As a little girl, my cousin Felicia and I would mimic things we saw on TV. I remember one time when we decided we wanted to be blood sisters. We had seen something in a movie, so we spit in our hands, rubbed them together, and promised each other that we would always be sisters.We were to afraid to pick our fingers.
She was born my cousin, but she became my sister.
The memories flood in sometimes, often without warning, and I am thankful for every one of them. I don’t ever want to forget those moments, so I write them down as they come. Each memory feels like another little piece of her that I get to hold onto.
Like sisters, Felicia and I had our own codes. We had looks that only we understood. We could communicate without saying much at all. And that didn’t end when we grew up. Even as adults, there were things between us that only we understood.
Recently, another cousin told me how hard Felicia’s loss has been for her because Felicia was the person who kept her levelheaded. It made me stop and think about something I had never really considered before: What was I to Felicia?
Every relationship Felicia had was different. She fulfilled a different space in each of our lives.
And then it came to me.
I was Felicia’s big Sis.
I was the one she could call when she needed advice. I helped her when she needed help. I listened when she didn’t necessarily need someone to fix anything—she just needed someone who would hear her. And I prayed.
I know she looked up to me, and there is something both beautiful and heartbreaking about realizing that now.
Our relationship wasn’t perfect because no relationship between sisters is. We fought. We disagreed. We probably got on each other’s nerves plenty of times. But underneath all of that, the love was always there. It was good. It was pure. It was ours.
When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, Felicia called me and Hannah. She told us how much she loved him and how much she loved us. She promised that she was there for us.
That was Felicia.
And looking back, I realize that little promise we made as children wasn’t as silly as it might have seemed.
We spit in our hands and promised we would always be sisters.
We didn’t understand life then. We didn’t know what adulthood would bring. We certainly didn’t know that one day I would have to learn how to be her big sister without being able to pick up the phone and hear her voice.
But we kept our promise.
She was my little sister.
I was her big Sis.
And death doesn’t get to rewrite what we were to each other.
So, when the memories come, I will write them down. The funny ones. The ordinary ones. The disagreements. The looks nobody else understood. The phone calls. The prayers. The moments when she needed me and the moments when I needed her.
I will write because these memories are evidence that she was here.
Evidence that we loved each other.
And evidence that two little girls who once spit into their hands and promised to be sisters really did become exactly that.
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