Today would have been my sister Cathy's 34th birthday.

Cathy passed away in 1987, two days before I graduated from high school. As you can imagine, that brings up its own set of issues, which I'll leave aside for the time being.

We had, I suppose, a typical brother-sister relationship for brothers and sisters who are close in age (she was born in 1967, and I toddled along in August '69). For much of my childhood she was my default playmate, the one person who, if around and not busy with one of her friends, could be recruited into doing whatever was on tap. In most cases this wound up being either board games or doing something outside.

Funny thing about the board games is that I beat her in just about everything, but Cathy could whip me in backgammon and chess. And I think I even taught her how to play chess so I'd have someone to play against! I think she was better at planning ahead, taking in moves and connecting them to things that could happen later in the game. I never quite applied that much thought to backgammon (and even if I do now, I tend to lose), and never could with chess.

The outdoor stuff tended to be more fun, and usually involved some brush with authority or life in peril situation. Such as sledding down a neighborhood hill whose run ended abruptly against the wall of a garage. Or going over to Gordon College's ice rink to skate, where she would eventually start playing hockey with a group of guys who were too smitten (and too macho) to stop her from scoring goals. Or any variety of trips over to the town Highway Department truck yard, where we climbed hills of sand, tried to sneak into the barns, and generally cause trouble.

Not surprisingly, things drifted a bit when we got older and into high school. Different friends, interests, and so forth. It's hard to define what happened. Our relationship was as much one of convenience as it was familial, and I suppose we let go of our earlier closeness not so much out of disinterest for the other person as for greater interest in everything else.

Cathy had this humorous, if not just a little dangerous, taste for life. Consider the birthday where she and her friends decided to joyride in my other sister's car. Did I mention this was before Cathy could get her licence? There was also the time her best friend let her drive her car, and Cathy managed to hit a McDonalds' drive thru window in such a way that it was torn from the building. To this day, I have no idea how she did this (and in an AMC Gremlin, no less!).

There was also "The Bucket," an old Fluff jar (one of the big ones) that Cathy and her friends would fill with whatever concoction of alcohol and mixer they had (rum and Coke being the most favored), and bury in the sand at the beach. Less obvious than the kids pounding beers in the parking lot, but more obvious than they thought. Which was a trademark of most of what Cathy did in high school - a glimmer of thought and innovation, but not with enough follow-through not to get busted.

She did manage to pull two things off in one day, though. Her senior year, the senior week "Toga Day" fell on the same day as the election for Student Government Day (or something like that) where a couple of kids per high school go to Boston and pretend that they're the government, from the governor on down. I was running, as were about 6 other people.

Cathy and her friend volunteered to take her homeroom's ballots to the office. Showing the sort of on the spot political moxie that made Richard Daley such an institution, they erased all the votes they could for one of their classmates and switched the votes to me. I came in second, getting to go as an alternate. I didn't find out until much later this had gone on, saving me the need to come up with an excuse to withdraw.

(In an unrelated note, the guy who they took votes away from is now married to a woman who, truth be told. I had a long, unrequited thing for. All water under the bridge, I suppose, but that's karma for you).

Oh, the toga part. Cathy made her's out of an electric blanket. She swore up and down it was just a gag, but she had neatly hidden the controls in one of the folds. That may have been the one day she never complained about being cold.

There are a number of reasons why this day is a hard one for me. I hope the anecdotes I've shared here give some sense of the person my sister was, and the meaning she had in my life. That she was removed from my life with no notice plays a big part in this. Cathy died from a viral infection in her lungs, one that spread rapidly. We had little idea she was sick, never mind with something that would have the end result it did. It's hard to reconcile that my last day with her was spent showing her my yearbook (which ticked her off given her boyfriend's entry) for about 5 minutes and making a joke when she got up to get some water. Of course, how was I to know, but it's hard not to see things in the light of what actually happened.

It's also hard given the effect Cathy's death had on my parents. You always hear the line about nothing being worse than a parent burying a child, but don't understand the truth behind it until you see it take place up close. I was at an age where I realized my parents were human, and had their failings, but the powerlessness this whole thing created was stupefying. Neither of them really ever got over it; it took years for my father to get to the point where you could mention her name in his presence.

But I suppose the hardest thing is thinking about what's been missed. Not having her come for visits when I was at BU. Not seeing her work her interest in literature and kids into something she'd probably have been great at. Not getting a chance to see her with a family of her own, and the entertainment that would come from her getting to deal with the same problems she caused for our folks. The list could run for pages.

When this day rolls around every year, I do what I can to think of the good things. Memories, even of times that didn't go so smoothly, are better than dwelling on things that I can't change. This works, to a point, and there was even one year, bogged down as I was in law school finals, that I was able to chase such thoughts away (even if it really was trading one set of problems for another). But I can never quite get rid of that feeling of sorrow.

My doctor talked to me a couple of months after Cathy died, and said that the hole in my heart where Cathy was would close a little each year. It wouldn't heal, but it would get tiny. He was, by and large, right. But today is that one day where the hole, a pinprick now, deepens. And I have a sense that Decemeber 11 will always be that way.