Life

The Day Our World Stood Still

I gazed out of the foggy window at the towering trees, which became faint blurs as my dad pressed down on the gas pedal. The silence in the car left my brain trying its very best to fill the emptiness. The sound of the tires against the black asphalt street was a lullaby that sent me into a memory that had been buried so deep in my mind, I forgot it had been there. My thoughts floated out of the rental car and drifted far away from my shell of a body that sat there in silence. I closed my eyes and began to dream.

I was five years old and filled with excitement to move into my new bedroom with my two sisters, Nitalia and Aviona. The luminous room was filled with warm yellow rays showing evidence of the approaching spring. The walls were freshly painted a delicate pink, to match the rosy cheeks of the three little girls that would fill the room with secrets, giggles, and sugar plum dreams. I pushed open the stark white wood door with one hand, while my Hello Kitty radio occupied my other, and the pile of three twin beds in the center of the room towered over me. I gently inserted the CD into my favorite toy, and the lyrics of “Mamma Mia” began to float out of the speakers. I carefully climbed on top of the cushiony tower and began my performance. One by one, the rest of my trio, Nitalia and Aviona, came into the bedroom to join me as if I had called their names. With a Wii remote as our microphone, we sang at the top of our lungs and envisioned the crowd going wild after every song. What was once a desolate room in the back of our house quickly became a venue for our best performances and my fondest memories. When you are five years old you don’t understand the importance of simplistic moments like this one, because your innocent mind thinks there will be a million more, and there may very well be. But for me, moments spent with my two sisters were numbered. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have ever stopped singing with them, and I would have squeezed them a little tighter that day.

I was plucked from cloud nine and brought back to earth when the car shifted from running over a pothole. I scanned the car and saw my dad with a strong facade painted across his face, my mom with trails of black mascara running down from her eyes to her chin, and Aviona quietly sitting next to me whimpering to herself. One less person, one less giggle, one less hand to hold. My big brown eyes filled with salty water and I fought every urge I had to blink and release the stream down my face. I dazed out the window, and dug deep into my mind, trying to find a memory of Nitalia and me before trauma shook our world forever. Before all of the nights spent in different hospitals across the country. Before she had trails of bruises up both of her arms from all of the IV’s. Before all of her long brown hair had fallen out as a result of chemotherapy. But I was at a loss. I dug through every mental filing cabinet I had, urgently searching for anything to remind me of her giggle, or the feeling of our hands intertwined, but all I could conjure up was a distant Memphis memory.

By the time I was seven years old, the magic of Christmas had dwindled down. Waking up in my own bed and running with my sisters to the family room to open up the gifts Santa delivered was quickly replaced with waking up in an unfamiliar apartment in the middle of Memphis and slowly walking to the small Christmas tree decorated with store-bought ceramic balls. Eagerly running to the abundance of gifts neatly wrapped and signed “Santa Clause” was replaced with holding Nitalia’s hand and helping her keep her balance as she takes the few yet difficult steps from the bedroom to the living space. The smiles and giggles that once filled the Conti home on Christmas morning were replaced with puffy eyes from crying the night before, and fake smiles that tried their best to hide the true feeling of anguish that was within all of us.

It was almost Christmas day, and we sat in our Memphis apartment, too far from home. My dad gazed out the window, trying to escape from reality for a split second. I hear him call out, “Girls, it’s snowing!” He tried his hardest to sound excited, but his glassy eyes proved otherwise. Aviona and I tore across the apartment, throwing on our coats and boots. We passed by Nitalia, who was snuggled under a mountain of blankets on the couch. Nobody had to say it, we all knew the chemotherapy and other medications had stripped her of her childhood, leaving her unable to play in the snow. Aviona opened the door, and the frigid air shocked our systems as we moved from inside the heat to the falling flurries. A few moments later, we returned inside with a miniature snowman sitting crookedly on a white plate. “We wanted to bring the snow to you” we both exclaim to Nitalia. She couldn’t help but giggle at the sweaty snowman, already losing some height from the heat of the apartment. We stood there and soaked up her laugh and smile until all that was left was a soaking wet plate with some scattered sticks.

The car came to a stop, and with it stopped my reminiscing. No matter how hard I tried to run, the reality of losing her would always catch up to me. A family of five eventually became a broken family of four. My cheeks burned from the frigid air rubbing up against my raw skin from the constant flow of salty tears. Every time I blinked, I was reminded of just a few hours earlier, when I was laying in the small hospital bed with her, surrounded by the monotony of the stark white walls, whispering my final “goodbye” into her ear. What was left of my dwindling innocence left me questioning how someone could be taken away from me as quickly as they were given. My heart was sliced open by the silver lining that I spent the last one and a half years of my life trying so hard to find.

There we were, in another unfamiliar place, with the unfamiliar feeling of losing a sister, a daughter, a best friend. We arrived at the home in New Hope, Pennsylvania as hopeless as we had ever been. Everywhere I looked, there was evidence of her, being a constant reminder of the part of my life I could never get back. The specialty bed my parents bought for her earlier that month lay empty. The wheelchair ramp my dad installed by the front door would never be used. The freshly folded blankets that she never got the chance to cuddle up with on a winter day. Even though Nitalia was not there, the remnants of her remained throughout the house the family of five was supposed to come back to.

January 28, 2011, while everyone else’s lives went on, our’s stopped. We lay there, in the enormous California King bed, amidst the sea of blankets and pillows, with our heavy hearts weighing us down.

The Aftermath
They say time heals all wounds, but here I am nine years later and the pain of missing my big sister is just the same. I am constantly haunted by the idea of her never moving onto college, never going on her first date, and never being called “Aunt Nitalia” by my future children. I am continually reminded of the void in my life where she should be. Just when my past begins to neglect me, I am asked the simple question, “How many siblings do you have?” and I am immediately pulled back to the reality that Aviona and I are missing the third pea in our pod. During an innocent car ride into work, I catch a glimpse of my elementary school, and immediately find myself back in the office, waiting in the prickly woven chair for my panicked mother who had just found out Nitalia was diagnosed with cancer. As soon as life feels the tiniest bit normal, January 28th creeps up on us, and we are reminded that our girl is gone.

Just like the aftermath of a war, my family is left with an incredible loss, battle wounds that will stick with us forever and serve as a reminder of what we went through, and the ongoing memory of the soldier we lost to the battle with brain cancer. I try my absolute hardest to preserve the memory of her – her giggle, her voice, the way she used to laugh so hard and hit me on the arm – but as I become older I can feel it slipping through my fingertips. So I rely on the things she wasn’t able to take with her when she left to bring back the memories I have lost sight of. The thousands of pictures from times I never even knew existed. Her flannel dresses that are a reminder of her sweet vanilla smell. The dusty jar of aquaphor that still sits by her empty bed. And all at once, I can see her again. Feel her again. And it’s like she never left.