Lexi’ was someone

Alexia Trim died October 22, 2025. She was 22. Her Funeral Mass was November 15. This tribute by her sister, Aaliyah, has been edited for length.

To some, Alexia Trim was the brilliant law student who died the day before her graduation. The young lady who died the day of her last surgery. The young woman who never got to wear her graduation gown or hold her certificate. The girl who died just three months shy of her birthday, January 9. The young lady with that ‘birthmark’ that people did not understand, who endured much staring most of her life.

Beyond the news and headlines, Lexi was a daughter, niece, granddaughter, friend and soon-to-be aunt. My sister. Lexi was someone.

To me, she was the young lady who would binge watch shows and movies like Survivor, Knives Out and Stranger Things and loved Christopher Nolan films. The girl who would be the first to read my writings for Writer’s Club and give her feedback, something I thought were just annoying criticisms. Now I wish if it meant the only way she were to come back was to give me criticisms on an essay or piece, I would ruin every sentence, paragraph and page, just to hear her voice again.

Lexi received the first sacrament soon after she was born. This marks this chapter of her life with her first white dress.

For the first three years of her life, Lexi was an only child. This first dress is particularly hard to narrate since I cannot tell a story I was not there for…

Lexi was good company. My mom always said Lexi would just talk.

She was an active child doing swimming, ballet and piano. Never wild but playful. Said playfulness ended in her receiving stitches under her chin, not once but twice, the second while the first was healing.

When I was born, my dad said Lexi thought I was a dolly. In a picture of my dad holding me as a newborn, she tried to turn my head, eager to show me a book and read to me.

During summer vacations when we were younger, we would play computer games, she would control the letters A, W and D, and I would control the arrows on the keyboard.

We would have baking competitions with our cousin, using our grandmother’s plants and listen to the up-and-coming pop music of 2013.

Typically around the age of seven or eight, Catholics would have First Communion. I remember telling her: “Break piece for me, I want to try it!” a few Sundays after being frustrated that I could not make First Communion yet.

As we grew older, it was a bit busier with camps and needing to manage our time properly, but we still made time for family time with our parents, playing games like Scrabble, which she mainly won, or Monopoly, which I always won.

Lexi was calm, but would stand up for herself, stoic but not inconsiderate, understanding but not a pushover. Persons who knew her would describe her as being funny, I strongly disagree, but she was extremely sarcastic.

Around this time, Lexi was truly becoming an even more remarkable person, something I never got to tell her.

Months before her trip to Colombia, Lexi had experienced severe bleeding from her AVM (Arteriovenous Malformation). On certain occasions it was to the point of her losing consciousness even before ambulances could make their way to us.

I saw my sister who once did swimming, ballet and piano, slowly wither away. Even something as simple as bending her head, she could no longer do.

Persons would look at Alexia and automatically assume she had always been sick or always in pain. At the time of her birth my parents were not told that she would not live a long life, not even the possibility of such severe bleeding happening, because it was not known at the time. AVMs are not death sentences.

Losing a loved one is never the hardest part, rather learning to go on without them is.

I still distinctly remember the singsong “Hello Leah” I would hear on the phone when Lexi was in Colombia. We would try to watch shows, even through the interruptions of the doctors and nurses. We would speak hopefully of the day when she would finally be finished with the surgeries and be home.

I remember the day before I got the phone call in school, I was crying.

I cried because I knew before anyone had to tell me.

When I saw my sister over the video call, it was hard to find a spot that was not attached to a machine, a spot that did not have tubes, a spot with just a bare piece of skin. She could no longer say, “Hello Leah”.

In her final moments I told my parents to play her favourite songs and read at least one passage from her favourite book Pride and Prejudice.

Lexi was not getting better. This time was different. Lexi did not wake up.

After her death, I slept in the living room. It was a long time before I could even look at her pictures, much less hear old voice notes. The thought alone made me feel sick.

My parents were still in Colombia juggling paperwork and their emotions while I was still doing Model United Nations (MUN). MUN was something Lexi encouraged me to pursue, so I knew I had to finish it, for her, whether I wanted to or not.

The only time I saw my sister again was when she returned from Columbia. It was before her funeral, where she was laying in her casket. She wore her last white dress.

While my mother was cleaning, I saw the binders of research she had done since my sister was born, dates, resources, doctors, even appointments Lexi went to in Miami in 2010. The heaps of projects, books, work that she did since she could write stacked in a corner. The journal my mom kept while she was pregnant with Lexi, often writing in it “I have so many plans for my baby”.

Somewhere among the mounds of research, her death certificate lies amid the determination and broken hopes of mummy’s baby getting better.