Honoring Lisa: Bearing Witness to an Unfinished Story
Today marks Lisa’s birthday—the first since her passing, and with that, a new kind of emptiness. This day has actually brought pain for many years. I would have loved to have greeted this day with a phone call, a laugh, the usual sibling banter exchanged at a safe distance. But it was always difficult with Lisa. I had failed to be there when she most wanted or needed me, and then had tried, unsuccessfully, to help her at times when she was unable to receive it, leading to estrangement. But her absence now is singular—an empty space at the table and an unfinished story whose last pages arrived before we were ready.
Writing about Lisa—my sister, my “younger sister” in my trilogy—was always complicated terrain. It was her direct request that she not be included in my book. “You stole my idea…” she said when I told her I was writing my story. “...I told you I wanted to write a book about what happened”. So I honored that promise, though deep down I knew—perhaps we both knew—that her book would likely never be written. Lisa couldn’t slow down long enough to deeply reflect on what actually happened to her in our turbulent childhood. She carried her story like so many do: always moving, always working, never quite pausing for the reckoning required by the page. Still, I kept my word. In the trilogy, I painted outlines, never giving her name—just “my younger sister”—leaving space for a silence she’d chosen, and a voice that, heartbreakingly, never got to rise.
The Gravity and the Distance
Lisa was, quite simply, beautiful—inside and out. People were drawn to her. She could command a room and then, moments later, disappear from it emotionally. If there was a magnet in her soul, it was one continually scrambled by the fields of her past. Helpers flocked to her, friends and strangers alike trying to offer something: stability, respite, love. But connection, for Lisa, lived on the other side of an invisible barrier—always desired, rarely obtained.
Our father, for his part, worked. He worked and he worked and then he worked more. In public, he could be sociable, surrounded by friends, resembling to all the world a well-connected pillar. But with us, his own children, there was always a kind of void he could not cross. Decades earlier, he had kidnapped us from our mother’s custody; he did it, he would say, to protect us—yet the motive, however good, could not repair the emotional pain that single act introduced. The scar ran deepest for Lisa. She was the one who most needed the kind of connection our father couldn’t—or perhaps wouldn’t—provide.
Always in Motion—Rarely at Rest
Lisa was nothing if not industrious—she tried, constantly. She worked hard at everything she did and innovated in her own way to survive. She was always in motion, perhaps because to stop would mean to allow her own story to catch up with her. Some of her self-medication was constructive: she poured herself into hobbies, crafts, making and selling jewelry, studying astrology, burning CD’s of her favorite songs, and eventually, with characteristic determination, buying a plot of land and building her own house. This was her way of staying afloat—purpose and productivity as a kind of life raft.
But the emptiness in human connection lingered. Even as she surrounded herself with people, the relationships didn’t always settle into lasting intimacy. There was, as for many, a darker edge—a history of illegal self-medication. Lisa paid a price for this, including a felony conviction on drug charges. Yet, even here, her story defies easy summary: despite setbacks that would have leveled most, she worked her way up to leave an inheritance for her nieces and nephews—a testament to her stubborn hope that, if she could not rewrite her own story, she could influence those chapters yet to be lived by others.
Lisa herself, through all the storms, managed to remain luminous. I’m actually not sure of the total number of marriages she had, though I officiated at one—back in the days when I was still a practicing minister. Throughout her lifetime, love and companionship returned to her again and again. But even these bright ties were rarely simple or lasting; the undertow of her life seemed always close behind.
Love That Couldn’t Cross the Divide
As siblings, we often orbited more than intersected. My memories of Lisa are full of attempts—mine, our father’s, her friends’—to reach her, to throw her a lifeline. But none of us had the perfect key to the locked places where her pain resided. Each of us learned, in our way, the limits of what we could give or receive. Lisa wanted love; she wanted to heal. If her instinct for motion kept her from running aground, it also kept her from ever quite settling into the safety for which we all hoped.
Even with conviction in her past, her generosity and magnetic appeal never waned. She could make you laugh until you cried and then leave you wondering if you’d ever really known her at all. I replay those moments now—her sharp wit, her flashes of warmth, her ability to light up or darken a room—understanding, finally, that bearing witness to her life as it was, not as we wish it had been, is its own kind of tribute.
The Ache of Unfinished Stories
Lisa’s passing stunned us into silence. A motorcycle ride home from work. A driver failing to yield—the universe giving no explanations, except the charge against that driver in the initial police report. Five months later we’re all still waiting for the initial hearing to take place.
The story whose resolution was snatched from us, leaving behind only questions and the taste of regrets. For me, and for all who loved her, the grief isn’t just for her absence. It’s for the fact that so much remains unfinished: the book she never wrote, the conversations that never reached the place where healing could happen, the apologies that now echo into the void. Lisa once asked me—to my face—not to tell her story for her. In honoring that, I always hoped she’d find her own chance. Today, I take up the responsibility not to rewrite her past, but to remember her as she truly was: beautiful, flawed, struggling, surviving, and—miraculously, defiantly—still loving, even from a distance.
What Remains: A Gentle Invitation
If there is a call here, it’s less a moral and more a plea—to love the complicated, unfinished stories among us as fiercely as we can. Let’s honor those for whom the ending hasn’t resolved into triumph, whose journeys remain marked as much by longing as by legacy. Let’s do it without gloss, but with the kind of tenderness that recognizes the courage it takes simply to stay afloat in this world.
In the quiet that follows Lisa’s birthday, I learn again that love is not always received, or even reciprocated, but that does nothing to diminish its worth. In honoring Lisa—by speaking her name, and owning both the ache and affection that attend her memory—I keep her light refracted through memory, never letting it vanish into silence.
If you read this and carry your own hard, unfinished love stories, know you are not alone. Even when it’s difficult, reflection itself is a quiet act of love. Share it. Sit with it. Let that be a way of keeping those we miss present, even as our hearts learn to hold both the joy and the sorrow of their living.
Candle’s Glow
Lisa’s gravity is still felt even now. Birthdays do not heal us, nor does writing. Time is less a medicine than a companion in grief. But if speaking her name today can grant her one more moment in the sun—complex, beautiful, broken, beloved—then that is enough.
Happy birthday, Lisa. May your story, with all its rough and radiant edges, shine a light for those of us still learning how to love honestly, especially where and when it’s hardest.
With love, Wade
If there’s a phrase, vignette, or additional detail you’d like further emphasized, or if any part of Lisa’s story needs refinement, feel free to share. I’m here to help you continue shaping this tribute until it feels wholly true to her and you.
