Six years next month.

Six quiet, thunderous years of carrying a title no one applies for.

A sole survivor is the last remaining member of their immediate family—the final branch on a once-leafy tree. My mother gave birth to three children. I am the only one left. No siblings to call and say, “Do you remember?” No one else who shares that same origin story, that same kitchen, that same sound of her voice calling our names.

Being a sole survivor isn’t about bravery or strength, no matter how often people try to dress it up that way. It’s about endurance. It’s about waking up and realizing the witness list has gotten very short. It’s about grief that doesn’t announce itself loudly anymore—it just sits down beside you like an old acquaintance who knows where everything is.

There’s a strange math to it. Love doesn’t divide; it concentrates. Memory becomes heavier because you’re carrying all of it now. Every laugh, every argument, every childhood legend—those archives live in your body. You become the historian, the keeper of the flame, the one who remembers how things really were when no one else is left to verify the story.

And yet—here’s the part nobody warns you about—there is a quiet ferocity that grows in that space despite the pain. Survival sharpens purpose. You start living not just for yourself, but through them. Their names echo in your choices. Their absence becomes a compass. You learn how to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and keep walking anyway.

It took a session with my therapist to realize that being the only one left doesn’t mean being alone in spirit. It means becoming a living continuation. A voice. A memory that breathes. A testament that says, we were here, we mattered, and I will always remember.

Because.

All I have left is memories and pictures—but my memories sing, and the pictures I have left speak. They whisper names, summon laughter, resurrect whole rooms in my mind. Time may have taken their bodies, their voices, but it did not take the truth of my brothers’ existence. Love leaves a residue. Presence leaves an echo. And as long as I am here to remember, nothing about them is truly gone.