Originally published in the True Girl Anthology September 2019. Download or order your copy here.

I wanted to be pretty that day. I had this image in my head of looking striking in my grief, like the woman wearing the black netting over her face attached to that impossibly tiny cap on the right side of her head, her strong jaw accented by the red lipstick carefully applied.

Looking back on the one photo we have of the day we held my sister’s funeral, I can see I was not elegantly grieving. My hair didn’t cooperate as it poofed out around my neck and flattened at my skull, my curls lost to frizz. I was wearing the glasses I’ve had for the past ten years since my prescription hasn’t changed much and I’d rather spend the little money I do have on contacts instead of a new pair. I’ve always been convinced of that 1990s trope, that wearing glasses makes a girl ugly, and I haven’t been able to shake it, even as I age well into my 30s. I wasn’t able to get contacts in time, and I was stuck with my glasses and an irrational anger about it. I’d never figured out how to wear makeup, so I wasn’t wearing any. I was slouching, and my face, riddled with stress-induced pimples, held a weird smile–a smile born out of grief, half there, forced, because one smiles for pictures.

That dark day, my mother held the photo of our sister, Margaret, and the rest of us surrounded her in front of the church — half of us unsmiling, half of us smiling (that’s what you do for pictures). Three boys, four girls (now), two nephews, one niece, three mothers, one grandmother.

Margaret was gone.

I’d always believed. Out of the eight of us, I was the only one left who still held onto faith in god as we all survived our childhood. We had angry parents, regular beatings, often faced starvation, few clothes, one bathroom for ten people. There were eight of us kids then, and after my mother finally divorced my father and he became an atheist in the aftermath, I was the only one who held onto faith.

Yet I had never experienced a moment of transformation, a before and after. I’d always believed, wrestling with it when I was 12, saying the sinner’s prayer at school, going back into class and looking around, wondering if anyone else at the private, Baptist school I attended saw a difference in me after I murmured some words.

When I was 15, struggling with depression and despair, I considered suicide, wanting to not be in pain anymore. I held the responsibility for my youngest siblings, Margaret included, I was exhausted from constantly trying to survive the wrath of not only my parents, but my siblings (my brother once held a chair up in the air and threatened to hit me with it. I stood there and told him to go ahead.), and no one believed me when I tried to talk about what happened in our house.

My father has the gift of a silver tongue with blackout rages–in one moment, choking one of his children, and then in the next minute, talking to police officers about how teenagers are so out of control these days. You know how they lie. They did know, they assured him.

It was exhausting.

I was so tired.

Everyone was in danger all the time, and I didn’t know how to keep them safe. I’d given up on trying to keep myself safe. I’d accepted by then that no one loved me, and I didn’t matter.

But even as I thought about how I would end it — a razor to the wrists in a warm bath, probably — the thought that intruded was my youngest sister, who was then three years old, being the one to find me. There was no clear heavenly intrusion, no gentle voice, no warm presence. I simply decided that I would accept that there was a purpose in my life, and I would see that through and accept that God did exist, or that I would reject faith entirely, reject faith, and die. If not immediately, if not through my own hands, then a spiritual death leading to hell.

That’s in the Bible. Romans 6:23. “The wages of sin is death.”

I wrestled again at 23 when I found myself leaving an oppressive church in New York City. Church — was it a church? This group of people showed up again when Margaret died, decided to broadcast intimate details of her death on a Facebook live video. I was in their community for about two years, and there was no love there, just control. Just mayhem. Corrections on what you said, what you wore, who you spent your time with. When they removed the video and messaged my older sister an apology, it was condescending and canned language, with an odd choice of words emphasized through capitalization, as though she were a child. “I thought it was a nice apology,” she said.

And then once more at 27, when I thought I did everything right, I thought I married a Christian man, and what I thought was his love for me turned immediately into his hatred of me, and he started hurting me. I escaped early on from that marriage. We were barely married for a year and a half, which included a few months of separation. Most women don’t escape, don’t survive. Most women stay for 10, 15, 20, 30 years, because so many churches push that divorce is evil, a sin, forgive the sinner, even at the expense of a woman’s life. “He was always so nice,” they say of the man who choked his wife to death, who burned their house down with her in it, who shot her and their three kids.

They said that of my father, too. Except he knew just when to stop, how not to leave physical marks or scars.

I was 31 when Margaret died. I remember that morning, a Thursday. I had work to do, but I was not feeling very motivated. It had taken such a long time to grieve and recover from my marriage. In a church filled with happy, young couples and their hoards of children, I felt tainted, isolated, alone. I thought I’d done what I was supposed to do. If they were hashtag blessed, what was I?

I’d just started pulling my life together. I had writing clients, I was working on a farm, learning how to train dogs. It was hard, physical work, but it got me away from a computer and my own dark thoughts. I also was assisting with classes, taking on more management responsibilities. I had time to pursue my writing. I had just taught my first dog training class by myself. It was all starting to come together. I was taking my time that morning, and then I got a message from my youngest sister. Her language was dramatic, but it was always dramatic. I would get back to her, I decided, standing in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. 

Then I got a phone call. Then another one.

“Margaret’s gone,” my sister said, her words struggling through tears.

“Where did she go?” I asked. I was prepared to go to battle, to fight whomever I needed to get her back.

When I finally did understand and hung up the phone, my knees gave out, and I fell, catching myself on the bathroom sink.

She was gone.

The day of the funeral, I tried my best to look pretty. I’d spent more than I should have on an outfit, including shoes, charging my credit card. I hadn’t driven the three hours to my mother’s house prepared for a funeral. It was a dark day, and we all did our best to feel at least a little bit in control. If we couldn’t change the fact that our sister was dead, we could at least choose if we wanted to wear a dress or pants. I wanted to be driven there, even though the church was only a few minutes down the road, and I climbed into the car with my sister’s friend, next to the giant photo of my beautiful sister, gone too soon. 

Then I noticed my mother wandering around, her keys in her hand, and I crawled back out and took the keys from her. We arrived at the church, just down the road from her house, just a little further from where it had happened, my mother leaned over to me and asked, “Do you smell alcohol?”

“No,” I said. 

“Good,” she said. “Because I just took a shot.”

At the church, I felt like I was supposed to comfort other people, and I didn’t want to make it okay for them. I also didn’t want anyone to comfort me. It all felt alien, unreal. I didn’t have any words to say, but other people, complete strangers, definitely did.

I listened to them offering their empty words, saying she was in a better place. But if my faith was right, and the bible to be believed, I knew she wasn’t, and that’s what broke me that day.

My faith slipped away as I sat in the memorial service, deadened emotionally, unable to process, hearing christians claim that she was in a better place, she was with god now. It vanished, following the empty words of others, punctured by my grief.

I knew what they said wasn’t true, because I knew what the bible said. It says “seek and ye shall find.” That’s Matthew 7:7–8. “Knock, and the door will be opened.”

For years, Margaret sought. We had many, many conversations about faith. She asked carefully thoughtful questions. A few years ago, she told me, “I tried to believe like you and mom. I just can’t.”

There was hope, I had decided then. If she can’t believe right now, then it’s just not time yet. God will reveal himself to her when it’s time. Jeremiah 24:7. “I’ll give them a heart to know me.” Ezekiel 11:19. “ I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh.” Ezekiel 36:25-27. “I will give you a new heart.” John 6:44. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them.”

I loved her so much. I waited for that time — I spent hours with her, listened to her stories, listened to her pain, her grief. I answered her questions when she asked me, waiting for god to show up and reveal himself to her when it was time.

And that was the biggest thing I struggled with, when I believed. What exactly were the promises of god? Peace? I had anxiety for as long as I could remember. I waited, I prayed, I pursued, I believed, and that anxiety never went away. In fact, especially after my divorce and a move to New Jersey, it got worse.

What were the promises of god?

I knew I wasn’t worth anything, that I didn’t deserve anything. I could recover from a bad marriage, and realize that maybe there was a plan there all along. Maybe I still had a purpose. I almost lost my faith after my divorce, but I didn’t. I understood losing a child, or a spouse, a believing sibling. There was a lesson, perhaps, there. A testimony to others. Maybe it’s profound grief, but god called them away, to heaven, and those families will be reunited. Justice after death made sense, too. I’d always felt like justice wasn’t possible on earth, here, now. The system was so broken. But everything would be made right.

I could explain everything away, hold on to those slippery promises, until she died.

Grieving manifests as a strange thing. I knew that it would take a year, a window that still holds months to complete. Maybe my faith will come back. Perhaps.

All I know right now is that god never answered her knock, and she was gone.

Just like that, my faith was gone, too.