4 Years Later
Following the four year anniversary of my brother’s death, my therapist asked about the week of my life surrounding the date. I explained how I journaled about a piece of that time I had never considered before, “It felt like a new way to sit in – or with – my grief.” And then he asked, how I am feeling [with all that] right now? And, I don’t think I answered him well. I pivoted to something else because I knew my grief had already taken up enough time in our session that day.
But if I could go back to the conversation, I would have explained that in this season of grieving, my grief feels like a begrudged companion. Or, a small critter I carry around in a knapsack. Someone who – uninvitedly – attached themselves to me on my journey of living and is mostly quiet and even forgotten at times, but occasionally DEMANDS to be noticed and attended to.
So…like a cat, basically.
It gets loud. And it will not leave me alone until I give it what it wants.
I don’t know if this is good or right. If I get overly spiritual about it, I don’t know if maybe I’m consenting to a stronghold or an oppressive spirit of something attaching itself to me…? But it doesn’t feel that way.
It feels like a kindness to not ignore this companion. To be gentle and respectful with them.
It feels practical and pragmatic not to try to dismiss them or pretend they aren’t there, when they very obviously are, and will be. For the rest of my time on this side of Heaven.
Most days I get to live life fairly normal – not the same, never the same as before, but normal-for-me-now normal – and I don’t even think of this shadowy figure that follows me around. But then some days, the sun is just right and the shadow looms large and dark and long in front of me, almost blocking my path. I could try to outrun it, but I know it will just keep taking each step in front of me like any shadow. I could turn my back and pretend it wasn’t attached to my heels just behind me, but what good is trying to run from something that isn’t going away?
So instead, I’ve learned on those days, or weeks, I just have to slow down, sit down, quiet everything else vying for attention, and look my grief shadow straight in the eyes.
I ask what it wants from me this time. Usually, it wants to show me or give me something, not take something away. Or, if it does take something, it is a weight I didn’t even realize I was carrying and I walk forward a little lighter afterward. But I forget all this after each encounter and go back to perceiving it as an ill-intentioned intruder.
I saw a quote recently that said, “Try not to fight with your grief, my love. It doesn’t want to be here either.” (Becky Hemsley) And it just made me feel a compassion for this unwanted tagalong. Gave it a personhood.
I’m not ready to call my grief a friend yet, but I also don’t loathe its presence like I did in the beginning.
In Years Past
Every year my grief journey has looked different. New Year’s Eve was hardest the first year. His birthday, July 13th, has been hard every year and the last couple years it was extended to all of Summertime. My birthday usually throws me into a day or two of deep sorrow and introspection because my brother always made such a big deal of other people’s birthdays, mine included.
In fact, there’s was a particular haunting – I haven’t found a better word to describe it – which came with my birthday this past year when I turned the same age my brother at his time of death.
It was unnerving to think of living past him. Beyond him. Further than him.
The anniversary of his death has never much bothered me before. In fact, one year, the date came and went on the calendar and I didn’t even realize till a few days later. But this year, his death anniversary date was BIG. LOUD.
On February first, I looked at the impending date at the end of the month and knew… this was going to be hard. I knew I needed to make space for it. All of it. Whatever was coming. I dreaded the numbers creeping higher on the calendar. And then, about a week out, I felt like God opened my eyes to something brand new I had never considered before – he had me sit down and sit in the days leading up to my brother’s decision and death.
On Feb 22nd, I contemplated how that might very well have been the day he decided. I thought about what was going on in my life at that time. And I wrote about it this way:
Today was the day you made your decision, I think.
Today was the day you went skydiving in Phoenix. Was it a dry run? A test drive?
Based on the details in your letter, I have speculated…. Were you planning to actually skydive and not pull the cord? I think that could have been your plan. But when you tested it that day, you realized they don’t let novices jump alone, so you had to pivot last minute. No chute necessary.
It will be a warm(er) Saturday again today, so my mind has me flashing back to Saturday, Feb 27th, 2021. The day I got your letter, and realized you were missing – was oblivious to the fact you had already been dead 3 days – and our whole world started unraveling. The day that normal ceased to exist.
There will be no canasta game with mom and dad today, like that day. Dad doesn’t remember how to dress himself at this point, much less play a card game of strategy.
Today, I would likely be texting you memories and milestones like, “Four years ago today, we were planning canasta with mom and dad” and that would be enough grieve. Instead, I’m here alone wishing there were cell towers in Heaven.
But back to this day – on the 22nd, while you were jumping out of an airplane for the first time, we were all blissfully unaware of what you were about to do, and life was going on as normal. Well, our new normal, that is, with only three weeks in to a new addition in our home. This tiny human who screamed and cried most hours of the day and demanded more from me than I felt I had to give.
I had no idea that what little I did have was about to be stretched even more thin. That the version of me my son got to meet on his birth day was also about to plummet over the edge of the Grand Canyon. He would never know that mother again. He would grow up with an irrevocably altered version of a mom. It doesn’t seem fair. And my heart aches for both of us.
Brother – I’ve spent so many hours trying to get inside your head on this day. With no success.
I rewatched your skydiving videos today. Over and over. Pausing, playing, rewinding, replaying. I studied them. Trying to decipher even the slightest micro-expressions on your face.
There is this one moment on ascent, when you’re looking out the plane window – the camera is filming you without you knowing – and I wonder if you are thinking about what you are about to do. Thinking of seeing another patch of desert ground from a distance that high, without a parachute, in the next 48 hours. I swear when you turn back and catch the camera rolling, there is a split second when you blink back tears. I’ve never noticed that before and don’t know that anyone else would catch it. Except I know that face of yours.
One beat later, you were making some joke and flashing that big toothy guffaw of a laugh. You perfected the art of masking.
None of us ever really knew what was going on in that head of yours.
And we never will, on this side of Heaven.
Then, on the 25th, which is the day after he died (we think), I wrote this:
Today is one of the in-between days. One of the days when you were dead, but I didn’t know.
Your body was lying shattered on the canyon floor and my life went on in obliviousness.
Your niece, Laila, turned 10 on this day four years ago.
And we had our one month check up with Samson’s pediatrician.
Barry sent you a funny text today. He was thinking about the time you smashed your cell phone in your H2 Hummer door and bent it in half. You would never read the memory. But we didn’t know that.
It would be another two days before I got the email you set to be delivered posthumously and even had some semblance of an idea you were gone.
Six more days before they find your body.
But we are unaware of all that today.
Today, we are here with a newborn, still obsessing over poop color and frequency – I have so many poop pictures on my phone – and I haven’t slept more than three hours at a time in almost a month. Basically, I’m enduring actual torture. All while my body has only just stopped bleeding the post-birth lochia. (How’s that for TMI?)
We were up most of the night with a screaming baby. I video chatted with our OT around 10pm because he just. wouldn’t. stop. crying. but also wouldn’t nurse. I was sobbing too. He would arch his back and turn red head-to-toe, acting like the nourishment coming out of my body was acid to him. He’s just frustrated and hungry. But I don’t know this at the time because I’ve only been a mom for exactly four weeks. I carry so much shame. I feel like I’m failing him. Failing at breastfeeding, which feels like the only way my worth is measured in this stage of motherhood.
I think today is the day I looked at B through red, tear-swollen eyes and said, “I just don’t feel like I can do this.” By which I meant, I can’t handle everything it is requiring of me to be a mom.
We are two weeks in to occupational therapy. Samson is not gaining enough weight, not getting enough milk from my body when he’s latching, even though I’m producing plenty. They label it a tongue tie. In our appointment this week, I cried in utter exhaustion and defeat. That’s when our OT gave me some of the wisest words I’ve ever heard: “Don’t quit on a bad day,” she said, referring to my breastfeeding journey.
I think about the irony of those words now. She was giving me that advice on the same day you chose to quit this life altogether.
Mom and Dad just got back in town a few days ago, they have been with us almost the entire time since S was born. Mom has been such a tremendous help to me. I couldn’t have done this without her and her steady presence. Soon, I will lose her too. She will become unavailable to me – this version of her lost forever – consumed by the ravages of grief.
But today, the sun was out and B & I went for a walk during one of S’s naps.
I have no idea what is coming.
Last year, when I felt released to start writing his story, my story of grief and grieving, I wrote about the 27th, which is the day we got his letter and learned he was missing, and, March 3rd, the day I got “The Call” they found his body. I wrote on the anniversaries of the days these things happened, but it wasn’t necessarily with grief, I was just telling the story, finally.
This time, it was different all together. This was to be an intentional time of deep repair.
I have always acknowledged that so much of my maternity leave and early motherhood was stolen, tainted by what happened, but at the time I was only angry about it. I raged about it to anyone who would listen. But I had never sat and thought in retrospect about what my life looked like in that season and what was happening simultaneously in my brother’s timeline.
I kept two separate journals at that time – one for motherhood and one for grief (once we knew what happened). It was a whole exercise in grief to go back and look at them, and my calendar, and my photos from that season all side-by-side.
A whole new way to sit with my grief, a new piece I’m uncovering to heal.
I’m finding so much ache and empathy and compassion for that girl – the girl I no longer am – the version of myself who went through all of that. What each of those eight days looked like, felt like, and was full of already before an astronomically deep grief was thrust on top of it.
As I was recounting all of this to a friend over the weekend, I couldn’t help but recognize and effuse about what an incredible sweetness it feels like that God doesn’t make us face everything at once. What a kindness.
On the one hand, four years seems like an awful long time to still be pulling back the curtain on new, unexpected hurts, and putting tiny fractions of my heart back together. But there’s absolutely no way I could have faced all the grief, all the losses, all the trauma of what happened that day in February in one fell swoop. And He knew that.
It’s been one layer of healing at a time. Piece-by-piece. Memory-by-memory. Loss-by-loss.
Last year, reliving those other two days was enough to re-enter at one time. This year, I could face revisiting other moments of that week.
And I can’t help but want to tell everyone how God is so, so good to be slow and gentle with us.
It feels a lot like hard work, going back and reliving the darkest days of my life. But it also feels like a gift.
And this is what my grief journey looks like four years later.