Who You’d Be Today

This is Rylee.

Or Aunt Roo, as my kids know her. But unfortunately, they only know her from pictures, like this one.

Rylee was killed tragically in a car accident on January 14, 2013.

Forever 21.

How I’ve grieved her and what could’ve been. And all the things that never were.

I think I always will. And if you don’t understand why I still talk about her, or why this day and her birthday are significant to me every year…lucky you. It’s because you don’t know this kind of hurt. You can’t until it’s yours to feel.

Friends like Roo don’t come along every day. I think most people are lucky to get just one friend like that in their lifetime. And some never do.

So when they go, they leave a hole that no one can ever fill. Time doesn’t make it smaller, you just learn how to live around it. Other things and people don’t fill it up. They just…can’t.

Every year that I get older, I always wonder what Rylee’s life would be like in comparison to mine. We were the same age.

It doesn’t seem fair that I’ve gotten to go on and experience things like marriage and motherhood, even just another birthday, and she never did.

I have to remember that she lived every single day she was here and she lived it her way - fierce, wild, bold, free, unapologetic, passionately…like someone left the gate open.

Rylee was fierce. She loved just as fiercely as she disliked and there was no question which category you fell in.

She was so full of life. She was so many things that I’d never do justice with words to truly describe her to someone who didn’t know her. There aren’t really words big enough to hold all of that.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at her picture and wondered, “Who would you be today? What all would you have done with your life had it been longer? Where all might you have traveled chasing the rodeo trail? Seen? Done? Accomplished?”

I’ve been without her for 12 years now.

I can still look at pictures from our college days and the memories of those moments, frozen in time, still come back and I can recall most of the details that go along with them.

Someday, I probably won’t be able to. And I think that will break my heart nearly as much as losing her did.

Once a year, I visit her grave and give her a new wild rag. I don’t really know why I started doing it, it just seemed like the thing to do that first birthday after her death. It has felt right to continue doing it, so I have.

Sometimes I talk to her. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I take someone along with me - my husband, one or more of my kids, my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my father-in-law…sometimes I go alone.

I don’t sit there and sob like I used to. Sometimes I even smile while I’m there. It’s a peaceful place. I know she really isn’t there anyway.

Her body may have been inside the box that I tipped my hat to before walking away from her grave that day, but even then, I already knew that her wild, gypsy soul was elsewhere.

When I’m there, I can feel that she’s happy. It doesn’t make the hurt go away completely, but as time has passed, it’s at least made it bearable.

I don’t know that there will ever come a time that I won’t wonder who she’d be today. But I know without a doubt, I was plenty blessed by who and what she already was and who she’ll always be, to me.

For What It’s Worth…

In Loving Memory of

Rylee Cheyenne Miller

October 16, 1991 ~ January 14, 2013