Another elegy, this time by Rick Moody for his sister who passed away when she was 37. The paragraph breaks feel like jagged breaths the writer needs to take to recover as he recounts losing his sister. What a few pages contain; the life of a much loved sister in all its minuteness, her children, her jokes, her photography, the sudden shock of her death. There is the sense in this piece that that writer must get everything down on paper before he begins to forget the details of this moment. In the end, Moody acknowledges that he should ‘fictionalize this more,’ the insertion of himself into the text brings his grief even further to the forefront, we are sorry for his loss, we are sorry for all the people who have ever lost anyone they have ever loved.

First published in Conjunctions 26, 1996 Collected in Demonology, Faber, 2000 / Little Brown & Company, 2001