Sometimes It's Just Too Late

I can’t sleep, which is not uncommon. I am trying to remember what it was like having a niece the same age as I. She was only a few months younger and her brother was a few months older, their father, my brother, was almost three decades older. He wasn’t a real good provider nor was he a really good father; consequently, they spent a lot of time living with us in our overcrowded house and being supported by my mother.

There were five of us around the same age, my older brother, not their father, my nephew, me, my niece, and my baby sister. I was the one in charge of the two younger girls. Imagine, a four year old in charge of another four year old and a two year old. How funny.

We played for hours in the mud, mud we made after taking a bath in the washtub beside the house. I taught her and my younger sister how to mold mudpies into tuna cans and how to sift the dry dirt through an old screen. It was fun, we never watched television in those days, we played outside until it was too dark to see, then we played in the bedroom with our one and only doll. The three of us fought over who was going to hold the baby doll.

She was really tiny, my niece, and while she lived in the same poverty that we lived in, her mother could sew and spent a lot of time making her really cute dresses, something my younger sister nor I had the advantage of owning. We, more my younger sister than I, were jealous of her wardrobe and the fact that she, after they moved away, was allowed to take ballet lessons and piano lessons, something our mother could never afford. But, when we were together, the differences melted and we were three peas in a pod with my brother and nephew always on the border of our play, trying to aggravate us by throwing rocks or as we got older insults our way.

My niece died; the truth is yesterday, her landlord found her body. He called her children and until the autopsy report clears, we all are assuming she took an overdose, not accidental it seems. Her funeral will be next week and my sisters and my brother, not her father but the aggravating one, are going to travel to her state and city for her funeral.

I tried to remember the last time that I spoke to her and can’t, it’s been that long. Why, I am not sure, maybe it’s because we grew up and went our separate ways, two different life styles with vastly different priorities and that doesn’t make it right. So, I no longer have a niece my age, in fact, I really never did, she was more like a sister that came for visits and sometimes stayed for longer times than others, so I am now feeling the pain of losing her and wishing that I had called her Christmas day or something.