I been working hard, I been searching for God in through the looking glass.

I flew down to Dallas the first weekend of August. It was my baby brother’s birthday and my sister’s last weekend at home before heading off to her freshman year of college.

I took the three of them - my brother, sister, and her boyfriend - out for a late night adventure on the eve of my brother’s birthday. We played laser tag and air hockey and rode the bumper cars, my brother’s favorite, over and over again. Afterward, we went to a fast food place for shakes and fries. I kept eyeing my watch.

“Hey. It’s your birthday. Happy birthday.”

The next day, after many months of prodding from my sister and me, my father rented a boat and the whole family went out together. It was the first time my brother had ever gone out on the lake; my father sold our boat when my parents found out they were expecting him.

We stopped to swim and my brother and I kept making circles around the boat - jumping off the bow, swimming around the back to the ladder, and clambering over everyone’s things, dripping wet, to get back to the bow.

We set up the tube and my brother and I were the first two to ride. I audibly cursed as we made a rough turn.

“I’m TEN,” he shouted, jokingly, as he had many times over the past year.

“Actually, you’re ELEVEN,” I cried back.

He loved tubing so much that he never got off, but just kept taking turns with whoever else wanted to ride. No one even made a fuss about it.

We ate egg salad sandwiches and forgot to reapply sunscreen. I wakeboarded, for the first time in over ten years, and rode better and with more confidence and control than I think I ever did when I was younger. My brother, sister, and I crowded together on the tube and rode it all the way in back to the dock, laughing, as my sister and I tried our best to hold on.

“Why did you decide to buy a boat?” my brother asked my father, while just the three of us sat in the truck.

His answer, essentially, was that it was a way to try to connect and spend time with teenage me. That floored me. Even though he didn’t say it to me directly, or really even to me at all, I could hear the undertone: “I really did try.”

I could not have asked for a better weekend. It was the most functional we had been all together in years, maybe ever. I was able to fly back home without the guilt that often nags me after these trips.

But I felt even then that it likely wasn’t something that could last, or even repeat itself again. So much about our family dynamic was changing drastically. My brother was starting middle school. My sister was starting college in another state. David and I were in the first week of trying to start our own family.

I really had no idea.

I haven’t spoken to my brother directly since that trip in August. It’s always so tough, so emotionally taxing, to try to arrange to video chat with my parents. I was just too tired when I was pregnant. And I’ve just been struggling too much since. I have sent them pictures and messages intended for him, but I never actually know how much of what I share makes it back.

But I’ve been texting my sister often, because I remember what it was like to be a freshman in college, alone in a new city many miles away from home, without anyone ever reaching out. And I finally sent her a care package this week, the one I had been meaning to send the week of my first ultrasound appointment. I hope it’s enough.

We just found out this week that the family dog, our sweet girl who follows me around the house, who sleeps next to my bed (but never anyone else’s), who keeps me company on restorative morning walks through the neighborhood, who makes the funniest little piggy sounds when I rub behind her ears, has cancer.

And I find myself wondering, and worrying, about our trip next week. Will my brother forgive me for my lengthy absence? Will my sister come home? - and if she doesn’t, how will things be different? Will I still be able to shrug off the constant questions about when we’re going to have kids like I have in the past? Is this the last time we’ll see her?

I wrote this all down to try to really remember a time when things were so unbelievably good. Because it’s so hard right now to imagine a time when they ever will be again.

Last updated November 03, 2017