Life After a Death

By Cameron Crane


The interesting thing about monumental transitions is that sometimes they happen instantly, and sometimes you don’t even realize they have happened until years later when you reflect on how things have changed over time. The latter typically happens with events that are difficult to process through emotionally or understand, such as divorce or the death of a loved one. These are the hardest transitions because you are never completely prepared for them.

It has been a decade since my half-sister’s father passed, and I can still remember exactly how I felt on that day. I was thirteen years old. My mother was crying in her bedroom, and although she was clearly emotional, the news was delivered to me so matter-of-factly it took me a moment to realize what had actually been said.

“Your sister’s dad died. She’s in her room. You should probably go comfort her.”

My sister was 16 at the time, and I remember the fear that possessed me as I walked down the hallway to her room. I had no idea what to say to her. I had never really gotten to know her father, had never experienced death before, and although I felt sad, deep down I knew it wasn’t really my loss. As much as I tried to will myself to feel that it was, or to at least cry, I simply couldn’t. When I opened the door to her room, she was lying on her bed staring at the ceiling. “I’m really sorry,” I said, and I gave her a big hug. I had never heard those words sound so insignificant.

I don’t remember the next few weeks, but I do know that things went back to normal relatively quickly, at least for me. I don’t recall a single conversation with my sister about her father passing from that point on. She continued to be successful, and hold her head high. She never fell into a deep depression, and so I never really comforted her. If she had a grieving process, it was kept very secret.

There were times, though, when reality would sneak up on us. When my sister won the title of Miss Marin and walked the stage of the Miss California pageant, she was the only one of the thirty-plus girls on stage escorted by a younger brother rather than her father. Whenever there was a special father-daughter moment in a movie we were watching, or she would recognize a trait in herself that reminded her of her father, her eyes would fill with tears. And whenever my brother and I would go out with our dad for Father’s Day, she seemed to disappear into her bedroom.

Still, I didn’t truly recognize what the transition must have been like for her until about two weeks ago, when I was flipping through a family album and a 16th birthday card fell out. I will never forget the experience of opening that card and seeing my sister’s father’s writing. It was so full of love and personality, and was the last thing he wrote to her before he died four months later.

For the first time, his death was real to me, and I understood the tremendous pain and transition she was forced to deal with at such a young age. I truly admire her strength throughout the process, the compassion she must have felt for my brother and I to have never held it against us for still having a father, and how proud he would be of her today for all she has accomplished. Almost exactly ten years from his death, I shed my first tear.

Death is one of those few transitions that have no clear ending. Losing a loved one changes your life so deeply, and yet the process can be so internal that things seem to happen almost subtly. We can be grateful for those little moments of recognition that life does go on, and even though our loved ones can't always be there physically, they do not cease to impact us and who we become.