At her funeral, I stood before the crowd, my voice shaking. “I once told my sister she was a nobody,” I said. “But she was the greatest somebody I will ever know. She raised me when she was barely grown herself. She gave me a future at the cost of her own. Every life I save is because of her. She was my mother, my sister, my hero.”
The silence that followed was heavy with reverence.
And in that moment, I learned something I will carry forever:
Ladders mean nothing if you forget who held them steady while you climbed.
Claire didn’t take the easy road. She took the hardest one of all—the road of sacrifice. And though she is gone, her love lives on, etched into every heartbeat of mine.
