I hear you are singing a song of the past

Someone asked me if my sister and I were close. I don't know. I can't remember. She died when I was fourteen. She's been dead twenty-five years; which means I've had a longer relationship with her dead than alive.

We are close now. But most of what I have to go on is a mish-mash of old photographs, home movies, fantasies, memories, selective memories, false memories. 

I like to think we were close in that I'm a lot like her. She was very adventurous. Of course a lot of what I'm like may be a product of me having co-opted her life and tried to live it in some form of pseudo-tribute to her, which she would have found pathetic. So it goes.

How did she die? She was most likely picked up hitch-hiking and strangled to death with her scarf. I've heard that it possibly didn't get that far - she might have been frightened to death before anything happened, and that's an image that I don't like to dwell on.

It's not horrible, it's just what happened. It was a long time ago. I don't carry a lot of reverence for the dead. Don't respect it, learn from it. 

Judging from the lack of progress in victims rights over the past 25 years this is something that evidently has not been done.