27|365
Billy, 1981
You were the alpha male in our little pack, the boyfriend of my best friend. You had a winning smile and spectacular self-confidence. I lost touch with you when I went to a different school in sixth grade, and only heard about you through the grapevine after that. After celebrating a basketball victory one night — I think you had just graduated from high school — you caught a ride home in the wrong car, which turned out to be a horrifyingly fatal mistake.
28|365
Roddy, 1982
You were my friend’s older brother, and everyone idolized you. You were smart, good-looking, athletic, funny, well liked. I often imagine you on that two-lane highway late at night driving up to your family’s cottage. You were all of eighteen and must certainly have been driving too fast, oblivious to the danger that cut short your brilliant life.
29|365
Jamie, 1988
We went to school together, but since you were a couple of years older, we were never really contemporaries until we were in our twenties. You invited me to a boxer shorts party you were having, and I was one of the few people who actually showed up in costume. You died a horrible death: golf course, summer storm, bolt of lightning. They said it entered your body through your mouth.
30|365
Joey, 1990
You were the last of eight children, and you had that even-tempered, amiable nature youngest siblings seem to have. You were more composed than your crazy older brothers, more centered. One summer day when you were in your early twenties you went out on your sailboard and never returned. They found the board, Joey, but they never found you.
31|365
Allison, 1993
My sister, you went like these others — much too early. You had the most generous spirit I have ever known, but you also expected so much from others — usually more than they could deliver. I miss you every single day, but especially on holidays, which you loved the way a child does. I wish so much you could have known my children.
32|365
Kate, 1999
Most heartbreaking of all, perhaps, because you were only six when you died, and you had spent a third of your life sick. You thought of yourself as brave, and you were; you were a spitfire. You had a special friendship with one of the older boys on our street and he used to walk you up to the store for an ice cream. I think about you frequently, what you might have been, the girl you would have grown into.
33|365
Jennifer, 2001
I’m not sure when I saw you last, but we had to have been teenagers. And I’m not sure exactly when you died, but I know it was breast cancer and that you left behind young children. You were my younger sister’s best friend growing up. I remember your big, toothy smile, so much like your mother’s, and how at the end of one summer you suddenly emerged with this cute little figure that I envied.
34|365
Allan, 1961
I never knew you, and in fact, if you had lived, I would never have been born. You were my mother’s first husband, and you died so unexpectedly of a heart attack at 33. She was pregnant and you were building your house together. She described for me the moment when true, pure grief leveled her: she pulled back the shower curtain and saw your dark curly hairs clinging to the porcelain from your last shower.
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