One Year Later

Well Sandy, it’s been a year since your untimely demise. For someone who started a dozen different lives and a thousand different projects but rarely finished any of them, you certainly made a complete and thorough job of leaving this earthly plane.  You have disappeared from my texts, my phone calls, my presence, and lately, even from my dreams.  If I wasn’t so pissed, I’d be impressed.   

I have done a lot of comfort eating this past year.  I justified it by telling myself if I couldn’t have you, I would at least have sourdough bread and ice cream sandwiches.  Alas, getting fatter did not make me happier.  So now I am trying to do Keto, but it is extremely difficult without you texting me three times a day to demand a rundown of my food intake. Keto is ridiculously complicated without a zealous sister tenaciously keeping track of your carbs.  I can still hear your horrified gasp that time I confessed to eating four graham crackers.  You would have thought I’d consumed an entire coconut cream pie.

I miss coconut cream pie. I miss getting a text notification from you and knowing ahead of time that I was going to laugh when I read it. I miss you sending me photos of critters you encountered on your morning run with captions like “OMG look at this!” even if it was only a beetle. I miss you coming over to randomly rearrange my furniture.  I miss you dragging me to Bath and Body Works every September to smell all the fall candles.  I miss how you called Hobby Lobby “The Lord’s Store” and claimed that shopping there made you feel like a Republican and crave Chick-fil-A. I miss your outrageous advice on what I should do with my life even though I never took it.  I always wanted to, but you know how dull I am.

Everything seems dull compared to you.  Remember that time you bought cheap generic Windex at the Dollar Tree and it left a film on your sliding glass door?  You were furious, but you left it there for days as a reminder to boycott the Dollar Tree. My life is like that now.  There is a foggy film over everything.  I have not tried to clean it off because I’m still not ready to look at the world without you in it. Maybe next year.

I’ve grown old this year, Sandy.  I know we swore we would always stay young at heart, but that only works if your heart is whole, not when there is a chunk of it missing. I was thirteen when you came into my life and 64 when you left it and even though it’s only been a year, I am now somehow 103. It turns out Retinol doesn’t work for heartbreak even if it’s the prescription kind that insurance won’t pay for.

On the bright side, your grandchildren’s artwork is currently decorating my refrigerator.  Rylan enlists me to play Barbies every chance she gets, and I always have to be the dad and go off to work under the coffee table.  Indi makes me lunches from her mud kitchen, but I have to pick my own “lettuce” which is what she calls the random weeds growing right next to the poison ivy.  Jovi gives me Eskimo kisses while I am pushing her around discount stores in a shopping cart. And every time I leave Nash, he wraps his arms around my legs and says, “love you more”. 

So, thank you for them. 

I’m trying to give all the love I had for you to your girls and your grandkids because I honestly don’t know what else to do with it.  Love, I have discovered, has to have a place to go in this world. Otherwise, you just carry it around and it gets heavier and heavier until you feel like you can hardly move. Then you get this craving to pour some out.

Speaking of cravings, I know you craved freedom more than anything else in life. I love knowing that your spirit is as free as a bird now. You were my one wild sister and now you are my one wild ghost.  I desperately wish you were with me in body, but I’ve had to accept that you’re with me in spirit instead.  There is no one else I’d rather be haunted by.

I’m still pissed though. 

Love you more,

Karen