For months after the death of my closest cousin, Josh, I sat for hours and stared vacantly at my computer. Meaningless, brainless games distracted me from reality. Sometimes I was up all night. Many college students would claim boredom as the cause of their insomnia, but I couldn't, not rightfully. I was scared. If my own cousin could be snatched away in a car accident, anyone could. The 'not me'� syndrome was successfully cured in me by one long distance phone call. The cure, however, left me with a new disease: the desire to communicate my loss.

It's never fair to write about the death of a loved one. How can a reader dislike a piece so full of emotion, no matter how ill-represented? Unfortunately, I have no other choice. But I don't want to right a mediocre memoir about death. I want to create something meaningful. The real problem? Everything worth saying has already been said. Probably in Pig Latin, in an attempt to be different. Everyone wants to be different; and I? I just want to be whole. So here, however unfairly, is my story.

I have a lot to say. I want to talk about a circle of hands over a hardwood floor, and girls I'd never met, and how cars seemed to stretch for miles behind me as I held my sister's hand to keep from floating away. The funeral procession was beautiful. Devastatingly so. There were enough tears to fill...well, there were simply enough tears. I won't lie just to find a pretty metaphor. I won't lie at all, unless it's to say that I know what I am writing.

When I was young, Josh put kitten formula in my Golden Grahams instead of milk. I didn't realize it right away. By the time I did, it was too late. I felt the same way on the day he died. I sat numbly in a friend's van on the way home from school, dreading seeing my mother. I didn't know what to say to her. I didn't know what to say to anyone, so I kept my mouth shut. Although that might have been to keep back the tears. I was certain, even then, that this could be fixed.

Later, holding hands with people I didn't know, looking down at the hardwood floor he and I used to play on, it still didn't sink in. While I listened to the pastor's gravelly voice speak about heaven, and gratitude, and loss, I expected Josh to come around the corner, a joke on his lips. He didn't. Nor did he appear when, through my tears, I came face to face with my idol and his: his older brother, Robert. He told me that Josh had been planning to visit me, in an attempt at comfort. In return, I told him of how Josh spent hours talking about how he would be just like his brother when he grew up. It was the best we could do.

Through thirty seven casseroles brought by at least as many caring friends and neighbors, no Josh. But maybe. Just maybe. It could have been some other kid in that car, he could have been playing a prank, surely he was at school. The evening news killed my dreams. If it's on the news, it has to be real. As I listened to the cheery anchorman saying nice things about a young man he had never met, my world collapsed in on itself.

We all cried then, in unison. Who wouldn't? We had things to plan, things to do, to concentrate on, and none of that mattered. We were together, and that was good, but who wants to reunite at such a cost? It wasn't worth it. He might as well have been my brother. We grew up together, played together, studied together, fought together. We learned that the last 's'� in Arkansas is silent together. This was the most unfair day of my life, and I said so.

I fought to keep some control, to help hold everyone together. I hugged his girlfriends, both of them: girls whom I had never met and who had never met each other. I helped find and hide the receipt from his night in a hotel with a girl (before his father could stumble across it). I made copies of photos to place in the coffin, as if he could see them. I was strong. I had to be. I am not strong now.

Perhaps, though, I will be strong again. My grandmother, placing lights near his grave a few weeks ago, left a note to possible vandals inside the light poles: 'These lights are for Josh. Please do not take them. - His Grandmother.'� And she laughed. I knew he would have laughed as well, and much to my surprise, a grin crossed my face through the tears. It surprised me, but it was there.

I thought back to the day we gathered to lower the coffin into the grave. It was cold and the wind blew like ice through the dresses of the women. It was an appropriate atmosphere for the way we all felt. Up on the gentle hill where Josh would never see the sunset, we gathered together what was left of our composure, and said farewell. Tiny roses, starkly red against the gray, frost-bitten ground, held my eye. And now, typing this, the tears hang back, unsure of themselves. Because through his death, I have learned of my own mortality, and that you can never take family for granted. Laughing with your grandmother, it turns out, is one of the most important things there is to do. Sometimes, I have learned, strength comes upon you when you least expect it.

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