What Remains When Someone Is Gone…

About two months ago, I quietly stepped away from social media, and even from carrying a phone. I wanted to live again the way I once did when Donna was by my side. No constant pings. No scrolling. Just life.

Days filled with sun and clear water. Running a dive boat. Going underwater whenever I could. Sitting on the deck with a book for hours, yes, The Wheel of Time, again. I was not blogging. I did not feel the pull or need to get things out of my head anymore.

Then last night happened….

My younger sister Denise passed away from breast cancer. She chose not to treat it.

That sentence is still hard to write.

She did try treatment at first, but it took more from her than it gave. She made the decision to stop. My mother struggled deeply with that choice. Truthfully, I understand it. I have lived a full life, a career, a wife, children, a home, a thousand memories. At some point, more pain does not equal more living.

Denise always marched to her own rhythm.

I still see her at the piano, forced like the rest of us to take lessons until we graduated high school. She had one song she always played, something from Romeo and Juliet. I can hear it even now.

She was left-handed. Endearingly uncoordinated. Her hair was impossibly thick and wild, no matter how hard she tried to tame it. And she brought home every broken, unwanted animal she could find, making them her pets, giving them names, loving them fiercely.

With her passing, I have been thinking a lot about how little we knew back then about where life would take us.

There were seven of us. Camping trips. One or two sports each season, always swimming plus something else. Growing up at Five Oaks pool. Art classes. Piano lessons. 4-H. If my mother could find something to put us in, we were in it. Sometimes she forgot she dropped us off and did not pick us up. I will never forget Bryan and me walking all the way from Oella to Wade Avenue one night after St. Marks lacrosse practice. They had gone Square Dancing and forgot we were at lacrosse!

We also had family nights, the kind of nights Donna and I later insisted on having with our own kids.

Once a month, my mother mandated Family Night. There was always prayer. She picked the Bible reading. One of us helped with dessert or a fun meal. Another got to choose the game. We groaned. We complained. And then, almost without fail, we laughed, ate too much sugar, and forgot we were ever annoyed.

That was our rhythm. Our roots.

As I try to recreate the life Donna and I had together, my mother tells me Donna and I were born in the wrong era. We believed in doing life together, husband, wife, children, all of us moving in the same direction. Not separate careers. Not separate hobbies. Not focusing on our own pleasure. Together.

That way of life feels rare now.

Denise was the first of us to strike out on her own. She moved to Florida for fashion school and was doing well, until the day she was hit by a car and broke her back.

At the time, I had a job I could do from anywhere. I drove my mother down to Florida, and we stayed for weeks. Hospital visits. Sorting her home. Holding things together.

Through an old Ocean City Beach Patrol connection, “Mongo,” help appeared exactly when we needed it. He was a paramedic in the same county where Denise was hit and was able to get to her, updating us with what was happening while we drove down from Maryland. Donna stayed home with the kids. That is what partnership looked like.

I have countless family photos, many with Donna in them. But this one I posted, this old picture from the 1980s, has always stayed with me.

A rooster on my lap. A goat beside my brother. Our collie front and center. A cat curled up in Denise’s lap.

No idea where life would take us. No perfect house. No manicured lawn. Just animals wandering in and out. Goats smart enough to kick open the back door and climb the steps where three or four of us slept in one room. Four H projects. Chickens. Sheep. A childhood that was loud, imperfect, and deeply loved.

This is how we were raised.

And this is what I still believe in.

Family. Roots. Showing up. Choosing love over convenience.

Rest easy, Denise… I cried when I heard the news. The first of seven to leave this world.