Sometimes I wonder if everything would have been different if my dad hadn’t d.i.ed that spring morning. I was only six, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Dad was making pancakes—his Sunday special. He always shaped them into funny faces that made me giggle. Mom was setting the table, humming some tune I can’t remember anymore. The smell of syrup and coffee floated through the kitchen like a memory even then, sweet and warm.
Then the phone rang.
I remember Dad’s face changing, brow furrowing as he picked up. A second later, the spatula clattered to the floor. He never finished those pancakes. There was a car a.c.cident on the highway. My grandfather had d.i.ed. My father left the house without his wallet, without his shoes. He just ran out.
He never came back.
A truck driver, half asleep, veered into the wrong lane. My father was just trying to get to the hospital where his dad had been taken. He never made it. It was raining that day, the kind of rain that feels permanent. After that, everything started to unravel.
Mom changed. At first, it was just a dullness in her eyes, a grief I couldn’t name at the time. Then came the anger—simmering, quiet, like a pot that never boils over but always threatens to. I think she needed someone to blame. And somehow, that ended up being me.
And then there was Evan.
My younger brother, born half a year after our father d.i.ed. He never met our father. He grew up in a house that had already started falling apart. But unlike me, he was adored.
Mom doted on him, gave him everything—every toy, every indulgence. If he cried, she dropped everything. If I cried, I was told to stop being dramatic.
I tried to be good. I studied hard, got straight A’s, won spelling bees, played the violin. But nothing I did ever got the same smile Evan could get by just walking into the room. “Why can’t you be more like Evan?” she’d say, as if I hadn’t been trying my entire life to be seen.
It wasn’t until college that I really started to pull away. I got into a good school out of state, and I didn’t come back for the summers. I worked, took extra classes. I met people who told me I was smart, kind, even funny. It felt like learning a new language—one where I finally understood how to say “I matter.”
Mom never came to graduation. She sent a card with Evan’s handwriting inside: “Good job, sis.” I didn’t even get a phone call.
Years passed. I built my life brick by brick, carefully and quietly. I worked as a teacher, then a curriculum designer. I met David, the man who became my husband. We got a small house with peeling paint and a stubborn old maple tree in the front yard. We were happy, in our own quiet way.
I kept the contact with Mom and Evan to a minimum—holiday cards, an occasional photo shared through our cousin’s Facebook. Evan grew up to be exactly the kind of man you’d expect after a childhood of unchecked privilege. Charming, selfish, and perpetually in trouble. He floated from job to job, couch to couch. Mom bailed him out more times than I could count.
Then she got sick.
Lung cancer. Stage four. I got the call from Aunt Marjorie, who always seemed to know more than anyone else in the family. “You should go see her,” she said, “before it’s too late.”
I hesitated. It had been nearly a decade since I’d seen her in person. But something in her voice—a soft urgency—nudged me. So I went.
She looked small in the hospital bed. Not the woman I remembered, who carried herself with a certain cold strength. Now, she was shrunken, her skin like paper. Her eyes were distant at first. Then she saw me and managed a smile that looked more like a grimace.
“You came,” she whispered.
I nodded, unsure what to say.
For the next hour, we talked. Or tried to. Most of the time, it was me filling the silence with stories from my life she had never asked about. I told her about my job, about David, about the maple tree that dropped its leaves too early. She listened, or at least pretended to.
Evan arrived halfway through. He smelled like cologne and beer, like always. He gave me a smirk, barely acknowledging me before turning all his attention to Mom. “Hey, Mama,” he said, his voice soft like a lover’s. “I brought you your favorite tea.”
That night, as I sat in the hospital’s dull-gray waiting room, Aunt Marjorie sat beside me with a sigh.
“You know she made a will, right?”
I looked at her. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Well,” she said, hesitant. “She left everything to Evan.”
I blinked. “Everything?”
Marjorie nodded slowly. “The house, the savings, the car, the jewelry. All of it.”
There was a pause—long and heavy.
“She said you didn’t need it,” she added. “That you were ‘fine on your own.’”
And I was. Financially, emotionally, I had built a life that didn’t depend on her. But hearing it still felt like a gut punch. Not because of the money, not really. It was what it meant. Even as she lay dying, she couldn’t bring herself to see me as worthy of anything more than self-sufficiency. I was the child who didn’t need love because I knew how to live without it.
I left the hospital the next morning without saying goodbye.
Three weeks later, she d.i.ed.
The funeral was small. I didn’t go. Evan sent me a picture of the casket, captioned: “Wish you’d come. She asked for you.”
I deleted it.
A year passed. Then two.
I tried not to think about it. Life went on. David and I moved to a new house. I started writing again—short essays, memoir pieces. It helped. But sometimes, late at night, I’d dream of pancakes shaped like smiley faces and wake up with a dull ache in my chest.
Then, one day, I got a letter in the mail. Handwritten, addressed in shaky cursive. It was from Aunt Marjorie.
Inside was a note, and a copy of a letter my mother had written but never sent. It was dated two weeks before she d.i.ed.
Dear June,
I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. I don’t know if I’ll ever be brave enough to send it. But I need to write it.
I failed you.
I see that now. I look back and I wonder when it started—when I began to treat you like a stranger in your own home. Maybe it was after your father d.i.ed. Maybe I saw too much of him in you, and it hurt to look sometimes. You always had his eyes, his quiet steadiness. Evan… Evan was all me. And maybe I poured everything into him because I was trying to fill a hole I didn’t know existed.
But you never asked for anything. You were so strong, so independent. I told myself you didn’t need me. That loving Evan loudly made up for not knowing how to love you right.
I’m sorry.
I want you to know that I am proud of you. I’ve followed your life in the little ways I could. I kept every picture. I bragged about you to the nurses when you weren’t there. I just never knew how to say it out loud.
I hope one day you can forgive me.
Love,
Mom
I read it three times.
I didn’t cry, not really. The tears were there, but they didn’t fall. They just hung heavy in my throat like all the words I’d wanted to say to her.
I thought about calling Evan, asking if he ever got a letter like that. But I didn’t. Instead, I folded the letter and placed it in a box I keep on my bookshelf—full of old memories and forgotten trinkets.
And I cut the last frayed string between me and my family.
No more holiday cards. No more photos through cousins. No more wondering.
Sometimes, I still think about that spring morning—the pancakes, the way Dad smiled, the warmth in that kitchen. I think about the life that might have been if he’d lived. If Mom had stayed soft. If Evan had been raised different. If I had been loved out loud.
But life doesn’t give us rewinds, only reruns. And I’ve chosen to change the channel.
I built a life out of the silence. And now, I live in peace.
Even if, sometimes, I still wonder.