It was so casual. An accidental slip of something that they'd never told me, my parents. A troubled life that connected to us that had been silenced in 1983, or 84. Or 85. They couldn't quite remember when it was she'd vanished, as she was never that close, and, they made sure to add, 'troubled'.
It became a life that touched mine, but only in its absence and retrospect.
She was never spoken of -- not at the family gatherings I attended. Not in the conversations with my grandmother, whose sister's daughter was the troubled soul who'd disappeared and whose body was to be found in a wooded area in Vermont.
I pressed for information, of course, as I'd never known I'd had a relative who'd been murdered. The casual way the news was delivered and the sense that it was merely her own fault for being so 'troubled' seemed to follow in the way they spoke of her -- as if it was the natural conclusion to a life that'd somewhere along gone off the rails, implying that she'd spent a lot of time at 'truck stops' and that that's where she was 'last seen'.
So I went to the internet. I typed in her name and eventually located the few, scant details that exist, along with a polite message to 'contact the Vermont police if you have any information', as her body was found quite a ways from her Glens Falls, New York home.
I was four years old when she vanished. She was an entire person that I never even knew existed and now I feel compelled to find out more. But I find it difficult to even begin to pry it open and I occasionally find myself slipping into fantasizing a narrative that's more comforting than the cold reality of a case, a deeply cold one from the look of things, that is unlikely to ever be solved after all this time. One to which I am not even sure I have a right to pry into despite the family connection.
And I realize, just for a moment, just how keen that void must be for those who've lost a loved one that they did know, and how deep it must be and and, for a moment, feel connected.
Connected and powerless.