I’ve been feeling ambivalent about my posts again. I have ideas that I love at first and then when it comes to writing them, I just don’t “feel” them at the moment. To combat that feeling, I started looking through my search terms and saw that lately, many people are searching for words for a dying loved one and I realized that this week is the 6th anniversary of when my sister died.

I’ve been seeing search terms such as what to say to your sister who is dying, my sister is dying in hospice, and words to say to my dying sister. It breaks my heart to see these searches because I know why they’re on my blog. And I know the pain they are going through.

Six years later, though, I can honestly say that when I remember my sister, it’s for all the goofy and fun things that we did. And while every once in a while, I get sad when I think of her, those times are far and few between. Instead, I’m telling funny stories or thinking about the books that we shared. So I can honestly share that it gets better.

But, because October 12th is nearly upon us, I share a collection of posts that I wrote while my sister was dying and the posts after she died that helped me to process her death.

My Sister is Dying was is the post that was published on the morning of October 12th, 2015 which was a Monday. She died that evening after her breathing tube was removed. The post is about what I was doing while my sister is in the hospital, and how I am managing to get myself through her illness.

One Year Later, And I Still Miss Her recounted how I’d given up reading my favorite fictional books that I used to share with my sister. For a year, I looked at the books that I’d taken from her house to read to her. One I read, One I never got to read. This post is about how I reconnected to reading a year later.

Missing her was still the theme in I Still Miss My Sister After Three Years. In this post, I write about our love of books, authors, words, and even TV shows. We would devour them and then talk about them for hours.

What to Say When Your Sister is Dying is, perhaps, the post that draws most people in. It specifically speaks to what I did with my sister when she was dying. Since each experience is different (my sister was in an induced coma because of the breathing tube) I also provided some resources including what to do during Covid, ideas from a Hospice center, and a link to a grief journal that I have given to others.

I hope you gain some comfort in reading these posts and I hope you feel the hug that I’m sending you when you need it most.