LikeBtn

Saturday, April 20, 2019

R - Raspberry #AtoZChallenge

My A to Z Challenge: Micro fiction, using 300 words or less, inspired by selected words along with a photo for inspiration. The words were chosen in reverse order from this lesson plan page.
(For example, for the letter A it was the 26th word on the list, for Z it was the 1st word on the list)



I stared at the old photo of my younger sister, Samantha. I remembered the day I took it with my brand new, to me, Kodak Brownie. I asked Sam to pose for a photo and this is what she did. Being six years older and thus, I thought, wiser, I became mom and told her, "If you don't stop making faces, it's going to freeze like that." She stuck out her tongue again and proceeded to make a loud raspberry sound.

I set the photo aside and shuffled through the rest of the pictures chronicling my life. As I got older, the photos got fewer and fewer. Other interests came and went. College, marriage, divorce, re-marriage, children, another divorce. We lost touch for several years. She fell in with a rough crowd for a while, adverse to any personal advice.

She'd lived a hard life of her own choosing and ended up alienating family and friends. By the time she was thirty-five, she looked fifty-five. As my dad used to say, she looked like she'd been ridden hard and put up wet. I never understood the expression until I worked with our horses.

I flipped back to the first photo and looked at the back. I had written "Sister Samantha 1976". She had scrawled underneath, "My face isn't gonna freeze this way."

When water dropped onto the back of the picture, I realized I was crying. Crying for my sister Sam who had been found dead after a massive heart attack. Her facial features had been distorted from the pain she must have suffered before she succumbed. I was the one that ID'd her.

It was only now that I realized her facial contortions at the time of death meant it had frozen that way.


20 comments:

  1. My goodness, what a sorry tale of decline then agonising mortality. A sensitively written piece Donna.

    My A-Z of Children's Stories

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wonderfully written, Donna. I've heard (possibly said) that phrase before.

    Janet’s Smiles

    ReplyDelete
  3. Your sister's comment on the back of the photo suggests she had a sense of humor as a child. That is a good memory to help counter her later life. As for raspberries, I love the giggles of babies when they receive raspberry blows on their tummies.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Such a touching story! It feels especially more painful if we are unable to help the person going into a decline..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This type of thing touches too many families today. So sad...

      Delete
  5. Wow. Powerful! makes you think about how the world views us at any given moment.

    ReplyDelete
  6. That felt so real. The picture you found looks a lot like some of my sisters, including the one that has alienated the family. - Erin (http://www.erinpenn.com/blog/)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It hits many of us close to home....so sad. Thanks for stopping by!

      Delete
  7. This is hard hitting stuff. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn in life is that you can't help people who don't want to be helped.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Donna,

    Oh that's soooo sad! I'm telling you I'm seeing some of this stuff in my life through others and it's heart wrenching how someone can give their life over to such horribleness. I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup on day that read: Shoot Your Local Heroin Dealer. I thought 'WOW!" but just days following that I learned of someone I love dearly had two experiences with death in a short period of time. Thankfully revived but scary all the same. My thought was next time she might not be so fortunate and pray that God gives her the will to stay clean. Thanks for sharing!

    A2Z Little Mermaid art sketch series with 'Ray-Ray'

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Cathy. This type of thing has hit so many families.

      Delete
  9. How sad. I do see a lesson in this though. I don't smile a lot either. "A hard life of her own choosing" sounds difficult to imagine. Who would choose a hard life? I always thought that circumstances dictate these things. It's only recently that I learned it's not necessarily so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Definitely not an easy life...too many of us have had someone like this cross our paths. So sad...

      Delete
  10. Felt sad when I read this post, sometimes its not easy to understand another person's choices....sensitive post.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.