On The Worst Day Of My Life

On September 15, my brother died. I cannot imagine a world without him in it, and yet for the last thirty-one days I have been living in that world. 

The cliches all apply:

• I can’t believe he’s gone

• There’s a hole in my heart

• He went before his time

So on and so forth. All of it is true, and all of it is hollow and meaningless. Language cannot encapsulate the enormity of my grief and cannot describe the immense black hole that swallows up the part of me that was my brother. It devours every beam of light that came from knowing he was in my life, light I took for granted because I did not consider that it would stop shining now.

My brother was in the military for several years, and I prepared myself then as much as a person can to someday be told his body now lay on foreign ground. I let that guard down when he was discharged, believing that now he was safe. Now he would be okay.

Most of the time it still doesn’t feel real. I can pretend for most of the day that the world as I know it has not changed for the worse (you see? You see how cliched and weak that sentence is? And yet it is true). But when I can’t pretend, when it is 3:34pm and the distraction of work has slowed to one email an hour, I can disassociate out of my body so I don’t feel the ever-present pain. My shoulders ache from hunching, my legs squeeze together to the point of cramping, because I am hiding from the horror that no one else notices.

I feel like a medium who can see the dead monsters feasting on the world of the living and no one else is privy to my secret sight. But I cannot speak to them, and the one person among them I want to see is no where to be found. So I find a place in my mind that does not see or hear anything around me and I pass the time as best I can until I can run away.

Run away to what, though? In the mornings when I wake up and at night after the sun goes down I find I cannot pretend my reality away any longer. I have not always been a consistent morning person, but for the past three years or so I have found joy in my morning routine. I have tea while I journal, I make coffee and breakfast, I take my time to enjoy the quiet before anyone else in my apartment wakes up. For the last four weeks, however, the morning brings the memories and I stay in bed until the very last minute to hide from the new normal.

The evenings are not worse, just different. The setting sun summons the memories. The earlier darkness falls the sooner I think about who he was and who he wanted to be. This death is a cold, unfeeling fact, an abrupt ending to a story that should have gone on for many more chapters (again, a weak metaphor,  but nonetheless true).

I have discovered that loss of life seems never-ending. When I picture life now it is as though I’m looking at a road through a lens but I cannot get the zoom to stay in place. I cannot see where I am, nor where I’m going, because one of my navigators ceases to exist. He has not merely left–he is no more.

Many people rely on the belief of an afterlife, and my brother’s Christian faith gave him (and many who loved him) hope for reunion in another life. I don’t know that I can rely on that belief. We are all made of various bits of energy, and I believe life and consciousness and all that makes us human is a specific collection of energy much like light or sound. I believe that energy, when no longer contained within a body, returns to the universe that surrounds us. In this way I think I can believe that some part of him is with me, simply because we exist in the same universe.

I wish I had more faith in a spiritual soul, though. I wish I believed I could see him again, that a real medium or a psychic could speak to him for me, that I could somehow feel the presence of his ghost.

But really what I want is for him to come back.