This one’s for me.

This post is for me and my family. On March 8, my youngest sister, Marian, died at the age of 50 in her sleep. Suddenly, there are only two siblings in the family. Suddenly, life seems much more precarious and fleeting. The “hit by a truck” event has sapped my drive and left me confused and sad…so sad, whew!

(photo L to R: Marian, Rosamond, Russell Lawson) Marian Averill Lawson was the third woman to bear the name. The others were also premature deaths. Her paternal grandmother was taken by cancer at the age of 48. Her aunt succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 49.

Marian had a great gift to be completely in the now. Whether she was sunning on the porch of the family beach house (she’s in the bikini) , dancing in the crowd at one of her beloved Grateful Dead concerts or infuriating a member of her family with her reckless disregard of the consequences of her behavior, she was 150% right here. You could have her rapt attention while she sat with you and the moment the door closed behind her, it was as if you were a million miles away.

She didn’t buy a gift for any birthday, rarely visited a godchild and never sent a holiday card or letter, to my knowledge. Yet, in 1981, when on December 23 my wife and I had lost our first child and couldn’t bear the holiday, it was Marian who showed up at our house on Christmas Eve with a scraggly fir tree stuck on the top of her 1968 powder blue Mustang.

Yes, Marian loved profusely and without prejudice. She invented funny and unique love names for her family: Squee, Mayne, Pigboob. She would tell stories about her adventures in a hilarious shorthand she invented on the fly. She disposed of a minor fortune on lavish gifts for friends and lovers, endless and incomplete home improvements, hundreds of bootleg concert tapes from the Dead tours. She did time. She befriended and suffered at the hands of dangerous criminals and a series of bad (and perhaps fraudulent) money-making schemes among her acquaintences.

She could disappear for months or years. When you next heard from her, it was as if you had just talked the day before about music or Jesus or recovery. She pursued sobriety and even caught it a couple of times. She walked with the Lord. She passed over to the other side with precious little left of her plentiful gifts: some clothes her family bought for her in the last six months, a few worn pieces of furniture, a barely running old Volvo and an elderly Labrador named Monkey.

Why did you leave, sister mine? When will we see you again?