Turning Away

It’s been just over 2 years since I started this blog. Two years and 165 posts on grief, life, and family. Over 60,000 words about my brother, my thoughts, and the process of living after suicide.

I provide these figures because, for the past couple of months or so, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that I don’t have much more to write. There’s a lot to learn in 2 years, but lately, almost nothing feels novel anymore. For the first year, everything was new. I’d never lived a year with a dead brother before. Last year was about learning to live in non-immediate grief. I wasn’t doing everything for the first time, and that, in itself, was new.

Now, I feel like I’ve experienced enough to give me a pretty solid handle on what life is like after death. There will be moves and jobs and new events; growing babies, and new babies that will never meet Uncle 3; songs and shows and stories that remind me forcefully of my brother and my situation, and others that I don’t think relate to me that well at all; the incredible love of friends and family, enough to carry me through interactions with those less compassionate; I’ll choose to tell some new acquaintances about my brother, but not all. Mom will still have a harder time than I do, and RJ will be the worst off of all; I’ll still ask people to pray for both of them before they pray for me.

And I will move through life with comparative ease. My brother’s suicide will have very little impact on my day-to-day activities. At night, at least for the forseeable future, I’ll still talk to him, telling him that I miss him and love him. If I have a bad day, or if I just choose to let myself really remember as I lay in bed, remember what that first week was like, from getting the phone call to giving the eulogy, I’ll cry with the same realization that brought me to tears 2 years ago: I want my brother back, and that will never happen. That desire will always be there, I think, to some extent.

This isn’t to say that new experiences won’t arise. I’m sure they will; at 28, I know I’ve only seen a very small fraction of the human experience so far. Still, I don’t know how many of these experiences will be new enough to motivate me to post again. I started this blog as my own digital Pensieve, a way to organize my scarily jumbled thoughts after my brother’s suicide. It really was only for me – my own way of coping. However, a small part of my writing was done with the hope of helping others in this same situation. After 3 died, I couldn’t find many helpful, real resources on sibling suicide. I know now that every grief process is different, but maybe someone in the same horrible, tragic place will find some solidarity in my descriptions. Of course, I also know that this blog is virtually impossible to find, even if you’re looking for blogs on brother suicide, but still. There’s always that chance.

So thank you, to the anonymous internet people and anyone who has read anything I’ve written over the past two years, especially those who have been kind enough to comment. Every single comment on this blog has been gracious and supportive, and I’m grateful for every single one. Again, I don’t know how often I’ll return here to update, if at all, but it’s been an immensely helpful part of my grief process. I don’t know if I am emotionally any more whole that I was two years ago, but I know more, and knowledge is, in fact, power.

In many ways, 3’s death is no more Real now than it was at the beginning. I know he’s not here; that’s a pretty undeniable fact, but suicide and death are so much sharper, so much harder to accept than simple absence. Still, I’ve learned a lot and I’ve lived. I’ve lived over two years without my baby brother, and I’m going to keep doing just that. In the face of such intense, personal agony, I can’t really ask more than that.

New Home, Same Dead Brother

This week is my first at my brand new Dream Job. All in all, it’s gone pretty well. I’ve done all my paperwork, gotten everything in order, and I really like the feeling of enthusiasm around the university. My new roommate seems a bit high-maintenance, but it’s only a 6 month arrangement, so even that’s no big deal.

The big deal, as per usual, is that my baby brother is still dead. I know that, of course, but I’ve been so busy moving and starting the new job that 3’s death fell by the wayside. It helps (doesn’t help?) that no one here – not one single person – knows about 3. Not my roommate, not my boss, not my new coworkers. Instead, I’ve been running around for the past 3 days, setting up my new apartment, and learning the ropes for my new job. I’ve experienced pride as I successfully navigated paperwork mountains, frustration as my roommate asked for yet another free ride, and relief as I managed to find my way around a new city. Pretty normal reactions to a big life change, I think.

Then, tonight, over 48 hours into my new adventure, I finally slowed down and checked on RJ’s Instagram. She has posted a picture from Christmas of her, 3, and R modeling the “texting gloves” that Gram knitted everyone. RJ captioned the photo “Last day I spent with my brother.” 

For some reason – emotional exhaustion from the move, pent-up frustration from new roommate, etc. – seeing that picture with that caption hit me with a pain more physical than I’ve felt in months. Nothing compared to the initial anguish, of course, but still. Curse the ineffective magic 6-month mark for not making things all better. 

Really, if we’re operating under my hypothesis of limited emotional resources, this makes sense, only in the reverse of what I’ve felt for the past few months. Instead of being so busy grieving 3 that normally benign things upset me, today, I’ve been so busy with work preparations and annoyed at new roommate that I don’t have enough energy not to feel miserable about 3. 

This all still falls under the general umbrella of “I’m not suffering nearly as much as Mom and RJ,” but I was genuinely surprised to be hit so hard by a picture of 3. Maybe we’ll talk about it tonight. He’ll probably tell me how good he looks in said picture [3 nods his affirmation]. With any luck, I can relax a bit over the rest of the week (hooray for national holidays!) and get myself emotionally balanced before the real work starts next week. 

Free My Soul

I’ve spent lots of time analyzing and lamenting the fact that I don’t get too emotional over 3’s death. Talking about it, writing about it, even just thinking about it doesn’t often change my mood. That being said, a couple of moments from the past few weeks have made me realize that there is one very familiar key to my otherwise shriveled, useless heart: music.

I’ve always been musical, reveling in orchestral arrangements and modulations. It makes sense that music would make me actually feel the loss of 3 far more than just thoughts or words. It’s usually not the expected songs, either. I didn’t cry at Miranda Lambert’s “Over You,” and I just roll my eyes every time I hear Ke$ha’s “Die Young.” It’s the slightly less-expected, occasionally more subtle songs that really get to me.

I came to this realization the other day as I was in my car (lots of breakthroughs happen to come while I’m driving) and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” came on the radio. I didn’t think twice, I just started singing, pretending, as usual, that my voice perfectly mimicked Ms. Houston’s. At some point during the second verse, I couldn’t sing anymore. My voice caught in my throat and my eyes welled up. Well, shit. Turns out that giant, symphonic songs with soaring vocals about leaving someone you love trigger something in me. Good to know.

After watching 3’s final video on Sunday, I was sad but not overwhelmed. A few deep breaths, and I was back to normal. Then I got in the car. I clicked one of the radio preset buttons in the usual order, just in time to catch the last chorus of Nickelback’s “Far Away,” the one with the key change and the lyrics “I wanted, I wanted you to stay/’Cause I needed, I need to hear you say/That I love you, I have loved you all along/And I forgive you for being away for far too long.” Uuuuuuuuuuuuugh. A rising key change and oddly appropriate lyrics speaking to a brother who killed himself? I was gone. This marks the second time since 3’s death that I’ve cried at a Nickelback song. Please don’t judge me.

I suppose I should be grateful, and I am. It’s comforting to know that I still can feel something, even if such feelings are seemingly far less intense and more fleeting than the ones experienced by Mom and RJ. That is the function of music, after all: to say things that we can’t and express emotions that we won’t.

The Coroner’s Report

According to my mom, the county coroner’s office finally completed the report on 3’s death. I never expected our sort-of-small-town investigators to be CSI:Midwest or anything, but almost 4 months? That seems excessive. Anyway, the report was relatively straightforward; it described the entry and exit wounds, the various substances in 3’s blood, and the state of the apartment. (It also misidentified his height by at least 4 inches and completely ignored one of his tattoos.)

Mom and I had different reactions to the report. While we were both pretty irked by the blatant descriptive mistakes – seriously, how do you miss the 9-inch cross design on his left ribcage – we diverged on the rest of it. Mom focused on the description of 3’s apartment, the “crime scene.” The report described how 3’s roommate’s room was a mess, with drawers pulled out, indicating that 3 had to look for the gun. Mom didn’t like how this implied that 3 put actual thought into killing himself, that, in her words, “he had time to change his mind.”

Well, of course he had time to change his mind. He doesn’t just carry a gun with him at all times. He had to go and get the gun, even if it was just in another room. I tried to reassure Mom by reminding her that 3 could have found the gun in seconds, trying to minimize the imagined amount of time he spent in anguish. In reality, none of us know. 3 could have sat for hours, angry, sobbing, miserable, before he finally pulled the trigger. I choose to believe that he made himself so angry, that the amount of time between deciding to search for the gun and killing himself was no more than a few minutes. All that impulsivity.

I, on the other hand, focused on the blood report. According to the coroner’s office, 3 did not have anything other than marijuana in his system. This information was comforting to me. Basically, the report didn’t tell me anything that contradicts my working hypothesis of 3’s life and death. He always maintained, and I believed him, that he didn’t do any drugs harder than weed; the report confirmed that. I believed that he was upset, emotional, and irrational at the time of his death, not calm and collected with a plan. The messy state of his roommate’s room, the apparent wildness with which 3 searched for the gun, supports that idea.

Really, the report doesn’t mean anything. Obviously, it’s unreliable at best, but beyond that, what does it even matter? He’s dead. He shot himself. That’s the outcome of this story. It doesn’t matter how long it took him to find the gun or how many illegal substances were in his system. My brother is gone.

When I See It in Stone

Yesterday, Mom sent out an e-mail to my siblings and I with potential images for 3’s headstone at the cemetery. I was halfway through looking at the different styles and sayings before it struck me just how truly ridiculous it all was. There I was, sitting in my apartment, on my laptop, considering the comparative strengths of different tombstone designs. For my baby brother. Jesus.

I knew that Mom was going to look at headstones this week (cleverly scheduled after a massage appointment – good job, Mom), and I know that I will, of course, visit 3’s grave the next time I’m home, but that knowledge didn’t make this barrage of Real any less jarring.

Miranda Lambert sings a song called “Over You,” which was written by Blake Shelton in remembrance of his older brother’s death. Many of the lyrics are eerily appropriate to my situation. The first verse talks about remembering being together at Christmas, which was the last time I saw 3. The chorus sings “They say I’ll be OK, but I’m not going to ever get over you.” 11 weeks in, these lyrics make more sense than ever. I’m never going to truly get over 3’s death, and I’ll never really be OK with it.

But it’s the bridge of “Over You” that really resonates with this past week: “It really sinks in, you know, when I see it in stone.” I left home before 3’s interment, so I still haven’t seen his gravesite. Add that impending visit to the list of things I never thought I would have to do. While I don’t think seeing 3’s name on a headstone will make his death “sink in,” (I’m pretty sure seeing his body in a coffin took care of that), I’m sure that image will be every bit as painful as Ms. Lambert implies.

I know 3 is gone. I see his picture on my bookshelf in my living room, I see the memorial messages my siblings post on Facebook, and my friends are consistent in asking how I’m doing. I know 3 is dead; I don’t need to be reminded. The headstone, the choice of images and phrases, is a reminder that I don’t need or want right now. I understand the necessity, but I’m feeling petulant, like a child who doesn’t want to do her schoolwork. Leave me aloooooooooone. I just want to plaaaaaaaaaay.

I still get to have fun, of course. By career standards, I’m having a phenomenal semester, and I am happy about that. But that happiness doesn’t completely disguise the fact that my brother is dead. That knowledge makes blatant reminders of 3’s death, like choosing a headstone, that much more bitter.