Living with Grief: How My Sister’s Murder Altered My Life Forever

I was ten years old when my sister was murdered.

A vibrant amaryllis flower in full bloom, displaying a striking pattern of red and white petals against a soft, neutral background.

There is no normal way to say that. There is no soft version. One day she was here, and then she was not, and the rest of my life had to grow around that empty space.

After she died, I helped raise my sister’s kid for a few years. I was still a kid myself, but life does not always care about what age you are supposed to be.

Eventually, I gave her to my grandparents to raise because that was what made sense at the time. It was not easy. It was not simple. It was one of those choices that lives in your body even when your mind understands why it had to happen.

I have been on my own, and in the universe’s good graces, since I was sixteen.

That sounds almost poetic, but really it means I had to learn early how to survive. I had to figure out how to keep going, how to make a life, how to carry things nobody could see.

In the beginning, grief was loud. It was raw and heavy and everywhere. It sat on my chest. It filled every room. It made the future feel like something other people got to have.

But grief changes over time.

It does not go away. People say that like time is some kind of medicine, but time does not erase anything. It just changes the shape of the pain. Over the years, the absence became a new type of grief. Not lighter. Just quieter.

That quiet grief is strange because it sneaks up on you. It is not always crying on the floor grief. Sometimes it is realizing you cannot remember exactly how her voice sounded anymore. Sometimes it is knowing her smell has faded from memory. Sometimes it is looking at your own life and understanding how much she missed, how much she was supposed to be here for, how many versions of me she never got to meet.

That is a different kind of grief.

It is not just missing the person. It is missing the life that should have happened around them. It is grieving the sister I lost, the mother she would have been, the conversations we never had, the ordinary days we were robbed of. It is carrying her memory while also carrying the weight of still being here.

And survival has its own grief too.

Because when someone you love is murdered, you do not just lose them once. You lose them again and again as your life keeps moving without them. Every birthday, every milestone, every hard day, every beautiful thing they should have seen becomes another reminder that they are not here.

Still, I try to hold onto one thought that gives me some peace.

I like to imagine that wherever she is, time does not move the way it moves here. Maybe my whole long life without her will only feel like five minutes to her. Maybe while I have spent decades missing her, she has not had to miss me the same way. Maybe she blinked, and I will be there.

I do not know if that is true.

But I need it to be.

Because I have carried this grief for most of my life, and I know now that healing does not mean forgetting. It does not mean the pain disappears. It means learning how to live with the absence. It means letting the grief become part of the story without letting it be the only story.

My sister’s murder altered my life forever.

But so did her life.

And even after all these years, I am still carrying both.