Erin
Almost exactly 6 years ago, I was a senior in high school, and my Spring break had just started. It was a Friday or Saturday night, and my aunt called. I answered the phone and cheerfully told her hello. She asked if she could talk to my dad. I went and gave him the phone. The next thing I remember is him running into the bathroom, moaning "Oh no....oh no..." My mom and I immediately rushed in, and he had his head hanging over the counter with the phone still to his ear. "What is it? What's wrong?" We both asked him. "It's Erin," he said. I was very alarmed and I immediately asked him if my cousin Erin was okay. "No," he said. I can't remember whether he told me right then or a little later that she had been in a car accident and had died immediately, but I remember running down the hall into my room and throwing myself onto my bed crying. My cousin Erin and I had been close since before either of us could remember. I had just seen her a week before, and we had talked about the excitement of graduation coming up, as well as prom. Now she wouldn't be doing either one. We went to her funeral on my Spring break, and I remember crying all the way through the service, and my brother trying to comfort me by putting his arm around me. Obviously it came as a shock to my entire family. Erin had just turned 18, she was young and healthy. She had strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles and she was very skinny. And she was my closest cousin. When we were little, we played together all the time, and other family members would refer to us as "The little girls." We hated this, because at age 11, you don't want to be called little. But now I look back on those memories fondly. The other half of "the little girls" is gone. Ever since that time, I have felt incomplete being around my extended family without her there. One of the things I treasured about our friendship was that with all the moving around my family did before I was 12, she was the one friend I could say I had had since I was very little. And when we came back to the States when I was 11 and I had no friends yet and was not in school yet, she was the one who would spend the weekend playing with me. We played barbies like crazy, and we loved dressing up in my aunt's old clothes. Erin was actually my second cousin; my aunt was her grandma, but she was closer to me than any of my first cousins were. I have so many memories of the fun times we shared together; she was a major part of my childhood. I will never forget her.