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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Intrepid_Wanderer on 2023-07-02 03:32:11+00:00.
Nothing’s been the same since my sister’s funeral.
It’s been three weeks since I got the phone call that Tracy was hit by a car. As horrible as it sounds, I couldn’t help feeling an odd sense of relief.
It’s not that I didn’t love Tracy. My sister and I… well, she was everything to me. We really only had each other. It wasn’t always that way— we had two brothers and a sister a long time ago. I never wanted to be an only child.
Tracy was always there for me, and I tried so hard to be there for her. I still remember when we were kids and I caught her trying to cover up her bruises with makeup. She told me Dad was hitting her and begged me not to say anything. A month later, my oldest brother found Dad passed out on the couch with his lips blue. By the time the ambulance got there, he didn’t even have a pulse.
Dad was sick for a while, so his death didn’t really surprise anyone. Mom hovered over all of us, especially little Charlotte. Charlotte was kind of sickly already, but now Mom was terrified that Dad’s disease might be genetic. I seriously hoped she was wrong, but Charlotte just faded away. As the two oldest, Tracy and I were usually left to take care of our brothers while Mom worked extra jobs to pay for Charlotte’s funeral.
Tracy and I were the only ones to live past 25. The symptoms slowly caught up with us, and Tracy and I needed each other more than ever. Even as I had to tell her that I was starting to feel the effects of our family’s disease, I made sure she knew how relieved I was that she was still healthy.
When Tracy’s daughter was born, it felt like a fresh start. Mom had always wanted grandkids, and I wished she could see us now. Tracy named the baby Charlotte after our sister, but in a cruel twist of irony, Charlotte died of her namesake’s disease. It was too much for Tracy, who depended on me now more than ever. I did the best I could to console her, but what could I even say?
When I heard that Tracy was hit by that car, I felt a strange sense of relief. It wasn’t that I hated my sister, it really wasn’t. It was just that she was finally out of the reach of the disease that followed us our whole lives. She was all I had left, and it would have destroyed me to see her suffer like that.
I still can’t figure out if I could have prevented this. If I went back in time and did something just a little bit different, could our lives have turned out a different way? That thought won’t stop haunting me.
You see, since Tracy’s funeral, nobody else in our family has been sick. As the weeks passed, even my own symptoms have been disappearing.