Lyndsey
On Losing Carrie
I had her.
I am an only child, at least by definition. But that was never entirely true. I had her. My cousin by blood, but my sister in every way that ever mattered. We may not have shared parents, but we shared family, memories, experiences, vacations, holidays, secrets, laughter, and a bond that makes labels feel irrelevant. A bond that made the phrase “just my cousin” feel not even remotely enough.
Grief began the day that she called to tell me that she had cancer. It was then that life shifted; her life had completely changed, and in many ways, so did mine.
Grief, when someone is sick, starts long before death comes. It lives in watching the person you love be in pain. In watching them lose the version of themselves they were when they were healthy. In watching them cry in fear in the hospital room while you say the wrong thing, like “everything is going to be OK”, and hearing them respond with “no, it’s not”, and knowing they are right.
Grief is having heartbreaking conversations about their death while trying to honour the relationship and the life still left to live. It is watching them lose independence. Stop speaking. It is sitting beside them in hospice. It is being there when she took her last breath. It is in telling my daughter that someone she adored and considered a second mother had died.
Grief before death is painful; it is fear, it is anticipation, it is unknown. Grief after death is the absence. Silence where her laughter and smile belonged. The realization that the person I called for everything was no longer someone I could ever call again. It was crying when no one was looking. It was staying strong for others.
Even as we approach 10 years, grief is her not being able to see our “Loralai Baker the candle stick maker” graduate. It is the sadness of not having her to talk to or lean on now that my dad is sick. It is talking to the ceiling, it is wishing to see her in my dreams when I sleep.
Grief is the shame of looking at how life unraveled after she left, and wondering if she would be disappointed in how it all unfolded. How different life would have looked if she had still been here. Grieving not only the loss of her, but the loss of the life I would have had.
It is the enormous shoes she left behind, shoes no one has quite been able to fill.
And maybe that is what grief becomes over time, all of us left behind, simply trying to keep swimming while carrying the weight of the space she once occupied. Learning to live
through the waves of building this new life, one of new beginnings, laughter, joy, memories all without her.
Grief is having lived through this and knowing I would do it a thousand times over, simply because I once had her.