Christina
On losing Carrie
Hope. At the first mention of cancer or terminal sickness, hope is what we cling to. We wrap it around ourselves like a shield, convincing our hearts that everything will be okay—that we will be okay again. Hope gives us language for the future: recovery, remission, more time. It allows us to breathe in sterile hospital rooms and to believe that statistics are just numbers that don’t apply to us. We hold tightly to stories with happy endings because we need to believe ours will be one of them.
What we don’t talk about is what happens when hope begins to thin. When test results change. When words like “progression” replace “improvement.” Reality settles in quietly at first, then all at once. Not everything can be reframed. Not everything can be rescued by optimism. And when hope fades, something else takes its place.
Grief arrives long before the actual loss. It seeps in through the cracks, settling into your bones. Loss, sadness—these words should be synonymous with life-altering. Because there is no version of life untouched by them. When someone you love is slipping away, the world keeps spinning in cruel indifference. You still have to answer emails, make dinners, show up to work, and take care of your kids. It doesn’t matter that your heart feels like it has been carved out, leaving a hollow space where laughter and certainty used to live.
For siblings, the grief is uniquely disorienting. You lose not only a person but a shared history—the keeper of childhood memories, people, inside jokes, and the silent understanding of how we formed to be who we are today. You grieve the future too: the holidays that will feel uneven, the milestones they will not witness, the growing older you were supposed to do together. When hope fades and grief takes its place, life does go on—but it goes on differently, forever marked by who is missing.
This was one of the hardest areas that affected me when losing my older sister: the milestones they will not witness. With a fifteen-year age gap between my oldest sister and me, our roles often felt more like caregiver and child than a traditional sister relationship. She taught me how to breathe and count to ten when I was upset, helping me find equilibrium between my feelings and my reality. She shaped my reality and my future, providing steadiness and belonging no matter what was happening in the world or within our family. She offered joy, comfort, and an unvarnished realism that allowed you to explore, make mistakes, and have a shoulder to cry on when reality didn’t quite measure up.
I was lucky that she was alive to meet one of my children. Although he has no memories—he was only one at the time—I got to experience the love that family shows, not only as an extension of itself but as an embodiment of what it means to be truly loved and cared for.
The best analogy I heard from a counsellor is to think of grief as a circle in a box. At first, the circle is so big it takes up almost all the space and touches every side of the box. The grief is all-consuming. As time passes, the circle gets smaller, and so does the grief. It is still there, of course—it never leaves—but the circle is not always touching the sides. You are able to live other parts of your life with happiness.
The circle continues to shrink and move. It pings from side to side, from top to bottom, and every time it touches the edge of the box, a wave of grief hits you as if it just happened yesterday. Then the circle moves again. It becomes smaller and smaller but never disappears. It becomes woven into your new life and part of who you are—a new part of you that you learn to embrace. And at the end of it all - or in the middle - we are truly lucky to love and experience life even when it includes loss.