Old People

I just want to call you and ask you how you are, to catch you up on my life and maybe bug you a little to quit smoking/clean up/get back in school/take care of your health/whatever else I see that needs fixing, because that is what sisters do.

But I can't call you anymore. I can never call you again.

I keep thinking about old people. They talk about families that are mostly dead, siblings they outlive by decades, even, people who died before color television was invented. I remember being struck by the tears in one octogenarian's eyes when she talked about her brother who died young of a disease we cure with penicillin nowadays; I felt sad for her, but I didn't really understand how someone who had disappeared from her life so many decades ago could still be painful to think about.

Now I think about myself at eighty, telling some other young kid who doesn't get it about my brother who died fifty years ago when we had to fight cancer with radiation and chemo and too many people lost the battle. And I know that kid will be fixated on what life must have been like, back in my day, and maybe a little uncomfortable with the tears in my eyes as I remember my brother who died way too young. They won't get it, either.

I get it. Fifty years from now, I will probably still get the urge to pick up the phone and call you, and it will still take my breath away a little when I remind myself for the billionth time that a phone is not powerful enough to cross the line that's between us now.