You’re in a family, it has shape, form. It exists in a place, a house, with parameters and parents and things that fill the spaces. If you’re one of the early ones, you witness the shifting, changing, growing of that family as new members arrive, tiny and fragile, engendering your love and attachment, demanding your responsibility. Whether older or younger, you take on roles, nurture relationships, bond, connect, and pull apart. There are comings and goings: jobs, college, marriage; moving out then moving back in. There are personalities, proclivities, problems, and partings.

Family.

As one of a large one in a small town where families of size were not particularly strange or unique given the dominating demographic of the Catholic church, my siblings and I didn’t feel special for a good chunk of our childhoods … that is, until we got to eight kids. Then nine. Ten. Finally, eleven. That number was meritorious and gave our family some “quiverful” bragging rights, though we kids certainly never framed it that way. We were just a lot of siblings living together, finding our feet, our positions, our standing in the large crowd, with, yes, a little buzz to saying, “I’m one of eleven.” People always gasped. They still do.

Except we’re not anymore … eleven. We’ve lost one of us and it feels strange to no longer be able to frame my sibling group with that number. Eleven. It feels even stranger to accept that my little sister, vibrant, beautiful; sassy, with a rowdy laugh and a love of so many people, places, and things, has left this realm. I think of her and somehow she still feels here, on this earth, in her home, expounding on something she feels passionate about, or singing every lyric to every song we performed at my mother’s memorial. Can she really be gone? It appears so.

My sibs and I, in various moments and groupings, have occasionally wondered, “Who will be first of us to die?” A macabre conversation, but as we’ve gotten older—as this one or that has dealt with health challenges, or survived accidents, or come back from difficult diseases—an inevitable one. Both our parents are gone. Some of us are now in decades undeniably considered “old,” and life does come with a warning that at some point we will die. But still … it was one of us. Our eleven. One of the “six girls,” a feature that inspired the name “Sixters,” and was something we celebrated loudly and with pride. “Fivesters” doesn’t have quite the same poetry. So, yes, it feels jarring.

My little sister and I were far enough apart in family order that we were not close as children. I was her babysitter, her bossy older sister, her occasional advice-giver (she once told me I was the person who explained deodorant to her … a clearly seminal moment of which I have no memory!). But years after we were both out of the house—I, in Los Angeles, she, San Francisco—we connected for the first time as adults, as peers, and spent the glorious ‘80s as girls who just wanted to have fun. Lots of pictures of us in my cool Hollywood apartment, dressed to the nines in ‘80s gear, posing in front of iconic places, laughing, dancing, hanging, singing.

When the ‘90s hit and I got married and had a child, she became our very favorite “Auntie Babysitter” when we visited the Bay area or she came down to celebrate holidays with us. She was the first person who took amazing pictures of my son with her “good camera,” which inspired me to get one of my own and launched my enduring passion for photography, a memorable gift of her influence.

At some point not long after, she moved into her own life with husband and children, which kept her busy enough that our time together lessened. We’d see each other at larger family gatherings, when my parents were either in her town or mine; sometimes for holiday or birthday events, but yes, we drifted. There were gaps in our political opinions; our views about health and healthcare were divergent, and so we learned to avoid certain topics for the sake of camaraderie and goodwill. Ultimately, the invisible string that connected us as siblings, as children who got to know each other as adults, endured. The last time I saw her healthy she was smiling and happy, wanting to know everything going on in my life; we laughed a lot and enjoyed the event that brought us together. Then she got sick. Again.

She’d recovered from a bout of breast cancer many years earlier, a tough go that, as she once put it to me, kicked her ass, but enough healthy time had elapsed since then that we all figured it was a thing of her past. But that last time I saw her healthy … turns out she wasn’t. It had returned and was brutal. Fifteen months later she was gone.

Strange, that she was the first. Others of us have dealt with cancer and recovered, so it’s daunting to view her last journey in light of our own. One of my brothers with his own health issues once told me he thought he’d be the first to go. We all hoped that somehow we wouldn’t have to face the answer to that unavoidable existential question for many more years, but what I’ve learned about life is that it’s wholly and profoundly unpredictable.

I’ve also learned, and believe, that we’re all on our own path, our own trajectory, determined by influences, decisions, perhaps spiritual edicts that have nothing to do with age or birth order. As the song goes, “Nobody’s promised tomorrow,” and so we all, each of us, must live our lives with verve. We connect, and love, and interact, and create, and explore, and experience, and contribute as deeply and passionately and fully as we can. We eat life, our life; we taste every bite, every flavor, so when it’s our time to go, we’ve left nothing essential undone, no necessary words unspoken; no love unexpressed, apologies ignored, or disappointments unreleased.

My little sister lived her life with verve. With passion. And love. And music and laughter and joy and rage and humor and all the parts and pieces that made her who she was. And this coming weekend, Memorial Day weekend, we will gather in her town to memorialize her life. To share her pictures, tell her stories, sing and play the songs she loved listening to, loved singing. A heartfelt celebration will be had for a precious and heartfelt life. We “eleven” will be together again for one last time, saying a sad, sweet goodbye to the first of us to depart.

See you later, Leenie. Fly high feeling our love … or, as one of your favorite songs put it, cherish is the word.