I’ve never taken this long to write a year-end recap (87 days to be exact). But I’ve also never faced this sense of grief, of loss, of trying to hide from the ache.
As soon as I sat down with the words in my mind and the story ready to pour out, my dog immediately came to ask for attention. And when I sent her away (after said attention), the tears started right there in the middle of sentence #2.
And now Nutmeg is asking to go outside. There’s just never a perfect time to feel, to write, to be. You have to make that time, you have to embrace the silence.
Today is normal, but also so different. My husband is in Paris, the neighbors directly behind me are having a party. I opened the door, I hear chatting, I hear the instrumental Taylor Swift I put on to let my thoughts come through.
But my brother is gone.
And that is what makes this year, and recapping last year, a heart-ripping-out level of difficulty.
But it has to be done. I need to acknowledge it, I need to grieve through my words, and if anything, I need to document so maybe one day I can come back and know that I’ve always loved deep enough for it to hurt.
Lessons learned
This is the format I’ve used for the last 5 years that I’ve done this and following this format is the only way I can ever get through writing this blog post, so bear with me.
Cancer
I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to finish that headline. Cancer came, and it took. It took my best friend. It took my brother. It took the person I called to talk about everything and anything. It took someone I worked with, someone I traveled with, someone I grew up with, someone I should have grown old with. It took the blissful, half-glass-full view I had and turned my life into a before-and-after. Before cancer, and after.
It’s so frustrating and isolating. I know so many people who have experienced loss. I’ve written about loss for far too many clients. But to face it myself, and to watch my 31-year-old brother fight this awful disease. That was something that I still just hope to wake up and find out was untrue, not real, not my family, not my life.
But it was, and it is. And I don’t want to lose the chance to honor him because I don’t own up to the reality. That he didn’t feel well last year when I was traveling in France. That I helped him move to Seattle in March, but he moved back to Utah temporarily in May because something was off. That he passed out come July while my mom and I were in Austin, and she came home and took him to the (second) ER where they finally found an answer. And the answer wasn’t good.
Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Blood cancer that requires a bone marrow transplant for any chance at a life. A bone marrow transplant we never got to try because he couldn’t stay in remission long enough.
We found ways to feel hope, to see hope, to wish, along the way. We were lucky in some ways, lucky that I could drop everything and leave my life in Texas — that I could just drive to Utah with my dog and my laptop and my husband who drove 20 hours without stopping to sleep so we could be there. That I had a job that let me move back home, that my husband has a job he can “commute” to via plane as an airline pilot. That we have neighbors and the best of friends who watched over our house, who cut our overgrown bushes, who checked our mail, who watered my plants so I wouldn’t come home to more death.
That I have such a big family. That maybe 1 of the 6 kids would be a match for Julian as a donor (she was, but then she was disqualified for other reasons).
That he trusted me to be his medical decision-maker if he ever couldn’t vocalize his own decisions. That we were close enough for him to feel that way.
But unlucky that now he can’t be my medical director. That he can’t plan my funeral or write my obituary… (Julian, I really hope you appreciate what I wrote because it’s not just an obituary, it’s a poem for the one true poet in the family and we know it’s not me.)
I can’t tell you that this happened for a reason. I never will. And to be honest, I’ll probably always shudder to hear any essence of that phrase or mindset.
But I will tell you that people, memories, photographs, oh my gosh, they matter. They’re all we have now. Take the trip and stress about anything else, later.
If life is to one day end (and now I’ve watched it happen in front of my very own eyes), then I want to feel it, to live it, to enjoy it, to grieve it, and to be with and think of what is important and nothing else. Nothing else.
And yet, it’s March 28th and I’m overworked, overbooked, unable to see above a to-do list or to fly out and visit my mom because I’m afraid of looking at pain straight in the face, and I’ve let myself become buried with work so I don’t have to think about the loved one I buried on January 4th.
For Julian
At this point, though, I wake up every day, still for him. To live when he can’t. To write when he can’t (that one hurts more than the living one). To feel and breathe and be knowing that he fought to have those same privileges. That, as I told my therapist, he wouldn’t want me to be in a pile on the floor, at least, not all of the time.
