Why Did You Leave Us, Carly? I Ask Her in Prayer

LOVE memoir

I don’t really know when the exact moment was when I found out. It seemed like I always knew. My mom had had three children already, my older sister and brothers: Ryan, Mandy, and Nathan. My newborn sister was a brunette with big blue eyes, my mother told me. She was chubby and was born with a smile planted on her face. I wasn’t born yet, but it felt like I was in the exact room when it happened. Remembering this time period in my sister’s young life, I feel as if I were the doctor or my mother watching her. Carly wasn’t much of a nuisance to the living. She was a silent, peaceful summer. She was calm, but her older siblings weren’t about the situation. Nathan, the youngest of the three older siblings, wasn’t positively aware of his surroundings. At the time, he was only two years of age. “Why did you leave us, Carly?” I ask her in prayer. Carly wouldn’t wake up. She lie in her crib, her pink decorated crib, asleep forever. My mom was torn. My dad was never the same. Crying with my parents, my sister and brothers wanted to do everything they could to help my parents, or even better, help Carly. My mom always said that if Carly had lived Collin and I wouldn’t be living here today, so in a way, we thank her. In our beds every night, we thank her for our lives. But Collin and I wonder what it would be like to have another older sister. Carolynn Renee McCage died at the age of about three months of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). She would have been the fourth gift from God to join this family. Praying for her life in the heavens, I continue my life similar to what she would have lived on this place.