I have entered this space numerous times over the past few weeks to share with you the graces of my living. I've entered here, fallen silent and retreated. Compelled to speak of home, food, love, and the daily happenings of our aspiring urban homestead, I've refrained from writing those cheerful words, owing my absence instead to recent life experience. A painful life experience, of which I need to honor, but hadn't found my voice.
I woke this morning, frazzled from a missed alarm, to find those needed words pouring from my heart with the dripping of the bathroom faucet, rush of a shower nozzle. I wrapped myself in a robe and nodded. Today, I can talk.
A few Saturdays ago, August 27th, in the midst of craft show preparing, I ran downstairs to wake Jimmy. "It's a little early," I confessed, a quick glance to the clock on my cell phone. "Only 9:15," I whispered, curling beside his warm body, inhaling the scents of red bed head. I closed my eyes, allowed the moment to wash over me, kissed his naked back. I would later learn that my mother too noted the time in those fleeting minutes. I would later learn that my baby brother, my little brother that easily towers over me by a foot and a hundred pounds, my only brother was pronounced dead at 10:02 am. An ambulance called at 9:30. Yet, at 9:15, I laid there beside the waking body of the man who wears a wedding ring for me, enveloped in an innocence of day.
Grief is a shitty subject, overplayed by fluffy novels I love to read, chick flicks, and old people. Every single thing I knew about grief was cliche. It is cliche. My sister called me that morning as I stood in the bar, checking in artisans, moving tables. With a glance to the phone and a few minutes to spare, I answered with a smile. The room spun. That's cliche. I narrated my movements before they began. "Now your legs are getting weak. Now you're going to sit on the floor. Now you're going to cry and ask questions and pass the phone to Jimmy when her words become unintelligable." You're going to get angry and feel relieved and feel guilty for feeling relieved and become so agitated that you can't sit in a car, can't sit down, can't stand, and generally want to strip the skin from your body like a pair of itchy socks to be left in a pile at the side of a bath tub.
My grampa died when I was eight. For years, I'd say nightly prayers and then kindly ask God to step aside while I talked to my grampa in private. Years later, my mom's parents passed six months a part, as if my grandfather's departure took away my grandmother's purpose. I gave their eulogies, notes scratched on a yellow legal pad in the driveway of their cemetery. She'd called me into her bedroom one day, home from college, to remark on what a beautiful speech I'd given him and ask if I'd give her one too.
The irony of simplicity is almost too much to bear. 80-year-old widows have houses full of knick knacks, dust balls, Christmas sweaters piled in a spare bedroom closet. 21-year-old boys have an empty sketch pad, a trunk full of band tee shirts, tennis shoes as long as my forearm, and a girlfriend who didn't know it happened. I practiced the words under my breath on the three and a half hour drive from Chicago. When "my brother is dead" wore out, I slept dreamlessly in the passenger seat, waking only to sob and fall back into restless coma.
I keep shaking out my hands. Even now. I don't know why. To rid a bad feeling, to distance my body from anything that might touch it. To make sure my blood keeps flowing. Waves of grief washed over me then. That's cliche. Pain from my toes to my ears to my hair standing on end, my arms full of lead. My insides turned inside out and exposed every nerve to every worldly sensation.
When your little brother dies, you realize how much you need others and how you can't handle others. A broken record of "I'm sorry for your loss." That's cliche. He's not a goddamned set of keys I misplaced, notes from a class. Brad, Brad, Brad, Brad, Brad. His name repeats a hundred times until I remember he preferred Bradley. Tears. Text messages, wall posts, a heart felt email. A relief to know that others know. I want them to know. I don't want them to know. I don't want to tell them.
I walk into the grocery store and shake. I walk out and lose it. I stare into the eyes of my mom, my sister, my dad. I sob and laugh and pace. Adrenaline kicked in and stayed for three days. By Monday, I need to be alone. I need to find a place both physically and inside of myself where I can give myself over to this experience, where I can find my own tears. I piss people off. We pick out flowers and clothes and music. The inner depths of my soul bleed to Hurt lyrics sung by Johnny Cash. "Brad would have wanted that," they say. That's cliche. What Brad would have wanted was not to die.
"IT'S HIM," I scream, walking into an artificially lit room reeking of formaldehyde. Oh my fucking god, it's him. I sink to the floor.
Brad was a boy as far as brothers tend to be. Born four years and eight months after me, he was always there, impressionable, willing to do anything his big sisters told him to. I remember him little, but little he never was. Always too big for his age, he rode his bike, sang to Phil Collins, ate peanut butter from the jar and once put his fist through a glass door window because he wanted pepperoni for dinner. Sick when he was young, weak and in need of protection, of saving in my eyes. Strong-willed in later years, passionate always, an incredible artist with such a need to please everyone he encountered. As I attempt to examine the last two decades of our memories, they don't come. One day the fog will lift. That's cliche. I hope the memories come racing back.
The toilet-shaped bowl with hoses leading to his body is not lost on me. "His hair looks too nice," I tell the funeral director, Brad's signature smirk agreeing even in death. The scars where he pierced his own lip with a nail, where a ring was pulled from his eyebrow in a fight, a scruffy beard my mom told him to shave. "I love you, Sis" echoes from our last conversation. He fell asleep at a party and never woke up.
In the following weeks, it's amazing how things are just funny. How you can lie in bed for two days straight and get up and go to work on Monday. How people get angry when your grief doesn't look like theirs. How a stupid facebook account represents a once living person. How conversations start with, "How are you?" followed with plans and requests so meaningless when I think that my father's name will not carry on, that my children will have only an aunt, that he sat there on a couch for six and half fucking hours before his friends realized he was dead and called an ambulance. That people shouldn't die alone.
A grad school instructor asks me how old he was on my first day back to class. "Oh, 21?! I thought he was a baby by the way you said little brother." As if it's perfectly acceptable to be 21-years-old and dead. How it makes others uncomfortable when they ask how I'm holding up and I answer, "Well at least I got out of bed today." How staying in bed isn't ever an option, but my limbs feel heavy with sleep 24 hours a day.
In the last two weeks, I know that I must keep moving forward. I get out of bed and shower, amazed at what a little makeup and a pair of earrings can do. I go to work, try not to resent the fact that I'm at work, answer emails, and make dinner plans wondering how in the world pedestrians can't see the gaping hole in the center left of my chest. I try baking, cooking, visiting a friend's farm ... all things I know bring me joy in normal every day circumstances. I pet our kitties, sweep the floor, check out my figure in storefront windows I pass walking down the sidewalk. I fill a bag with farmers market vegetables, complain about the end of summer, jump in the car to grab something to eat when I can't muster the energy to cook it myself. I get into bed, alone, but know that I won't always be alone. Jimmy will come home, crawl in beside me, kiss the nakedness of my back and we will continue living. Tighter, together, we will continue living.
