Goodbye Linda

A lot has happened in two months. Summer has gone away and fall has come again. I have looked down from half way up a mountain, finding that I was too weak to go all the way to the top. Tim and I celebrated 12 years together. We had a third place brisket. My cousin died.

Right. She was murdered.

Linda was shot to death for no damn good reason except she lived in a bad neighborhood and probably told off the wrong guy.

She was good at that. She and I lived very different lives but I knew that about her.

Where we were concerned, two people could not be more different. Her mother was my father's younger sister. They lived a block over from us when I was little but she and her sister and brothers were all much older than I, so we didn't hang out. My exposure to her was really just at holidays. In her teen years she was a wild child who seemed always to be coming and going, doing drugs, disappearing. She'd drop her kid off with my aunt and be gone. She lived hard. I, on the other hand, lived quietly, conservatively. I got my education and then a master's degree. I did drugs as an experiment at a party once and didn't like them so I never did them again. I married. I went to work. Lived clean. Sooner or later she was just a distant image in an old picture: 14 cousins (missing only the two not yet born) in front of the Christmas tree at our grandmother's house -- she a sort of pretty blonde teen in jeans and a plaid shirt with her arm draped around my brother's shoulders, laughing in to the camera. I am crouched near the bottom of that same photo, hair coiffed, perfect little dress, smiling absently at something off camera, feeling and looking terribly out of place.

I saw her most recently at her mother's funeral although I don't know if I even said anything to her. We hardly knew each other, really.

In life she stayed in her part of town and I stayed in mine. In death we return to the same circle. If not for the accident of parentage, she might have been just another incomplete headline of the news. But she was someone. She was. And I am sad. Because I didn't know her any better than anyone else who saw the story of another shooting on the news. Because I can cry over movies, a good book, a tv show, a sprained wrist -- but I cannot cry for Linda.

And I have 13 more cousins I don't know any better than I knew her.