beki

I’ll post other pictures later, but this is how I most—and in many ways most want to—remember my little sister Beki: happy, good-natured, and a little mischievous, the way she was for all the years she was given.

Being five years younger than me, Beki was always a little girl in my mind. I tried to protect her until I moved out of the house and our lives took separate paths for too many years. I will never forgive myself for not protecting her more, for not knowing more about the protection she needed then.

I tried, in the last 10 years, to make up for effectively abandoning her while I figured out a life for myself separate from the influences of her father’s (my adopted dad’s) side of the family. I couldn’t think of any way other than cutting them all off completely…and that ended up including her too.

She never blamed me. That wasn’t Beki’s way. She fought and found her path. She was a mom three-times over, biologically, and “mom” to the many more she took care of at different times. She was an artist. She could fix anything (she had all of the mechanical gifts I did not). She was fierce and stubborn. She was generous even when she had not. She lived in the present. She had a real chuckle and a half-fake laugh that- sounded just like our mom’s, our grandma’s, and our great grandma’s. No one else has that laugh I miss so much.

Most of all, though, Beki was my little sister, with all the simplicity and complexity that implies, and she is gone far too soon.

RIP, little sister. I love you, no matter how far.