“TODAY IS A DAY OF SADNESS AND MOURNING,” RABBI Bernstein intoned. “Our dear Talley is gone, at the tender age of twenty-two. She left us with heartbreak. She left us with frustration. She left us all yearning for more time with her. And she left us with over two decades of memories. That’s why we are all here today—to remember Talley. She was the cherished daughter of Garrett and the late Dana Weber, and the adoring sister of Sloane, who you’ll hear from in a few minutes.”
I was at my sister’s memorial service. It was a Monday. Talley had been declared dead eighty-seven hours earlier. Eighty-seven hours and seventeen minutes. Which was just eight hours and forty-three minutes shy of exactly four days.
If you’d told me four days ago that this is where I’d be, sitting in the front pew of the Beth Shalom Synagogue, staring at my sister’s coffin—my sister’s coffin—I wouldn’t have believed you.
If you’d told me four days ago, I would’ve done things so differently, and there wouldn’t be a reason for me to be here now.
It had been Rabbi Bernstein’s suggestion that I speak at the service, and tell the other mourners things about my sister’s life that perhaps they hadn’t ever known. At first when he said it, I’d thought, Okay, I can do that.
But when Rabbi Bernstein left and I sat down to write what would arguably be the most important thing I’d ever written in my life, I had total writer’s block. Dr. Lee often said that there’s no such thing as writer’s block: “There’s always something to say,” she’d told our class. “You might not know exactly how to say it, but you can certainly start by saying it badly. Too many stories don’t get written because their writers get stuck on how best to tell them. But a story doesn’t have value to others while it’s cooped up inside you. It only has value if you write it down. My advice is to give yourself permission to write a completely vomitous first draft. I’ll bet there’ll be some diamonds buried in there, and when you revise, you can keep an eye out for what sparkles. But you won’t have anything to work with till you get that first draft down.”
There were so many things about Talley swirling in my head, I didn’t know where to start. She was so obsessed with dolphins that she probably knew more facts about them than your average marine biologist. She won the spelling award every single year she was in elementary school. She could convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in her head, and vice versa. She saved up a year’s worth of allowance to buy me an American Girl doll for my sixth birthday. She’d go to the mall with the express purpose of giving compliments to strangers: “I love your hair” or “That sweater looks great on you.” I wanted to be like her. I tried to be. But I never was, not entirely. I’d never be as good as Talley. Writing about her wasn’t like writing a story. She couldn’t be confined to the page. That was the problem.
Before it was my turn to speak, Tess Nyland got up. Tess had been on the Golden Valley High cheerleading squad with Talley. She read from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, a book I’d found on Talley’s shelf when I’d gone looking for Ulysses. Tess read from a section that Talley had underlined: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
My sorrow over losing Talley had excavated me down to the core. There was no way all the carved-out spaces would ever be filled with joy. I was only seventeen years old. Presumably I had a lot of life ahead of me. But how could I ever have another day of pure joy, without Talley in the world?
Tess finished and it was my turn. I stood and walked to the podium, feeling the lump in my throat, too big to swallow, and the squeeze of shoes that were too tight on me—they were Talley’s shoes. The speech I’d written was folded in my palm. I clutched it and gazed out at the audience. Every face looked blurred, except for one. Our across-the-street neighbor, Sara Gettering, sitting about a dozen rows back. She was short and rail-thin. Her gray hair was perpetually pulled back into a severe bun, and her glasses made her eyes look enlarged to twice the usual size. We’d always called her by her first and last name. Like “Sara Gettering said you were playing ball in the front yard and you almost hit her car” or “Sara Gettering says we’re not allowed to draw hopscotch on the sidewalk.” I wondered why Sara Gettering was the one in crystal-clear focus; maybe because it was shocking that she, of all people, had come to pay respects to Talley.
I began unfolding the piece of paper in my hand. The last time I’d unfolded a piece of paper, it’d been Talley’s list. I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about Sara Gettering showing up for Talley’s funeral, and one of the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.
More pie.
I kept my partially folded speech in my hand, and started speaking without it. “Once when I was about nine, I told Talley I wanted to make an apple pie. I hoped she’d take me to the grocery store for ingredients. But she told me to wait in my room for a few minutes, and when she came to get me, she handed me the first clue in a scavenger hunt. I went all around our house, then our backyard, then our front yard. The second to last clue said, ‘Put words in my mouth and they’ll be taken away.’ That took me a while, but I finally figured out she meant the mailbox. I opened it up and there was the last clue, which was a math problem. The solution turned out to be our neighbor’s address. This neighbor—I’ll call her Mrs. X—she had an apple tree in her yard. You need apples to make apple pie, obviously. Mrs. X lived alone, and Talley assured me she had plenty to share. But Mrs. X was the kind of person who really scared little kids. I told Talley, ‘I can’t go ask her for apples.’ Talley said, ‘Don’t ask for permission; ask for forgiveness.’ She explained that was her life philosophy. That was the phrase she used: life philosophy. If you asked adults for things, she told me, they’d likely tell you no because they didn’t think you could handle something on your own. So the best thing to do, she said, was just go for it. If you mess up, then you can say sorry.”
My eyes were trained on Sara Gettering as I went on with the story, how we’d snuck across the street onto her property. We were only there for a couple minutes before she burst out the front door. She was waving a long wooden spatula, and I was convinced she intended to spank us with it. I let go of the apples I was holding and they fell to the ground: thud, thud, thud, thud. Talley began apologizing right away. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” she said. “Please forgive me, and please don’t be mad at my sister at all. She’s an innocent bystander.”
“An innocent bystander?” Sara Gettering asked. “What about my poor apples?”
I looked down at the apples, bruised on the ground. “Sorry,” I whispered.
Talley grabbed my hand and pulled me across the street, Sara Gettering yelling behind us all the while. We slammed into our house, and Talley leaned against the closed door, doubled over. She was laughing so hard that tears pricked the corners of her eyes. “You asked the apples for forgiveness,” she said, shaking her head. “You asked APPLES for FORGIVENESS!”
“Well,” I said, and I could feel my cheeks heating up to the color of overripe crab apples. “They got bruised when I dropped them, and Mrs. Gettering said so.”
“Oh, Sloaners,” my sister said. She took a deep breath and stepped right up close to me. “I love you so much. We’ll get you some more pie.”
More pie.
There it was.
“Being Talley’s sister was my best thing, my greatest adventure,” I told the mourners who’d gathered at her memorial service, including Sara Gettering. “I can’t believe the adventure is over. That’s all I wanted to say.”