In Memory of my Sister, The Epitome of Non-conformity

From my wife - it's been a very emotional month this week.

This week I had to do the unthinkable, go to see my younger sister being buried in Virginia. I haven't truly been able to sleep well since I got the news over the phone. She leaves behind five children, a mother, sisters, and a slew of nieces and nephews and cousins and friends. I wrote the following in her honor. She lived in what we thought was a state of needless confusion looking for the answers of life in places we never would have dared to explore. I don't believe that she found her answers there either. I wish for her a peace in the next life that she never seemed to be able to find in this one.

In Memory of my Sister,
The Epitome of Non-conformity

You were born a white daisy in a bouquet of roses
Not ready to conform to the garden but wanting to grow free.
You pushed and pulled through life wishing to experience it
Without the rules and regulations that most of us follow.
And so you experimented with life denying the rest of us
knew what the hell we were talking about.
Maybe we don't.
Maybe we are clueless.
You enveloped us with a spark that few people will ever show,
A fire inside of you that lit a different pathway.
You never stopped to say hello or goodbye, but kept going
to see what was there for you to find, any new discovery.
You left us standing in the darkest of shadows seeing if we
could see your glimmer seeking an unseeable new pathway.
Maybe we were blind.
Maybe we don't understand.
But you left this world and went to another place where I'm
certain that you will not do death like you never did life.
You will search your way through and insist on the peace that
you never found here because you never stop looking, never settle.
Maybe we didn't say goodbye.
Maybe we didn't have to.
Because strangely a piece of you lives in those of us that you touched
with your wild and crazy ways of doing things, my non-conformist.
You grew too quickly and left us much too soon to really be able to see
the world that existed in your eyes that was too painful for us to bear.
Maybe one day we'll understand.
Maybe we we never will.
But we loved you. We love you. That is one thing that will never change.
You were never a disappointment, just the enigma of a life we never solved.

With deepest love,
your sister Pasty