Tweet

by Aalliyah Trim

To some, Alexia Trim was known as the brilliant law student who died the day before her graduation.
The young lady who died on the day of her last surgery.
The young woman who never got to wear her graduation gown or hold her certificate.
The girl who died just three months shy of her birthday.
The young lady with that “birthmark” people did not understand, who endured staring for most of her life.

Beyond the news and headlines, Lexi was a daughter, niece, granddaughter, friend, and soon-to-be aunt.
My sister.
Lexi was someone.

To me, she was the girl who would binge-watch shows and movies like Survivor, Knives Out, and Stranger Things, and who loved Christopher Nolan films. The girl who peeled the ends off her bread religiously. The girl who would be the first to read my writings for Writer’s Club and give her feedback—criticisms I once thought were just annoying. Now I wish that if the only way she could come back were to criticize an essay or a piece, I would ruin every sentence, paragraph, and page just to hear her voice again.

My sister, Lexi, whom I am writing about on her 23rd birthday.

---

Baptism

Lexi received her first sacrament soon after she was born—a cleansing initiation into the Church, washing away original sin and marking rebirth in Christ through water and the Trinity.
This chapter of her life is marked by her first white dress.

For the first three years of her life, Lexi was an only child, because simply, I was not even a thought. This dress is particularly hard to narrate, as I cannot tell a story I was not there for. Instead, I recite what we were always told growing up about the days we could not remember.

Lexi was good company. My mom always said Lexi would just talk. One day, while my mom folded laundry, Lexi stood looking at herself in the mirror, reciting, “Marsha? Marsha? Marsha?”—as though she already knew what those words meant.

She loved to read from an early age, but our mom noticed she avoided one toy in particular: multicolour play blocks that never left their plastic casing. This was mentioned to her pediatrician, who shrugged it off. No one could have predicted what Lexi would do when she got home. Her little body crawled to the bag, and she took each block out one by one, stacking them carefully. If this were not a telltale sign of who Lexi would become, I do not know what is.

She was an active child—doing swimming, ballet, and piano. Never “wild,” but playful. That playfulness ended in her receiving stitches under her chin, not once but twice, the second time while the first was still healing.

---

First Communion

When I was born, my dad said Lexi thought I was a dolly. In a picture of him holding me as a newborn, she is trying to turn my head, eager to show me a book and read to me.

During summer vacations, we played computer games—she controlled “AWD” and I controlled the arrow keys. We had baking competitions with our cousin using our grandmother’s plants and listened to the up-and-coming pop music of 2013.

Typically around the age of seven or eight, Catholics receive First Communion, marking their first time receiving the Eucharist. I remember telling her, a few Sundays later, “Break piece for me, I want to try it!”—frustrated that I could not yet make my First Communion.

Anything there was, I was the guinea pig. This may seem counterintuitive since she was the eldest, but not in certain cases. Once, Lexi tricked my cousin and me into eating aloes, and not even heaps of sugar and condensed milk could rid the bitter taste. Other times it was when she was learning to plait around Form 3, something I later asked her to do often, showing her inspiration pictures from Pinterest.

As we grew older, life became busier with camps and responsibilities, but we still made time for family—playing Scrabble, which she mostly won, or Monopoly, which I always won.

---

Confirmation

Lexi was calm but stood up for herself—stoic but not inconsiderate, understanding but never a pushover. People often described her as funny. I strongly disagree. She was extremely sarcastic.

With pattern recognition, one would realize this was Lexi’s third white dress.

Around this time, Lexi was becoming an even more remarkable person—something I never got to tell her.

No one, including Lexi, knew the challenges she would soon face, or that the resilience and courage she is praised for now would be tested so severely.

Months before her trip to Colombia, Lexi experienced severe bleeding from her AVM. At times, it was so intense that she lost consciousness before ambulances could arrive. I watched my sister—who once swam, danced ballet, and played piano—slowly wither, becoming increasingly weak. She could no longer do something as simple as bending her head downward.

Realizing that the care available locally would only be temporary, and that equipment arrived late, doctors advised other options—options my mother had already researched and was already acting on.

Some people looked at Alexia and assumed she had always been sick, always in pain, or that the inevitable would have happened regardless. This was not true. At her birth, my parents were never told she would not live a long life, nor warned of such severe bleeding, because it was not known at the time.

AVMs are not death sentences.

---

Funeral

Losing a loved one is never the hardest part. Learning to go on without them is.

I still remember the singsong “Hello Leah” I heard on the phone while Lexi was in Colombia. We tried to watch shows together, even with doctors and nurses interrupting. We spoke hopefully of the day she would finally finish her surgeries and come home.

The day before I got the phone call at school, I was already crying. I cried because I knew before anyone told me.

It had been gloomy all morning. My father told me to go to the chapel. My parish priest was there. My dean met me halfway, and we walked together. I did not want to go. I thought if I did, it would be real. I thought that if I did not go, it would not happen.

When I saw my sister on video call, it was hard to find a spot not attached to a machine—a place without tubes, without wires, just bare skin. She could no longer say, “Hello Leah.”

In her final moments, I asked my parents to play her favorite songs and read at least one passage from her favorite book, Pride and Prejudice. When I exited the chapel, it was raining.

Lexi was not getting better.
This time was different.
Lexi did not wake up.

After her death, I slept in the living room. It was a long time before I could look at her pictures, let alone hear her voice notes—the thought alone made me feel sick. The pain of her absence, and my mind cruelly believing she would walk through the door any second, became almost immobilizing.

My parents were still in Colombia, juggling paperwork and grief, while I was doing Model United Nations. MUN was something Lexi encouraged me to pursue, so I knew I had to finish—for her.

The only time I saw my sister again was when she returned from Colombia. Before her funeral, she lay in her casket. She wore her last white dress.

When it was time for her cremation, I could not let go—not mentally, not physically. My hands had to be pried from the handles of her casket.

While my mother was cleaning, I found binders of research she had done since Lexi was born—dates, doctors, resources, appointments, even trips to Miami in 2010. Stacks of projects, books, and work Lexi had completed since she could write. A journal my mom kept while pregnant, often writing, “I have so many plans for my baby.”

Somewhere among the determination and broken hopes lies Lexi’s death certificate.

I was told grief is love with nowhere to go—much like this piece, which has no mailing address for Lexi. You love the person they were and the person they will never become.

Lexi, you kept one dress. Your other three will stay here with us—not forever, but long enough for me to feel your absence and be reminded of the presence you once had. The girl who loved reading and films, peeled the ends of bread, and critiqued my essays.

Who turned 23 on the 9th of January.
My sister.
Alexia Trim.