No Life To Live

I didn't know that my sister's death would be a mic to the world.

A world of people whose ears could no longer play deaf to the outcry her silence made over the duration of her existence.

It was after her death that her cry was the loudest!

A sound that would ring into the ears of everyone (including me) like an alarm that is released when the mayor of a city declares a state of emergency.

So now that I have everyone's undivided attention, I must speak on my sister's behalf. There is a world out there that my sister desired to reach but her arms weren't long enough.

I stand as the bridge between my sister's reach and the parts of the world that never felt her touch.

There was more to her story than the shattered glass that was used by a clueless system to identify someone they knew nothing about.

My name is Penelope France, I'm 28-years-old and I am a successful real-estate agent who owns several properties around the state. My sister's name was Angelica Johnson and she was 26-years-old at the time of her passing. Angelica was technically my half-sister, we have the same mother and two different fathers. But I loved Angelica very much and I never saw the need to make that known with every encounter I had so I tell everyone she was my little sister because it's the truth.

It's hard to know where to begin so I'll start at the beginning. I still remember the day our mother, Elise Johnson went into labor with Angelica. I was at the hospital with some of my relatives and we were sitting in the room talking to my mother as she laid in bed waiting because my sister was due to arrive the next day. Everything was fine and then suddenly, I heard my mother cry out in a way that was gut wrenching. It was a sound that I still remember to this day.

My grandmother, my aunts and others rushed to her bedside and asked my mom what was wrong as she placed her hand on her stomach and began rocking back and forth, crying hysterically as my uncle ran out of the room to grab a nurse. It was a bit of a blur after that for a moment. I remember my uncle running back into the room with a nurse and a doctor wearing a white coat as everyone got out of the way so they could assist my mom.

Out of fear, I started crying because I didn't know what was going on and that was when my uncle picked me up and carried me out of the room after the doctor asked everyone to go to the waiting area. I remember watching my family waiting anxiously for the doctor to come and tell them if my mom and my baby sister were okay, because at that point no one knew what was going on. After an agonizing three hour wait, the doctor finally came to provide my family with an update.

It turned out that my mom was having contractions that were ten times worse than they were when she gave birth to me, but she started losing a lot of blood and in an attempt to save my mom and my sister, the doctors performed an emergency caesarean section. They managed to stabilize my mom but my sister came into the world deceased, she was stillborn. The doctor immediately began his efforts to save my sister as the other nurses tended to my mom who was starting to have a panic attack when she looked over and saw her lifeless daughter’s body on the table.

The doctor was able to save my sister and physically, she made a full recovery. But little did any of us know the emotional and mental effects this moment would have on her for years to come, and that we wouldn’t know her real pain until it was too late for any of us to do anything about it. As I told you, Angelica and I have two different fathers. My father was active in my life even though he and our mom weren't together, which was why she allowed him to name me after his mother (my grandmother) who died on the day I was born the year before.

Unfortunately, Angelica didn't have the same advantage I did with her father who made it clear from the moment our mom told him she was pregnant that he didn't want anything to do with her or my sister. Years later, I found out that Angelica's father offered to pay our mom to have an abortion but refused to do it. Outside of child support, Angelica's father did nothing for her. She had never seen or met her father because he chose not to come around. My dad however, allowed Angelica to come with me when I would spend weekends and summers with him at his large house in California, and he treated her like she was his daughter, which made my mom happy.

I thought everything with Angelica was okay, she seemed normal to me. We both made good grades, we were both cheerleaders and pretty much inseparable. Angelica had a smile that would light up a room and the boys in our school noticed, and were always trying to talk to her. Again, everything with us and with her seemed to be normal. But then I graduated from high school two years ahead of Angelica and went off to college and that was when my sister changed. But somehow I still didn't have a clue. She didn't give me a hard time about going away to school because she had a lot of friends and she was going to join me in two more years, which she did. She studied Psychology and graduated with honors!

So the day my mom called me in tears saying that the police came by her house and told her that they found Angelica dead inside of her apartment after committing suicide, I felt the wind get knocked out of me and I almost passed out because I couldn't believe it. I lived two hours away and I drove home as fast as I could in tears, still hoping that I would get to my mom's house and see that this was all a misunderstanding and that it wasn't my sister's body found inside of her apartment. But I arrived to my mom's home where my family had gathered as each of us gave statements to the detectives.

The million dollar question to all of us was, “what happened to make Angelica want to kill herself?” My mom and no one else in my family could answer that so when I arrived, they were hoping I knew something because Angelica and I were so close, we were sisters who knew everything about each other. At least I thought we did. But I wasn't able to answer it for them either, I was just as shocked as they were about what happened. Angelica didn't leave a suicide note to give anyone a clue. All that was left behind was the shattered glass on the floor in her living room that Angelica hit her head on after passing out from the overdose she took on some over-the-counter pain medicine.

Angelica's story made the news and that was all the media could use, the broken glass that her blood and body were found on. The detectives asked me before they left my mom's house that day if Angelica had a journal and I told them she didn't because she never took an interest in writing and I never saw her write in one. But I knew there was more to my sister's story than shattered glass, being popular, having a college degree and good grades. There was much more to Angelica Simone Johnson than what any of us (including me) knew about her and I was determined to find what it was!

A month after Angelica's death, we had finally put the last of her things in a storage unit near where she stayed. We didn't know exactly what we would do with her stuff, but we weren't planning to throw it away so we agreed to pay storage fees until we could find another place to put everything she owned. I was putting the last box of her things in the unit and the tape across the top came loose and my uncle handed me some more tape to seal it back up. But before I could do it, something caught my attention and I wanted to see what it was so I opened the box and there was a small box inside that was closed but not all the way. I really don't know what made me look in it but I was glad I did because it was there that I found it, I found my sister's voice!

It turned out that she had kept a journal after all and it was obvious she didn't want anyone to know about it, including me, which made me even more curious about what she said. When I opened the journal and saw the date of her first entry, I realized that Angelica started the journal right after I graduated from high school and left for college. I read the entire journal page to page and was in tears by the end of it. So much about my sister that I didn't have a clue about, so much about my sister’s life experiences that she never told me about.

The first line I read in her journal said, "I have no life to live. I'm a stillborn and somehow I am still breathing and I don't know why. Dr. Randolph should have left me for dead when he had the chance, because it's becoming more and more obvious that I have no true purpose for being here. I'm just existing and I'm tired..."

That line crushed me and I was already crying, wondering if I would make it to the end of her story but I was determined to do it. I was determined to read this through to the end because my sister had a cry from within her soul that none of us could hear and that many others didn't bother to pay attention to. I read the journal and then I shared it with our mother and our family so that they could hear my sister's heart too. I was never much of a writer, but I knew how to do it and I wanted the world to hear Angelica’s story behind the shattered glass, so I started a blog and wrote her untold story for others to see.

Little did I know that her voice would fall on the ears of other women and young girls like my sister who had been waiting for her voice all this time without knowing it. Women and young girls who my sister was destined to reach. Even though she didn't realize it while she was alive, I could only hope and believe that she was smiling as she watched her destiny and purpose for living unfold from above.

So here I am, everyone. I continue to stand as the bridge between my sister's reach and the parts of the world that never felt her touch. My mission was accomplished because now, many have now been given the opportunity to feel Angelica's heart and find their own purpose and reason for living through the words of her truth she released from inside.