03/16/2024
It would be her life sentence!
One moment you were here. Living life. Making plans. Dreaming dreams. Talking, sharing, hugging, and loving like only you could do. And then in one moment – you were just gone. And, on this 17th day of March in 2016, our lives would never be quite the same again, ever.
She was gone before she left. Her heart started walking away long before she physically made her way out. She started leaving when her spouse and children began to put her in the shadows. When he found more important things to invest his time in than being in her presence, when things that made her smile became a burden, one he had once carried for the sake of winning her heart. When her ears became a well that you dropped your promises into, with no intentions of picking them up and fulfilling them. She was gone mentally and emotionally. Her physically leaving was just her final act of letting go.
Was it the countless hours he spent emotionally connecting with his brothers’ ex-wife? Perhaps it was the introduction of a third party, by someone who would later lose his own son to the same reason we lost Barb, one that would to this day, take a place (her place), in his life? The children? Was it the one who’d stood over her mother’s dead body in that cold, sterile hospital room crying “I’m sorry Mom, I didn’t mean it, I don’t really hate you, and I never hated you”? Barb never heard those words, how could she? She went to her grave, thinking that yes, you did hate her. Another daughter, one that would dangle her child, a granddaughter, like some pawn in a game of chess, a game where the one true loser, was Barb herself. Each of them saw to that! Her life sentence.
Do not underestimate the ones who have suffered the kind of grief that does not seem to end. Those who have been broken in places you did not even know existed. The ones who fell into silence because their lungs had no words left to speak. It was her life sentence.
Barb took her own life, because of how she was treated by the very members of her family who were supposed to love and cherish her. She saw no other way, the pain to great, the loss to significant. Their treatment of her certainly became her life sentence!
Yet they continue to live their lives. Free of the cumbersome burden they saw in Barb. They are happy, carefree, going about their everyday lives. What price have they paid? This certainly never became their life sentence!
Barb, she has paid that price, everyday for the last eight years. It will forever be, HER LIFE SENTENCE!
Your memories Barb are sweet gifts from you, ones that allow my heart a breath. To let me be lost for a moment, to remember your life, and not just your death. Because there is a last time for everything and you don’t always get to know that it’s the last time when you are in it!
While I do not write here as often anymore, not a day goes by that I do not think of my beautiful sister, gone way too soon! You will always be my baby sister and I will always be your big sister!
Forever missing you!
