Obituary 1961-2025
This is my first
That's a lie. I've written a few obituaries. But this is the first one that that really cut.
Deep.
I'm writing a second draft this morning. Version 1 came last night and it was a journey. It started with the facts rewritten with overly verbose prose, embellished in a place or two (she would love that I took her love of reading and described her as voracious), and I surprised myself with how profoundly I cared for this woman whom I really only ever knew because of my wife.
Like how often she had volunteered for different projects. That she went to New Orleans after Katrina to help with disaster recovery and cleanup or just how much she loved the job she'd had the last twenty years of her life. Or how much she always wanted to go to college, but children and life just never presented the opportunity and so she poured herself in to any studious thing she could.
Words do not describe how delighted I was to write in a single paragraph how she went from driving an 18-wheeler at 19 to painting famous cartoon characters like Donald Duck and SpongeBob on plywood standees. Until the company got shut down for copyright infringement. Thanks Disney, she really loved that job.
Combing through my archives for a memorial video, I wasn't too shocked that most of my video of her over the last 40 years is her dancing or singing. Usually both. How insightful that knowing how she loved to travel, I guessed she'd been to 46 of the 50 states. It would take the input of her husband to confirm though that indeed they had yet to travel to Hawaii, Alaska, North and South Dakota.
There were no surprises for me as I wrote of her love of the mountains and camping. She was my first experience in the mountains. After I graduated, she invited me to join her young family on a camping trip in southern Colorado. I'm sure I was a poor guest, eating all of their food and doing little in exchange except collecting firewood. I can still see her up early and watching the sun rise through the pine forest on the mountainside before making everyone breakfast. Getting up early I think is something parents learn isn't a choice. For her, it was a joy and camp-mornings were absolutely the cream of life.
Her love of fishing though caught me off guard. My wife, less so. Probably because their father loved taking them fishing when they were kids. I assumed because my lovely significant other never cared much for the activity, that my sister didn't either. But turns out, I was way off on that one. Her sons and husband describe her not only as enjoying it but being excellent at it. Maybe it's the emotion of it all, but I was told by more than one person that not only did she always catch the first fish of the day, it was usually the largest as well.
Fish. Just when you think you know a person.
It was the last three paragraphs that undid me. Describing her humor and wit, her smart-assed-ness as my wife and I call it, remembering her laughter even in the darkest moments, how she hoped like the sun shines that she had a future—it was debilitating.
I have been trying to understand the breadth and depth of my sadness. At times thinking I am moved because of my love for my wife and understanding what a profound loss this is. She could replace me after all, but not her little sister. Then I realized how much I loved my sister myself. Which is a surprise to me. Completely. It seems strange to me to to even say 'I didn't know I loved her so much.' Maybe that is what taking someone for granted is. Loving them profoundly and not even realizing it. I hope she knew, or suspected how much she meant to me. If nothing else, I think her sister does.
It was a thousand words, that I landed on. Far too many by some standards. As far as I am concerned, it was about 75,000 too few.
To say that she will be missed is about as gross an understatement as I can make. She was the nucleus of her family, best friends with her parents and sisters and a critical part of my life. All of us are made of missing pieces, and the puzzle of our lives will be more incomplete than ever without her.
Thanks for reading and sharing my beautiful lie.
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