My Person

This past weekend was my beloved O’s wedding in Pennsylvania. Yes, I flew back to the United States for 48 hours just for a wedding in the middle-of-nowhere Amish country. While O and I don’t talk nearly as much as we used to, but when it counted most, he picked up the phone. And for that, I will love him forever. Buying a transatlantic plane ticket for his wedding is the least I can do.

If you had told me 10 years ago, when I first met him, that O and I would become as close as we did, that I would trust him more than almost any other person on the planet, that we would have weekly phone chats that could last hour, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second. O was the weird, somewhat creepy little Mexican guy who whined too much, and I was the condescending bitch who had no tolerance for people disagreeing with me.

But then something happened after we graduated from college. We both moved to new cities to start the next stage of our lives, and we both got lonely. We missed the comfort of having friends living right down the hall or across the quad. Through our loneliness, we tentatively reached out to each other. We cautiously reassured one another that we each enjoyed our weekly chats, that no, the other person wasn’t being too needy. We learned to navigate each other’s quirks and flaws, with the mutual understanding that we’re both quirky and flawed people, an important realization when you’re surrounded by the type of lily-white, salt-of-the-earth people who typically attend our alma mater.

When 3 killed himself, O answered my phone call that early Sunday morning. When O’s dad died, I sent flowers and texted O on holidays and his dad’s birthday. When I got this job, O was one of the first people I told, because I wanted him to know that even a job in Ireland wouldn’t keep me from his wedding.

At the wedding, I got a few snippets of time alone with O. Each time, we gave each other big, long hugs (O always was the best hugger in our group). You don’t really get a lot of time for lengthy, heartfelt conversations with the groom at a wedding, so I think we tried to put a lot into those embraces. Gratitude, trust, the promise that we’ll always be there for each other. Hugs make for great means of communication.

I told O that I love him and want him to be happy, and I’ve never meant it more. The new Mrs. O might not be my favorite friend-spouse in the world, but their wedding was gorgeous, and O deserves nothing less. The weekend, in addition to being hectic and exhausting, was a comforting reminder of how much my friends have given me, and how much bliss I wish for them in return.

What Is This Feeling?

Thursday was my 28th birthday. As mentioned before, I’m a naturally narcissistic person, so I really like birthdays most of the time. Last year was not at all fun, but this year, I have much more experience having a dead brother, and you know what? I was going to enjoy my birthday anyway. I had a good book ready to finish, a loaded Starbucks gift card, and dinner plans with visiting friends. Good stuff. Honestly, that’s all I expected. Some coffee, some good food, and, of course, reading a few “Happy Birthday” posts on my Facebook wall throughout the day.

But that’s not all that happened. First, my amazing coworkers threw me a surprise party, complete with balloons, banners, and a cake. I can’t even remember the last time I blew out candles on a birthday cake, much less celebrated at work! Then, at dinner with the phenomenal Phillips family (old family friends – I babysat their kids ALL THE TIME when I was in middle school and high school) not only took me out to dinner, they bought me gifts from my 2 favorite stores in all of Dublin, without knowing they were my favorites! It was a wonderful day, surrounded by wonderful people.

As I was walking home after dinner, I felt a sense of something enjoyable that I haven’t felt for quite awhile. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t just feeling loved; I was feeling lovable. Going out to dinner with friends, having a bunch of office mates throw me a surprise party – these are things that happen to normal people, people who are liked. And not once throughout the day did I find myself in my normal thought pattern of “Oh, they’re just doing this because they’re nice people. If they really knew how awful I am, they wouldn’t.”

3’s death, in addition to causing all the horror and grief and pain, served as a rather forceful reminder that I am not normal. I am profoundly damaged, emotionally eviscerated by the men with whom I share the most genetic code. Before 3 killed himself, I had just started to have a tiny bit of hope that, despite years of mental destruction at the hands of my mentally ill father, I could possibly have a mentally functional life – solid relationships, happiness, etc. Then 3 pretty much blew that hope out of the water. “Nope! You don’t get to feel normal. Your psyche is a festering minefield, torn up by dozens of fierce examples of betrayal and abuse.”

I’ve grown to respect this feeling. After all, one can have a perfectly adequate life without close relationships, right? It’s not the 1950’s – I don’t need a husband, and I have enough fantastic friends that I can spread out my crazy without getting too close to any one of them. Most days, it doesn’t sound like that bad of a plan. Easier than working through my deeply familiar psychopathology, that’s for sure. But then my birthday happened and I let myself think for a minute that maybe there’s hope for me after all.

Time Limits

Years ago, after my first big grad school screw-ups (I completely misread some statistical output, throwing my advisor into a frenzy, wasting her time and the time of a bigwig in the field, who advisor had called for advice), I was whining about said screw-up during my then-weekly phone conversation with O. In one of the more brilliant moves he’s pulled in our nearly 10 years of friendship, O told me that yes, I screwed up, and yes, I was right to be upset about it, but that I only had a limited time to feel bad for myself, and then I had to move on. I think he was actually really generous with my time limit – 3 months or something.

That was such a fantastic response for me. It didn’t invalidate my feelings, but, at the same time, it reminded me that such feelings weren’t exactly productive, so I shouldn’t hang on to them forever. Plus, as O knew, I work well with deadlines. I like having lists and limits and rule books. It didn’t end up taking me anywhere near 3 months to get over that first big career mistake, but that conversation with O definitely put me on the path to moving forward.

The thing with grief is that very few people, if any, are going to give you a time limit. No one’s going to say “Yes, your brother killed himself, and that sucks, but after a year, you have to stop feeling bad.” Losing a brother, a child, a spouse, etc., is such a massive disruption that no one can really tell you how long it’s going to take to start to emerge from the fog of despondence. Hell, if anyone had tried to give me a time limit after 3’s death, I might have smacked them.

That being said, I am now in a place where I can acknowledge that prolonged grief isn’t necessarily beneficial. It’s not healthy to hold on to misery, to remain nestled within the morose dimness that the sudden death of a loved one can bring. While 3’s death will never be OK, I can feel it starting to enter “It’s something that happened” territory, meaning that it’s in the past, not something I actively have to overcome every day.

How I came to this most recent realization is one of my potentially more pathological quirks: because I live by myself and [like to think that I] handle most things by myself, I sometimes fantasize about sympathy – just laying my head on someone’s shoulder, while they tell me it’s going to be OK (don’t judge me; I know that’s weird). Over the past year and a half, most of those daydreams have ended up at “My brother killed himself.” Reasonable, I think. Suicide is a pretty big deal. Only a few nights ago, I was imagining some kind of difficult situation, and daydream-me didn’t include 3 in her litany of bemoaned situations. 17 months, apparently, is long enough for me to distance myself from the acute shock and grief of losing a brother.

Now! This is not to say that I’m never going to be sad or distressed or outright destroyed over 3’s death ever again. And it’s certainly not to say that 17 months is a hard and fast grief time limit for anybody else. I just think that, in my own personal effort to document and sort through all of my jumbled thoughts after my brother’s death, this signals a sort of new milestone for me. After 17 months, reverting to grieving 3 is no longer my default reaction (even in my imagination, where I’m actively trying to get sympathy). I wasn’t given a time limit, but I think, I think, I’m moving forward anyway.

So Much Love

Well, I am officially in Ireland. It’s been a hectic weekend with traveling and fixing up my apartment (note: trying to drag 3 wheeled suitcases across a cobblestone street = bad idea), but things are looking good.

I’ve been so tired that I haven’t thought a whole lot about 3 since I got here. In fact, between being on the plan Friday night and being flat-out exhausted Saturday night, I forgot to talk to him before I went to sleep. As far as excuses go, moving to another country is a pretty good one, though.

When I first moved to start the US portion of this job, I worried about how 3 would fit into my new life in a new state. Now that it’s been a year, I’m not “worried,” per se. I know it’s going to take some adjustment to figure out how to live with a dead brother in a new country, but everything about moving internationally takes adjustment.

The anniversary of 3’s death served as more of a turning point than anything has thus far. On one hand, it’s an odd point of pride; we’ve all survived one year without our brother, son, and uncle. Certainly, it’s still painful to think about, completely surreal that 3 is gone, but now, for the most part, we know what to expect. We’ve lived through birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries, so now we know how those feel. We’ve heard sad songs, watched too-close-to-home scenes in TV and movies, and walked by pictures of 3 on the walls. We know what triggers anguish and what doesn’t. That knowledge is very empowering.

On the other hand, the anniversary serves as a more subtle, intangible marker, as if I’ve been given permission to be happy, not to have 3’s death be the defining factor in my life. It’s a strange feeling and certainly not one I expected. At the beginning, I feared this feeling, the idea that one day, I wouldn’t be actively miserable that my brother shot himself. Now, it’s OK. If I had to try to describe it, I’d say that I’ve learned how to classify my grief, how to put it in its proper place. It doesn’t have to be all-consuming, nor should it be.

Part of this realization may have come from all of the stories I heard over the holidays, things that happened the week of 3’s death that I didn’t know about before. I learned that my brother-in-law, J’s husband, is the one who met Mom and Stepdad at the door when they came back from speaking with the police at 3’s apartment. I learned that L was at church when she found out, playing the organ. She then had to go back and play for 2 more services before she could make it home.

Most importantly, though, I learned more about the absolutely massive response my family got from people around us. In the days and weeks following 3’s death, Mom received over 250 cards of condolences, including over a dozen church service dedications and 9 Bibles donated in 3’s name. Cards from coworkers, relatives, family friends, people we hadn’t heard from in years. So. Much. Love.

With that in mind, I feel much more comfortable with starting a new chapter after my brother’s death: gently putting aside my active grief, knowing that I will still have plenty of moments of sadness, but making room for all of the other things life has in store. There will be good, bad, stress, joy, worry, and laughter, and there will always be love.

 

Good Job

Happy New Year, all. Though now I mentally measure my years from the date of 3’s death, January 1st is still something special.

As I was leaving my apartment for the last time a few days ago, on my way to my parents’ house before I leave for Ireland, I felt a sense of self-centered melancholy as I contemplated this past year. I’ve gone through a lot, and I really wanted that fact acknowledged by someone. Tell me I did a good job. Tell me that this year was indescribably difficult, and I got through it with admirable strength.

Luckily for me and my ego, I got my wish. But I am not the only one who had a tough year. Everyone has something to deal with, everyone has struggles. The start of a new year means that we have all collectively survived our challenges for another 365 days. That is certainly an achievement worth celebrating.

So congratulations. You, whoever you are, are amazing. You got through an entire year. That’s hard to do! Survival is difficult. People fight for it all the time. For some of us, surviving each day isn’t a conscious decision. For others, it is. Some people choose to live every single day, by not taking those pills or not picking up that gun. That’s incredible, and I’m proud of you for that. If no one has told you yet, good job. You did awesome.

In fact, I bet you did so much more than just choose to live. You also dealt with whatever the world has thrown at you: work, school, stress, mental illness, family drama, war, famine, pestilence, death. All of the above! You handled it and made it through to 2014. Life is hard, but you kept going. That deserves attention and acclimation. Well done.

But you didn’t merely push through your own struggles. You helped others. You mattered to others. You listened, read, responded, did favors, bought gifts, smiled, cared, and loved. Because of you, someone else (me!) got through whatever they were dealing with. Brilliant, I tell you. Just brilliant.

I really hope that someone else in your respective lives lets you know just how fantastic you are for getting through another year, but just in case: good job. You are phenomenal. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Survival is hard, and life can be ridiculous, but you did it. You’re still doing it. May your 2014 have enough beautiful, funny, loving, and luminescent moments to help you make it to 2015.

Sincerely, 3’s Sister