A blurry montage of past memories
Dear Francis,
I hope this letter finds you in good spirits. My spirits, as I'm sure you've heard, have been flagging of late.
The sudden and unexpected loss of my sister—whom you knew distantly—at the beginning of the year has been unbearably hard for me. Through the stupefaction and tears, I realized, almost apologetically, that I went 36 years on this Earth without experiencing a real tragedy. There are individuals on this planet who've experienced more loss than I have before they pass their first birthday.
Into that wretched category of people I would place my sister's nine-month-old child. As I held my niece in the hospital, while the machines keeping her mother alive whirred and beeped monotonically in the next room over, I thought of how her mother's death would radiate out through her life, affecting every facet of it. Have you ever seen one of those movies, Francis, where the protagonist realizes that some pivotal thing happened early in his or her life, prompting a blurry montage of past memories and experiences that culminates in the watershed moment?
That is what I imagined as I held my niece and let her wrap her diminutive hands around my unwashed hair. I imagined her decades later tracing the contours of her life back to that day in the hospital. My little niece, who had not even been on this planet for one full rotation around the sun, had lost her mother. She will likely never remember my sister's resonant laugh, never recall her sparkling eyes.
That is a depth of tragedy that I can scarcely comprehend, Francis, even though my sister's death affected me mightily.
Countless experiences shape our lives as we grow up, some of them large and some of them quite minor and forgettable. For my niece, her mother's death will fall comfortably in the former category—it will leave an indelible mark on the entirety of her life. I held her in my lap and cried in the drab hospital wing as I ruminated on the unfairness of it all.
She looked at me with her wide, guileless eyes, and I saw no tragedy in them. But I knew that could not last.
With love,
SEW