Losing Colleen

My sister Colleen died five weeks ago, and I still find myself looking for her. Not literally. It is more ordinary than that, which somehow makes it worse. Something happens and I think about telling her. I see something she would find funny. I remember some ridiculous thing she said or did. There is still a part of my brain where she is simply out there somewhere, living her life, available to me, and then reality catches up.

A few months ago, we went on a cruise together. The timing was terrible for me. I was unemployed, worried about money and worried about my career, and taking off for a week was not exactly the responsible move. I went anyway because I had the chance to travel with my sister and I thought there would always be more time to solve the other things. I had no idea how right I was to go, or how wrong I was about the time.

Colleen could make me crazy. She had no problem telling me when she thought I was getting in my own way, and she believed in me with an insistence that was sometimes comforting and sometimes deeply annoying. She wanted more for me, and from me, than I always wanted to hear. I keep thinking about that now, along with all the things about her that are much less useful and much more painful.

Her death has turned me inward. I have not wanted to talk much or explain how I am doing, mostly because I do not really know. I am sad. I am distracted. I am tired. Sometimes I am fine for hours and then something small catches me completely off guard. And somewhere inside all of that, my career stopped feeling like the biggest thing in my life.

For much of the past year, not working felt enormous. I spent so much time trying to understand it. Was I positioning myself wrong? Was my experience suddenly too broad? Too senior? Not specific enough? Did I need to change my story, my expectations, my entire direction? I still need to work. I still want to work. I miss being useful. I miss being in the middle of things. I am still angry sometimes about how hard this has been. But I cannot seem to summon the same urgency around it.

I do not know whether that is perspective, grief, exhaustion, or just a temporary inability to care about anything that is not immediately in front of me. I do not know if I will feel differently six months from now. I only know that things look different from here. My career does not feel meaningless. It just feels smaller.

I still want to figure out what comes next professionally, but I do not think it is the only question anymore. Mostly, I wish I could call my sister and talk to her about it.