Jacqui...

My sister died 33 years ago today. She was 27 years old.

What is there to say about Jacqueline? That she was funny and smart. Quick witted and irreverent. That she loved The Beatles and Elvis Presley and the Kennedys. That her moods could turn dark on a dime and just as quickly make you laugh like no one else could.

Jacqui was a skinny kid. Boyish almost as a little girl, and flat-chested and awkward as a teenager. By the time she hit 20 she was striking and elegant. She was taller than the rest of us, with blond streaks in her hair and a peace sign around her neck--a sign of rebellion in the South in the 70s.

Jacqui died a violent death. For that, perhaps, every member of our family, even the ones who were born after her death in 1976, remember her with regret and sadness.

Today as I rode the train into work I tried to imagine her life had she survived. Jacqui's life ended with a single gunshot to her chest from a hunting rifle that was used to end her life. I thought of the bullet that entered just below her left breast and exited out her left shoulder, leaving behind a gaping hole that the coroner said measured some six inches in diameter. I mourned the children she might have had. The moments holding a newborn child that was her own. I wondered about the man she might have finally found who would have loved only her, intensely and without hesitation.

This year is the first in which my mother hasn't remembered what day it is. My sisters and I agreed not to remind her--for once a blessing in the confusion that has been eating away at our mother's mind these last couple of years.

Of my nieces and nephews, only one of them was born before Jacqui's death. The others, however, recall her as if they had known her as we did. Each of them, the girls in particular, have something of her in them.

Aleksandra got her spirit. Her fuck-you attitude. The first time I saw my oldest niece when she was no more than a couple of months old, I looked into her cracked-ice deep blue eyes, and I saw Jacqui's spirit.

Mary Elizabeth looks so much like Jacqui that at times I have to look away so that she doesn't see me wanting to hold on to her, beg her not to stray too far away from those of us who love her. She is the same age as Jacqui was at her death. Her personality is similar in some ways too, which, I think, may scare her mother, my sister, at times. But what M.E., as we call her, lacks of her aunt's is a sense of tragedy that was all around Jacqui by the time she was M.E.'s age.

Then there's my Jourdan who loves music the way her aunt did. Jacqui would have loved my daughter. She would have appreciated that Jourdan does nothing like everyone else, and that she does it with her own style and grace that is truly remarkable.

So another year has passed. For me, what breaks my heart into a million pieces, is that what is left of Jacqui is in our memories...nothing more. She didn't live long enough to leave anything tangible behind. Her belonginga are dispersed between her siblings, but her energy has faded from the "things" that belonged to her.

What happens when we are gone? When Jourdan's children have children, and the stories have faded, will it be as though Jacqui never lived?

That thought is scarier than death.