I saw a name today. It was my late sister's fiance's name. I don't think about it much, but it makes me really mad and upset when I see it.
My sister died when she was 27 years old. I've written extensively about it on this blog. I was 25. I'm 29 now - almost 30. It's been four years, and in that time I've gone from concerned to friendly and supportive to angry to arguing to not on speaking terms with her fiance. The last of those has lasted over three years.
My sister was a writer, and a prolific one. She had piles of notebooks and a hard drive full of short stories and poems. I'd like to read them. I'd like to collect the best stuff for a book for my family, but her fiance won't return emails. I suspect there might be some embarrassing stuff about him in the journals. I don't care about that. Rip that out. I just want the stories, and the stuff about her life. I want to read the only record that she ever existed. I have a handful of poems and a few pictures, and nothing else to prove she was ever even here. What kind of person does that to a family? What kind of person takes all of a person's record and buries it?
Her fiance met a woman on the internet and was married within six months of her death. He moved to Chicago with her life insurance policy. He got married on the week she was born - maybe even the day.
Hundreds of pages of stories and poems remain languishing on hard drives and in note books. Some have probably been deleted, some thrown away. But there might be some left out there, and I want to read them. I want a little record that she ever existed in the first place.
What kind of person does that? What kind of person wants to bury the memory of Amanda Wilding?
