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I never knew her
I was nine
Still learning to kick
The football
To skid my bike
She was seventeen

Her smile
Is what I remember
Taken by a fracture of Life
In a crumpled up panel van
Wrapped around a pole
Her dead boyfriend
Beside her
It was Pesach
The first night
April 3

And I remember her dance
To Elton John's Crocodile Rock
In our loungeroom
In our old house
I remember the movie
She took me to see
'Charlotte's Web'

And I didn't cry when she died
Stoic and all
Never tears For Esther
It was just too painful
Just too sad

My father muttered Hebrew prayers
My mother sobbed uncontrollably

And I remain mute
Begging for the day
That has not yet come


.

Dear Boss ~

Thank you for sharing these poignant, and still stoic, verses of your memories of Esther. Your unsentimentalized phrasing brings your loss straight to my heart. "In a crumpled up panel van" is so graphic and real in description of an accident.

[I believe it was "Charlotte's Web" who someone else had been taken to see by their sister and their sister never returned to pick her up.]

I hope one day you'll be able to properly grieve this loss which, at such a young age, was clearly so significant for you. Even though you only speak her age, your first verse paints two, clear portraits of two young people, eight years apart. Your very next line confirms the portrait in my mind's eye.

A very moving poem for me to take in, Boss. Thank you, again.

Love,
Lizzy

I'm also glad to see you here.

Boss,

Thanks for sharing this poem. I'm sure that the nine year old did
the best he could given whatever resources were available to him.

Dear Lizzy,

Thanks for appreciating the poem. Grieving can be so difficult, especially for such a beautiful sister.
Thank you very muchly for your thread for me and Voo - you are a thoughtful one. I just needed a short break - can't let 'em get to you.

In peace always

Boss

You're right Steven, he did. But this 37 year old still sometimes thinks he should have been more.

Take care

Boss

Boss,

We do the best we can, even now.

You, also, take care.

[I believe it was "Charlotte's Web" who someone else had been taken to see by their sister and their sister never returned to pick her up.]

With your posting here, this has come back into focus for me, Boss. This was your sister. This was you.

Such a big problem with death is how the survivors so often inject themselves into the cause of loss of their loved one. We feel so desperate to have them back that we 'call' on every corpuscle of the universe to rearrange its energy, fate, and time to effect a different outcme. I remember crazy thoughts after my two, women friends were killed, to the effect of, "If only I had gone to the coffee shop that morning, they would have had one more person to speak to before they left, which would have delayed their day by 15-20 minutes, which would have affected their departure time at the end of it, which would have made them not be at the same spot when the car, that crashed into the side of the bridge, came to a stop in the road, and they collided with it. This, as you know, is grief thinking, denial, and feeling desperate to rearrange reality, as though we could have somehow personally, magically, prevented death. These were my thoughts just last year, during this same month and beyond. I'm better a year later; but still need to leave my rethinking, of their last day, alone.

To consider what a 9-year-old boy must have felt, particularly if you never got counseling of any kind, to deal with the thoughts surrounding your sister's death and loss to you, is pretty overwhelming. Your thinking that you should have "been" more seems also to pull in the fact that you were a boy, she was a girl, and boys are "supposed to protect" girls. I know that logic can go right out the window when you consider that you weren't even in their van, couldn't drive, etc. ad infinitum. It's akin thinking to my crazy, magical thinking that I could have changed the course and final outcome of my friends' day, simply by seeing them that morning.

I'm guessing that you must have gotten counseling in the 28 years since your sister's death, but that your grief still remains stuck in some integral way. I hope you can find the tears you need to let go and let them fall, Boss.


Love,
Lizzy

You're welcome for the song. I hope you can hear it one day.

That's very sad, Boss. I know how hard it is to accept death, even as an adult, and even when you are expecting it. There aint no cure for loss, even though, as Lizzy has said, we try so hard to find one.

Keep talking about her. Your tears will come.

Good to see you back on here, Boss.

Take care,

Diane