Love you, bye.

Hey little sister.

Thought I’d take some time to tell you the news, just in case you haven’t been keeping up. Your namesake is 3 1/2 now. Which means you’ve been gone 5 years. Hardly seems possible, that five years have flown by without you.

I think of you daily. Naming one of my children after you made that inevitable I suppose. She’s not much like you though, she looks lots more like Kierston. I thought for a while Tigerboy was going to be strawberry blonde (we won’t say the other) but he seems to have blonded up now, and gone into full clone mode.

Your family are doing OK. Not that I see them all that often, now we’ve moved away. I regret that, but at the same time, this is a good place for us to be. And I’m trying to make an effort to get back up home regularly, though it’s been difficult this year, what with the whole constantly broken car.

It’s not right, you know. You shouldn’t be dead. I’m still kind of cross about that, in a nameless, blame the universe, sort of way. I don’t really know how to express it, just the same as I didn’t know how to express how I cared when you were alive. I’m basically pretty poor at the whole relationship bit, and the fact that I’m related to you doesn’t make any difference with it.

Take the whole love you bye thing. How did that come about? Did the rest of the family discuss it, or did someone just think it would be a cool thing to say, so that just in case it was the last thing you heard, it was a good thing ? And then everyone else started saying it. But I didn’t get the memo. It’s like there was this bit about social conventions that I missed out on the coding for, somewhere along the line.

I thought you got that about me though. It didn’t seem to make that much difference if we had a big gap between seeing each other, it was still easy and comfortable when we did. And the kids got on great – particularly Small and Princess. (I call her that here. I don’t use the children’s real names, you might have noticed.) The shared experience of parenting was something that I really cherished, and something that I particularly missed. I think that maybe you were better at it than I am, and it was good to have someone to talk to about stuff.

You did it again. You made me cry. I try really hard not to, because it’s something I should be getting over, right?

But I don’t think it works that way. I don’t think I’m ever going to get over not having you around any more. Miss you so much, Katrin. Every day.

Love you, bye.