iconoclasts eat last

stages of grief: my parents begged me to read part of your book. you write specifically about this year. the year that the person we grieve has been gone as long as they were here. i recall a note about how i would be thinking about that person once a week or less by this point in the "stages of grief". i ask myself what you, as an author, knew about my experience. how did it serve you to create these metrics of forgetting? why is the infrequency of my remembering something to look forward to? why did that seem like a comforting thing to write? what does this say about your experiences? would you write it differently now?

today my sister, Becky Denise Gerow, would be 36 years of age, had she not died in a car accident 18 years ago. if i were able to talk with her this evening i would ask a lot of questions. i might share some things as well. here are some of those things.

i might ask what afterdeath really feels like, if it does.
i would ask how it feels to have believed in what it would feel like, and know now what it actually feels like. assuming it feels like anything, or exists for her.
i might admit that i wish i could believe in some place we would hang out together once i die, and that i do not believe and we can't.
i would ask her if she recalls the time we laid under the pines with our dogs. the ones the lightning took.
i would ask how it feels to be remembered by a tree, a license plate, and some hand scrawled songs -- if it feels at all.
i would beg for her voice on the state of our parents non-comital-non-retirement.
i would ask what she thinks of our family now. the distance and silence we have all grown like moss on the roof of our relationships.
i would hope she would have an angry voice to speak of the way our relatives deconstructed the cabin we grew up in, and the stale mansion that stands supplanted.
i would ask her if it is okay the way i feel about spending time with happy people. how it is scary because i worry that i can only make them less happy. i would ask if some folks get to stop being sad when they die. if she had a way to know that. i would ask if sad folks at least get longer breaks from being sad then they did in life, if they exist. if they have reasons to recall.
i would want to thank her for being my only friend during some of the harder parts of my life, and share how much it would feel good to tell her that.
i would thank her for being the kid our folks always wanted. i would thank her for pushing space to let me be myself, even when she knew it was an unhealthy self.
i would thank her for the trips to the beach, the cigarettes, the dirt bikes, rodeo dances, for go-cart hair fling, and for taking steps i would need to take later.
i would say thanks for the day i left before she did. i looked out the window of my green car and said goodbye. it felt like the time i said goodbye after we dropped her off for college in Colorado, and i sat in the back seat and cried against all my might.
i would say that i love her.
i wish i could tell her these things, and endless other things, but i can't.
that hurts a lot sometimes.