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But how could anyone have known? Known or believed that even now, nearly three decades since your sister’s death from aggressive breast cancer at her tender age of forty-one, that remembering it today would feel so eviscerating even now, in the present day? It wouldn’t have been possible for anyone who knew you back then, as someone who often smiled a great deal (even if sometimes clearly disingenuously), and who laughed and joked frequently (though the jokes rarely succeeded) that such fierce remembering, forced through the guts, would have the power and stamina even now to clench itself so painfully in the chest   The chest and heart: exactly where your sister still really is, while on this earth she absolutely no longer is, and for a long time now hasn’t been Your only sibling (Even now it’s a little easier if you don’t write her name) On that rainy Sunday afternoon back in 1991, after receiving the news over the telephone of her sudden and unexpected death after so many years of her combating that pre-menopausal cancer, did you really believe that you’d someday still feel this angry? (And this furious at God or whomever, and this prepared to rip apart the world with your bare hands… yet in spite of so much shaking of your fist in God’s sometimes cruel face, and even daring to spit at His face, risking the palpable threat of eternal damnation, you somehow managed to remain a faithful Catholic… even a sincerely penitent one, even when scorned by agnostic and atheist friends for what they viewed as possession of a ludicrous faith) Your slack-jawed gaze upon learning of her death aside, could you have believed that such rage, that kind that burns in the bowels and really does taste worse than shit, could have endured for so long?    But how did it endure so long? How, in a world of so many more important things, a world filled with the most hideous tragedies? A world of wars that even when they eventually end (fortunately not always in a mushroom cloud) invariably begin again; the