I look like I have it together. I’m working. I wear clothes. I wash my hair and my body regularly. I often feel like I have it together. And between looking like I have it together and living in my hometown and being the daughter of people who lost a child in February, I end up playing spokesperson a lot. People want to know how my parents are. They lower their voices and they furrow their brows and they purse their lips in sympathy and horror and fascination. I am polite to these people. But lately I keep thinking, you know, I lost my sister. And I swear, half the people who ask me about my parents forget that she belonged to me, too. Sometimes I want to tell all these fascinated and well meaning people to mind their business, that if they don’t know my parents well enough to check in with them directly, they don’t have the right to an update from me. I want them to see that their queries force me to be an educator and a grief counselor and a diplomat all at once, and sometimes I don’t feel like it. Sometimes I want to scream that I am in pain, too. That I cannot not be their informant or their inside source, because I am as ravaged as the people they want to know about.

The thing is, I don’t actually want people asking me the same personal questions with the same scrunched up face they use when they ask about my parents. I don’t want them assuming I’m a train wreck or that my identity now primarily consists of surviving my sister’s death.

I don’t know what the moral is here. I am sad. I am tired of talking for my family. I am tired of being assumed to be at any one place in grief, especially in relation to my parents.