Today is the fourth. Every fourth of June we used to celebrate my sister's birthday. But now the fourth is filled is guilt. Hurt. Anger. Sadness. Anything but celebration.
She would want you to celebrate her life...
This is the type of phrase often turned by the grieving left behind. I don't believe that this is true about her and I don't believe she would have ever desired such a celebration. I cannot celebrate a life so shattered, so damaged, so wilted that it funneled down to one eventual option of death.
Our lives closely resembled one another until she shot a hole in that toxic fork in the road. How do you celebrate a life gone by when you can't even celebrate your own? She's dead. I'm alive. I consider myself lucky and nothing more. Not exactly reasons to reflect, release some balloons or even visit the final marking of her earthly existence.
And then the selfish side... I don't want to fucking celebrate a person who placed so much responsibility, need, and cries for soothing squarely upon my shoulders. I gave so much but in the end perhaps I gave too much. When she left she took a piece of me that I cannot recover. Now I'm left with the scar of death barely stitched together with the thread of hope that I truly did all that I could do.
How do I celebrate a life passed too early? How do I remember her with anything but painful regret?
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Hello darkness my old friend,
4 months ago
4 comments:
Many people talk a lot of rubbish about death, particularly a chosen death.You know the meaning for you and will make sense of it in your own way in time.Von
What you're doing is observing a day - a remembrance of someone. We live in a rah-rah culture that creates celebration out of very little, but that's not what this birthday is about.
I can't be sure if one day you will be able to remember her other than with regret, but I suspect it will be the case.
You honour her existence by remembering her. That is more than enough.
Von, I hope so.
Deborah, I hate the place where I am when it comes to remembering her and I do hope that you are right in that's it is more than enough... at least for now.
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