About 7 weeks ago, my brother was taken to the hospital. Two weeks later, he died. And I have not been dealing with this very well and this is really hard to write.
First, there's a kind of non-constructive cycle that I get into. I think about him and I think about how much I miss him, and then I begin to think about the selfishness embedded in some of these things I'm thinking - the "I" of this, not the "him." And I know from the parade of people who saw him in the hospital and who came to his funeral and what not, that every one of them has an experience of this is as awful and painful and as valid as my own. And in some ways maybe it is worse because everyone acknowledges the tragedy and horror of this for his brother or sister or mom or dad. But if you are "just" a family friend, no one really knows and no one really acknowledges it. You don't get days off for bereavement and people don't send you flowers or cards.
At the same time, I can't help but think about the overwhelming loneliness and aloneness of this and that this is how we are - ultimately, completely, absolutely, devastatingly alone. It doesn't matter whether you are me, my sister, mom, dad, neighbors, friends, relatives. People are hugging you and telling you how sorry they are or not, I feel as alone and disconnected as I've ever felt.
There was a family that lived a block or two from us, but our circles only intersected a little. Their oldest son was my age, and I remember trading baseball cards with him when we were 8 or 9. The card I remember was this one. I wanted it because he was wearing braces. Their son died about two years ago, suddenly. They moved a while ago, but a family that is close to them is still local. The mom happens to work on the floor above me and I saw her the other day. We talked about her son, who was a year behind me in school and went to college on a baseball scholarship, and she mentioned my brother and the family and somehow it felt better coming from her because I knew how close she was to them - that she had a better sense of the depths of it somehow. But really it is just my knowledge of the situation, her situation, their situation that makes it that way. Everyone has lost people close to them, but I don't know about all of them and maybe I somehow think that their sentiments are less sincere or something, but just being more and more aware of the suffering and pain (and joys and successes) of other people is simply being a better human and it is something I need to work on.
There are times when I'm feeling pretty okay for a few days in a row, and then an email comes and the subject line says something like "Condolences" and I just can't open it. I close my email and I shut off my iPhone's 'push' capability and I don't open my email again for a week or so. Reading those emails leaves me almost useless. There are other kind of "oh fuck, he's gone" moments. His listing my cell phone contacts. Typing an email address and his name comes up. Mail addressed to him. I get stuck thinking about those two weeks in the hospital. It was really cold. In the middle of it was the snowstorm. I tried driving up to the hospital on Christmas Eve, but I kept having to dig my car out of the snow, and a neighbor helped me get unstuck and he offered to drive me. I remember the sleeve of my wool coat was covered in snot and tears and I hated the fish tank in the hospital lobby. He was born at that hospital. All 3 of us were.
In July of 2005 my grandmother died. It was the last time I cried before this. My brother and I were driving home from her funeral and listening to This American Life - it was the Little Bit of Knowledge episode. I'm not sure he'd ever listened to NPR at length before that, but he seemed to like it. And over the next few years he'd talk about it pretty often. When we were going through his things a few weeks ago I found a mailing tube from Chicago Public Radio with a "This American Life" poster in it. He had donated to NPR.
There's other emotions wrapped up in it that I don't care for. There's a kind of shame about this. I really don't like telling people about this unless there's some reason for me to do it - I'm only writing this because typing this all out seems easier than talking about it out loud, an hour at a time, with my therapist. Maybe shame because it is anomalous - people who are 25 years old are not supposed to die, so we what went wrong, what didn't we do right. And there's a lot of anger and frustration and disappointment. I knew him better than I knew anyone else - he was two and a half years younger than me. I had some sense of the way he chose to conduct his life and I didn't really like all of it, but that's him, and since he went to the hospital a clearer picture of some this has developed and - honestly - it makes me ill.
But mostly it is loneliness and emptiness. And I try to fill it in different ways and none of them work real well. My brother wanted, in pithy terms, a life not a living. He, more or less, had a servant's heart. He was able to see the best in people even when he saw the worst in people every single day. He had every reason to be angry at the world, but he wasn't. He was angry at himself, because he had the capacity to do more. I, on the other hand, am selfish. My industry is fraudulent and contributes a great deal to the problems he was charged with fixing.
So about every night for the last month and a half I have laid down and stared at the ceiling and sometimes I'll never get to sleep. Sometimes the exhaustion is overwhelming and I do. Normally I just attempt to battle my sense of disbelief at some of this until I finally do sleep. But I've been dreaming about him more lately - vivid, crushing dreams that are about as painful as dreams can get. And I feel like I'm with him more but this isn't real this isn't real this isn't real and I worry about forgetting the real stuff.
