Fifteen years

Dedicated to -  
Samantha Allan Sheridan
​15.12.89 - 08.01.04 ​     

What I know about grief, is that it is forever.
The grief I felt 15 years ago is not the same as the grief I feel today; and the sadness that lives with me tomorrow, will be different to the heartache sits with me right now.

I lost my big sister. She was 14. I was 11.
Its been fifteen years since we stood around a hospital bed as a switch was flipped. Fifteen years since throwing a handful of dirt over a casket in the January heat. Fifteen years since drinking mugs of milo in my Nanas crowded living room and recieiving embraces I didn’t want, from relatives I didn’t know.

It was weeks until I began to understand. I Woke myself up in the middle of the night thinking I couldn’t breathe. Realising that you can in fact, switch off a person, releasing she was never coming back.
Eventually I got over the what if’s. I stopped indulging the fantasies I created where Sam had never died. She lived, and she fell in love, got a degree, got married and started a family..


Still I found it hard to express my pain, knowing my parents had lost a child I assumed my grief must be less significant. I felt selfish to demand that anyone listen to me, to demand an answer to the paralysing anxiety I felt.


Survivor Guilt.
Questioning why you should be here, and them not.


Every time I laughed with my friends, I felt guilty.
Every time I had a birthday, passed a test, watched the sunrise, I felt guilty


When I fell in love, I felt so guilty.


I begged people to talk about her, terrified of her ever being forgotten. I felt like I owed it to Sam to make sure everyone remembered.

For the first few years, I felt Sam with me, everyday. Sometimes I thought I could smell her, other times, I felt the warmth of her sitting beside me. Sometimes I even saw her roll her eyes at my Dad.
Eventually though, she faded away.

It breaks my heart to admit it, and my hands are burning up as I type, but eventually I forgot the sound of her voice.


Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still se her clearly.
But sometimes I can’t see her, as hard as I try, and my body is flooded with shame.


When someone you love passes away, the loss shatters you, its like looking in a mirror and watching yourself crack, and slowly break away.

It’s not the only thing you lose.


I love my parents. I loved them before, and I love them now. But the people I love now are very different after losing a daughter and for 15 years I have missed missed them.


Something else you lose, is you.
Almost immediately I stopped being Jessica and became “Sam’s sister”. Everything I did and everything I was, was so intrinsically linked to Sam. I wondered every day if people thought it should have been me. I wondered if they felt angry that it wasn’t. I felt like people were judging whether I was sad enough.


I quickly learnt that most people aren’t very comfortable with other peoples grief. Kids didn’t want to be friends with me because they didn’t know how to act when I was upset. People avoided talking to me because they were scared of saying the wrong thing.


To me, it was as thought they thought my grief was contagious, as though I had some kind of repellent illness. I felt like I had done something wrong.


Although I often felt lonely, I wasn’t alone. The friends who stood by me throughout school were, and are, very special people.


I never knew anyone outside of my family, who had lost someone so close to them. Estranged from the rest of the world I desperately wanted to see the world the way my friends did. Live in the world the they did.


Every year I looked forward to the next, hoping the dark shadow that followed me would one day disappear.


When the shadow remained in my late teens I tried to ignore it, but it only grew darker until I finally confronted it in my twenties and accepted that it would be with forever; and that to have a shadow, somewhere, there had to be light.


When you’re dealing with grief, living your life becomes a choice. You chose to thrive, or you chose to be consumed with loss, to hold it close to your chest, relying on it to justify your distance from the world.


Deciding to live my life, despite guilt and anxiety I knew would likely be with me forever, allowed me to step out of my shadow and embrace the things and the people in my life who were giving it light.


And there is endless light in my life.


People often say, not a day goes buy when you don’t think about a loved one who has passed away.


It isn’t true. Days do go buy when I don’t think of Sam, I don’t know how I would bear it if she was on my mind every day.


But everyday I miss her. Some days more than others. When I see sisters having coffee together, my heart sinks and my throat wells up. It's like I’m 12 years old again, sobbing into a cold damp pillow in a dark bedroom and I forget how to breathe.


I still fight tirelessly to bury the resentment I feel towards my friends and family who have what I lost.
A sister. A bridesmaid. An auntie. A best friend.


In 15 years I have never stopped wanting those things. I know when I’m 70 I’ll be missing her still.


The guilt is part of me now, mostly it quietly inhabits me, but sometimes it gets loud.
When I graduated university.
When I stood in front of the Eifel Tower.

When I do anything that she should have done, guilt dances with the pressure to do something worth while with my life because she couldn't.



As I grew up, I was forced to say goodbye to more and more people that I loved. People who had a part in healing my heart, broke it again. I eventually understood that the only way around loss, is to have nothing; and having nothing terrified me more than anything. I can only hope that there will always be more people to help tape up my heart when something else is lost .

When inevitably, it breaks again.


Because I know that everyone who has ever entered your life, one day, you will have to say goodbye to.
​

And what I know about my grief, is that it is a testament to Sam, and all the beautiful people like Sam, who taught me about love and eventually taught me about loss.

*Dedicated to my Sister - and everyone who loved her, remembering her today.