed into her with the impact of a Mercedes colliding with a wall.
The worst setback of her life was never marrying, a deprivation that rocked her more jarringly than her two sisters who have led single lives.
She loved and she dreamed.
Neither rudimentary desire came close to being fulfilled.
A movie kept rerunning forth and back across her mind.
Those were the scenes of a Mercedes repeatedly ramming a wall.
My only brother, also single, also died prematurely, at about the age of my kid sister. The cause probably was the same.
Since she was born after I left home, I never knew her the way I did my other siblings. I never knew her.
That was one of several reasons I felt equally guilty and shocked by her death.
When Pop was fading, just ahead of his 94th birthday, she maintained a vigil none of her siblings could have provided.
After Pop died, her will flagged. Her raison d’être was gone.
She began giving away her belongings. Her apartment shrank as pieces vanished.
She entered the hospital the day after her birthday, having been found at home in a coma. She never left.