I can’t stop thinking about death and justice.

It’s everywhere now, things I used to justify and explain away so easily. Well, if he didn’t resist (now I understand the profound fear and panic). Well, she seemed to be a bad person (someone’s past decisions do not provide a pass for a violent murder, with a cop being both judge and executioner). Well … 

I used to pride myself in thinking independently. Because I wasn’t raised to parrot my parents’ opinions, I had to do a lot of work on my own, to figure things out for myself. And I realize the system impacted me much more than I thought it had. The roots run deep.

As I think about all of the injustice in the world, the lives taken far too soon, I’ve realized I can realize it, recognize it, and still talk about my sister. It’s not the same. Of course, it’s different. But both conversations can happen.

It’s been two years since she died, since the detective told us that there was too much about her death that was strange, that it didn’t seem like a suicide.

She died less than a mile down the road from our mother’s house. It was a small building, two floors, something of a shed. That hurt my heart the most, that she was so close but had been so isolated. I learned that my mother didn’t even know where she was living when she’d moved in with her boyfriend.

A few days after her death, we visited the apartment. I sat in the car, looking out the window, at the forest, at the house next door. Did she scream? Did she try to get help? Why hadn’t they done anything? Did they know what was going on?

There were the overgrown moss rocks common to Pennsylvania, and random bits of yard art.

I couldn’t go in. I didn’t want to see.

Some of my siblings went. There was no tape up, it didn’t seem like they were treating it like an active crime scene. Would no one go mop up her blood? How could they rent it again? What would they tell the new people? Would they say that someone had died there?

They went in and looked. They saw blood, a lot of it, and my brother left to throw up in the woods.

And they found the police report, a one-page document left behind.

We’d learn later that out of the ten cops that walked in, only one, our detective, didn’t immediately consider it a suicide. Everyone else dismissed it immediately. It makes me angrier now. I’m angry that there are lynchings happening today, and police are like, yup, that there’s a suicide.

Suicide.

I’m angry that people with guns with so little training make these snap-judgment decisions that are unfair and unjust.

People are asleep in their beds (Breonna) or walking home while dancing (Elijah) or trying to pay at the grocery store (George) and then they’re dead, and the cops can just walk away.

We were desperate for information after her death. We couldn’t get a hold of anybody at the police department. We didn’t understand what had happened. And all we knew was that her boyfriend openly carried around a rifle. He carried it in his trunk.

We knew that he continued to smash her phones, her only communication with her family. He was isolating her. One of that last times I’d contacted her, she asked who I was — I didn’t know she’d gotten a new phone, and she didn’t have any of her old contacts. I didn’t know he was constantly taking everything away from her.

In the police report, we found out a few of the things we didn’t know. We found out that it was his gun that had killed her. We found out that she was pregnant when she died.

I was battling the grief, the numbness that came with it, and the white-hot flashes of anger about the unfairness of it all. That even if, even if that kid hadn’t killed her, he’d set up a situation that if, IF Margaret had been suicidal, she was able to kill herself, and that felt just as wrong.

It took us a few days to talk to the detective. He felt a connection to the case, he said. He wanted to solve it before he retired. He was committed to doing the work. It would have been easy to dismiss his words, but what especially won us over was his compassion. And he saw straight through our father’s bullshit.

Schlep had pushed for a declaration of suicide from the beginning. We suspected that it was what would garner him the most sympathy. He started making demands of other people on social media, saying things that if he reached out, to not ignore him. He didn’t call any of his children. He didn’t reach out at all, just his lawyer calling the oldest to find out how he could get Margaret’s things.

There was one moment, standing in my mom’s dining room, that I did think, if he actually tried, if he changed after Margaret’s death, that I would forgive him for everything he’d done. But then the stunts happened, and he even had the coroner calling my mom, telling her to call him, and I was done.

The detective didn’t care at all about him or his demands. The detective sat patiently with us, and answered all of our questions, letting us know when he could give us information and when he couldn’t.

And everything about her death just didn’t make any sense.

Not the bruises on her arm, or how she could have possibly held the gun in a way that would have let her shoot herself in the face. Her arms weren’t long enough. There were other details, too, and none of it added up.

Two years.

It’s been over two years. And we’re not any closer.

And as more people die in race-related attacks, as my eyes open to how this country works and my own complicity in it, it does become clear that the only way to get justice in a system that isn’t broken, that’s working just fine, is to shake the heavens and demand it.

Emblem of Our House is an on-going series about the death of my sister Margaret in 2018, published every Monday here and on Instagram @EmblemofOurHouse.