Eighteen

Today is very much like it was twelve years ago, warm but not hot and cool in the shade, the sky a kind of clear you don’t often get in Cleveland.  It felt that way from dawn, and when I went back to check the weather for June 7, 2014, which is a thing you can so easily do now, the feeling was validated.

I find myself thinking less of that day and more of the day of her funeral.  Sitting with my sister and father, giving them contingency instructions.  The masses of people.  The words I wish I’d thought to add.  The limo ride through so many road construction zones.  The thud of earth on urn, mourner after mourner adding a few more clods to the slowly filling grave.  Clinging to Kat as we sobbed.  All of them almost like things I saw in a movie once, and also absolutely nothing like that.

This would be her adulthood.  No longer a child, finally, on the schedule that should have been kept.  She most likely would have graduated high school a couple of weeks ago, unless the spark in her drove her to graduate a year early, or drove her to so much juvenile mischief that she ended up a year behind.  Even in the latter case, I don’t think she would have been destructive, but I can’t be sure of that.  She never got close to the age where kids learn how to be cruel, let alone the later age where they learn why they shouldn’t be.  Well, most of them do; the exceptions go on to run bad governments.

This transition from phantom childhood to phantom adulthood feels like it could be a transition for us as well.  Every year we’ve gone as a family to the grave on the day, parents and children and lately grandchildren.  Perhaps, in years to come, we won’t be as bound to the exact day.  Maybe we’ll each go on our own, or in smaller groups.  Maybe not.  I don’t know.  But this is the year we would have started to let her go, had we not been forced to do so twelve years early, to let her spread her wings and find her way.  It’s possible that we will start to do the same.  We’ve already begun to talk about it, a little bit.

For this year, at any rate, we all went as a family on the day.  Her big sister’s little one had picked a cellophane spinner to decorate the grave, and when we stuck it into the earth at the top edge of the stone, the sun used it to cast glowing purple patches across her name.  Sometimes the breeze would slow and leave the spinner in just the right orientation to turn the purple into a butterfly.

The Rebecca we knew would have delighted at that.  The today’s Rebecca we never got to know probably would have rolled her eyes over it, but I like to think she still would have found it delightful.

• Eighteen was published on Sunday, June 7th, 2026.
• It was assigned to the Rebecca category.
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