My mom told me about you. You were lost early on. It's more common than not, that's why you don't tell anyone you're expecting until after the first trimester. But it happened to mom and dad a few months before they found out about me.

I'm sure they got excited when they found out about you. First baby and all. And I'm sure, even though they never have expressed it when talking about it to me, that they were upset when they lost you a few weeks in.

In high school I read "Heaven Is For Real" and cried. Because in that book, the boy went to heaven and met a baby that claimed to be his sister with no name. She was the baby his parents lost before he was conceived, and he was too young to even know what that meant. He met the baby that came before him. And you were the baby that came before me.

And as I sat there, crying into the book, I said to myself, "because you died, I lived." If you would have been carried full term, I wouldn't be here. Who knows if the second baby would have even been me? Your soul entered this world, but didn't even get to really see it. You passed so I could live.

And I don't understand why God had you come back to him to send me here. I don't understand why he thought I was more important than you. I don't know what his plan is for me, and why it couldn't have been your plan. But the fact that you're in heaven, a baby with no name, who never got to enter the world just so I could... it breaks my heart.

So from that day on, I said I'd live my life for both of us. You didn't get to spend time on earth so I could, so I would spend the rest of my days for the both of us. I graduated high school for us both, and went off to college, not just because I wanted to better my education to go further in life, but because you deserved that. I don't make decisions based on me, because I'm not living this life just for myself. I'm living my life for the both of us.

You didn't get a funeral, you weren't laid to rest, you didn't get a proper goodbye or life-long mourning, but you just left silently to make way in this world for me. To prepare mom and dad for me, and then my younger brother. It wasn't your choice, it just happens after all, but it happening resulted in me.

I don't know you, but I love you. We don't talk about you, but I think about you. You weren't a part of this family, but you're a part of me. If it would have been you, it wouldn't have been me. So I do it all for you.