I want desperately for God to exist. When I die, I want to go to a little red cabin on a bay in Northern Ontario and curl up next to the pot-bellied stove for eternity.

I want to stop worrying that my future children will never meet my father because he is seventy-three, and I’m twenty. I want to see my sister again before I stop existing, so that I can remember what it was like before I grew taller than she ever got the chance to.

I used to believe in God and heaven and everything else Catholic school promised me five days per week, plus church on Sunday. Faith wasn’t something to be questioned or examined; God just was. When I was ten and working on a collage project for Christian Living class, I came across a plaque in a religious catalogue that read: Be still and know that I am.

The magazine quoted God Himself as the speaker of those words. I was a weird kid without many friends; something about that quote made me feel so incredibly loved that I clung to it for years. I carried those seven syllables in my heart like charms on the friendship bracelet no one ever gave me.

My sister was seven years older than me. She babysat me frequently, and for the first seven or eight years of my life, she put up with my bitter refusal to go to sleep without her laying on the floor beside me, holding my hand. When she thought I had drifted off, she would start to shimmy her way towards the door, only to be sternly reprimanded by my little voice saying, “Where do you think you’re going?” At which she would sigh and slide back into place at my side until she heard my breathing steady and my grip on her hand went limp.

When I got older, we talked about boys. She liked country music and I pretended not to. We would dance around my kitchen doing dramatic interpretations of Reba Macintyre lyrics. If God had a face to me then, it was hers.

When I was eleven she went away to university. When her first year was almost over, she called to say she was coming home soon, and that we would spend the summer together. She wasn’t feeling well but it was just a cold. I told her I loved her. She died of meningitis later that week.

My belief in God was never stronger than after her death. I needed God and heaven to be real; I needed to know that I would see her again. I went to church, I prayed with my rosary daily, all the while ignoring the taunts coming from inside me that asked over and over, What kind of a God would kill her?

When my sister was alive, people never told us that we looked alike. After she died, it seemed like everyone I saw, including my dentist, wanted to tell me how much I reminded them of her. My mother started doing double takes when I passed; she said we had the same expressions. My sister was beautiful; I thought people were just trying to be nice by telling me I looked like her, so I ignored them.

Years passed somehow. I was a teenager, but I still felt like that weird kid from elementary school with no friends.  This time though, I had no faith to fill me up, no sense of overarching acceptance. I was alone with myself, and I didn’t like her very much.

My family stopped going to church, even Christmas mass. Instead,  on December 24, my mother would make two ice candles, and we would bring them to the graveyard at twilight. The snow was knee-deep, so I would go ahead and make tracks for her to walk in. We would find her parents’ flat headstone first, dig a hole in the snow, and light a candle. Then we’d head down the road to my sister’s headstone and place another candle six feet above her buried shell.

At Christmastime, the graveyard is always covered with candles; they look like little funeral pyres floating on a sea of white. My mother and I act out our ritual every year. It feels more like purification than mass ever did.

Faith is a funny thing; when I was little, I had faith in God, but I also had faith in the monster that lived in my closet. I got away from the place where my sister is buried. I made my own friends, although I don’t talk to them about her. I respect those who believe in some higher power. I used to envy them, knowing that feeling of protection that  floats above them all the time. I need faith in something tangible so I put it in myself, knowing that I’m not everything God or my sister was, but that I am enough.

I look in the mirror now and I do see a little of her in the shape of my face and the way my hair falls around my shoulders. I don’t believe in God. I don’t have faith that my sister will be waiting for me in that little red cabin on the bay, but I do have hope. I knew her; I danced in her footsteps, I matched my movements to hers, I sang and held her hand. That’s enough to give me full, blossoming faith that a part of her will be with me always.

Art by Bob Barron