Read Confessions for Free Online Page A

import.
    Katherine Jerome
    Beloved Daughter and Sister
    Gone To A Better Place
    Born October 31, 1979   Died May 9, 2005
    The epitaph cut into the stone that marks her grave says so little about her, I find myself thinking.
    Five years and almost six months she’s been gone, to a better place as it says on the slab of granite. Soul in the hereafter. Body beneath a yard of cold earth in a suburban boneyard north of Chicago. A mile from where she grew up with a brother and parents and a succession of Labradors all named Jasper. Two miles from where she graduated high school, homecoming queen and valedictorian.
    Eight miles from where she was killed.
    In my own way I have echoed the shallowness of the stone in my own thoughts, quantifying my baby sister’s life so coldly. As if her twenty-five years were reducible to an equation of origin and distance and time. All factored with one another. Yielding a result. A life. Its passing.
    The norm of my visits treads nowhere near the dread reality I have brought with me this morning. Twice monthly, at least, I come, bearing flowers and words. Morsels of life as it spins on without her. It always seems that I leave too soon, without having shared enough. Yet she does not want for other visitors, I am certain. Friends had always flocked to her, so much so that it seemed during her high school years she was the beacon of most social groups, others orbiting her as if it was her presence which held them together. I have not seen those people in many years, and on my one day here with Katie I am unlikely to, but I can imagine them coming by in ones or twos or threes. I can imagine them gathered around, standing where I am, giving voice to recollections. Good times shared. Bad times endured. There would be laughter, and tears, and there would be goodbyes with promises to come again.
    Then there is my father. Our father. I know he visits, and I imagine he speaks to Katie as I do, but I do not profess to know what he says. In the few oblique conversations we’ve had verging on the subject, he offers little, and as sadness seems ready to envelope him he shifts the conversation entirely, to the horror that the Bears have become, or how good the fishing must be up at the lake. To anything that is not about her. Her death devastated me, but it was harder on him. There is a regret in him that I cannot describe. One that only a parent suffers when a child is ripped from the world before their promise can be realized. And he goes through it alone. Without being alone.
    He will not take my mother to the cemetery. He could. It would be no more trouble than walking her to the car, helping her in, making the short drive, then guiding her between the tombstones to where her only daughter is buried. But I understand why he does not. The last and only time she was here, on the day we buried Katie, she broke into giddy laughter as mourners laid white roses upon the casket.
    By then, though, it could not be blamed on her. Two years earlier she’d been diagnosed. Finally the misplaced keys and forgotten names and pots of burned stew on the stove had become worrisome enough that she gave in to my father’s insistence and went to the doctor. Who sent her to another doctor. Who sent her for tests. And then we knew. That was when a fear became a more frightening reality, though I believe that my mother knew before any of us. Before any doctor told her. I say this not from any special knowledge, but from a single observation six months before her absentmindedness had a clinical name appended to it, made one day when I looked out from the altar while celebrating mass and saw her and my father six rows back, having sneaked in to see their son, an associate pastor then at St. Gregory The Great in Milwaukee. On my father’s face I could see that pleased smile that I had come to cherish since I was a boy standing petrified before a crowd at the school spelling bee. It was his most simple offering of approval, and