She often liked to say these words,  

an expression that made us smile:  

“My yardstick is getting shorter.”  

Such a great sense of humour,  

always the life of the party. 

But underneath a dark streak,  

belying buried sadness and sorrow. 

In her youth, a bit of a rebel  

who preferred the wrong path. 

Entering her teens, she liked to say: 

“I don’t want to live past 39!”  

as she smoked up a storm,  

blowing swirling smoke rings  

out of her bedroom window. 

Then sometimes our sister brooded,  

as she sat in her darkened room:  

The air thick with smoke and gloom.  

Barely in high school, then, 

an abrupt and early departure:  

She was going to have a baby, but  

the father was nowhere in sight.  

It was the late 1960s; 

The talk of the town. 

Mom and Dad were resolute 

and stood by their eldest daughter.  

When a baby girl was born; 

Her presence gave the family  

an entirely new lease on life.

Years flickered past 

in the blink of an eye… 

Who was to know that the baby girl

would not live long past four decades? 

And less than ten years later, 

her mother, my sister, suddenly  

left us, too. 

What was my sister thinking that day, 

acting as if it were just like any other? 

But it wasn’t; it was the polar opposite.  

Perhaps a reaching back to the past, 

dealing with unsettling truths, 

as my sister departed Dodge

forever. Yes, dearsister, your

yardstick  

was getting shorter. 

But you were the one who shortened it forever.