My mother seemed to have tightly shut a chamber in her heart on the day of Rina’s death

Leo Tolstoy’s famous line tugged at my heart before I was able to put the reason for it into words: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Growing up, the existence of my aunt was a nonentity. She was never spoken about.

We knew she was dead, we knew she had been engaged to be married at the time that she was tragically hit in a horrific car accident that took her life.

But that was it.

Aunt Rina hovered, an unspoken ghost we all sensed, but pretended didn’t exist. Save for a small, framed, wallet-sized photo on my mother’s bureau, I never saw another picture. There were no albums documenting her life, no diary of hers to flip through, no high school yearbook to ogle at and laugh over outdated styles.

We knew little about Rina, what she was like, who she had been engaged to, what her hopes, dreams, and fears were. Did she laugh so hard that tears filled her eyes and trailed down her cheeks, like my mother? Was her hair naturally curly or did she perm it? Did she share the same carefree nature as her best friend, the woman we all grew up with and called Aunt Judy? How did she get the scar, evident in that sole picture, over her left eyebrow?

Those answers were buried with Rina’s physical body, for my mother seemed to have tightly shut a chamber in her heart on the day of Rina’s death.