...and then there were none

Families start with different configurations. Mine started with parents and their parents living with us, often visited for long periods by other relatives. My oldest brother was away at college and my next older brother and sister used me as a toy and terrorized me, the youngest.

At my age four, my uncle left when he was hospitalized; my grandfather left to stay with one of his daughters; he died two years later. I was an only child during the week while my sister and brother went to school, living with my oldest brother in a Boston apartment. He, in ROTC, was called into service in 1939. My older brother was in New Guinea by February 1942. He survived WW2 and came back to marry, and lived with us for a few months.

My next older brother graduated college and moved to another state while my sister went to work in Guam for a couple of years. As I write this, I realize how much I had been an only child for long periods.

My sibs and I lost my parents in 1986 and 1987. By then we were all in our own homes. It was a shocking realization that we were now at the top of the family heap in our nuclear families. I felt it was like a child's rhyme: "First there were six but now there are four." My oldest brother's death this week makes it: "Now we are three." As I have lived beyond so many other deaths (husbands, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends) I realize it is inevitable that the count will go down. I cringe that it is like musical chairs to "and then there was one". I am four years younger than my next older sib. Will I be I left standing alone from my family of origin? How lonely it feels to think that...there will no longer be anyone with whom to share my childhood. How much will I remember of it? Does any of that matter since there was so much else of life to be remembered? I recall a line in a TV movie: "Without memory, you have never existed."