It’s Been One Month Since He Died

You’re still receiving messages from friends for whom it took a while to get the news. Over the past weeks, you’ve absorbed almost everyone’s kind words, their Facebook messages are laden with heart emojis and phone numbers and offers to help in any way possible. But there are still those unopened laments that you can’t bring yourself to fully read just yet, like the one from your brother’s teenage crush, a girl writes she will never forget the first time she saw him.

Life confirms melodrama, and the days spent sobbing against foreign hotel floors proved to you, for the first time, that grief can be truly debilitating. But you don’t cry every day, and you also wonder why not. You feel pressure to be more consumed with his death on a minute-by-minute basis. You snake around the emotional skyscrapers that you’ve been conditioned to expect during this kind of heartbreak.

You feel undeserving when you catch yourself smile, you’re weighed down by guilt when you have a good day, there are secret grief police watching and judging. You feel like a criminal as you continue, no matter how shakily, down the old railroad tracks towards your future. How could you not? How can you keep moving when he will never be in motion again?

Rolling away from the aftershocks, you mainly just feel numb. Dumbfoundedness has been replaced by concession. Every day that goes by becomes further from his death being just one long, terrible epic of a dream.

Speaking of dreams, you’ve see him there. He is alive and well, even more eloquent and cheerful in your imagination’s milky backdrop. He’s all smiles next to a brick building that has waves crashing around it on all sides. Somehow the building still stands by the end of the dream.

Sleep becomes a place of comfort and surprise, a refuge where reality fades away and a fairground where all things, past, present, and future can tango, rearranging truths into elaborate subconscious riddles. When your head hits the pillow, you feel lighter. At least, sleep was a safe space until you dreamed that your Mom died, too. Then the trouble sleeping started.

You become obsessed with taking photos of walls. Strong, solid, hundreds of years old, and in every color imaginable. There’s something about their solidity that makes you feel safe. There’s something about the cracks that you can find solidarity with.

For the first time, you understand masochism. Vices are excellent and immediate distractions. Instant sensation distracts from deeper, more unchanging pain. You’re not going to seriously hurt yourself, but you’re starting to peek into the psyches of people who do.

You gobble peanut butter by the double-spoonful. Losing your appetite and losing a sibling didn’t come in a pair for you. You upped the portions, you ate to forget. You ate the second portion that he would never have. You imagine how every Thanksgiving from here on will be miserable, because what family of 3 can eat a whole turkey?

Thanksgivings past, where all the best photos of him were captured, beaming, surrounded by family, dressed up in our Hawaiian Sunday best, second-hand aloha shirts crisp. Those were the best memories.

You’ve gone through hundreds of old albums, looking for hints that he knew what his future held. Instead you see his smiling face, in too-large baseball caps, and in a black shirt with spiky hair, holding a trumpet, and in a suit. You see only the incredible person you knew and loved, a sparkle in his innocent turquoise eyes, and you remember him at every age more tenderly than the last.

The questions come and come and come. What if this, what if that. What if all roads hadn’t led to the same dead end: his death. You rework the puzzle pieces of your life to remember how you could have stopped this from happening. But no one can turn off to avoid the dead end when no one saw it coming in the first place. In the beginning, there are a million things you could have done. In the end, there is nothing that could have changed what happened.

You cherish and obsess over the last gift that he gave you. When you unwrap your headphones, fancy new silver earbuds, tucked gently into a carrying case, you’re flooded with emotion. Depending on the day, you react differently. If it’s a good day, you’re let off easy, and a gentle warmth spreads from your ears to your heart, knowing that they are a little piece of him. On the bad days, the earbuds don’t make it to your ears and sit limply in your palm, another reminder of his vanishing.

Music sounds different than ever before. Suddenly, seemingly simple lyrics transform into twisted, painful poetry that echoes through your ear canals, haunting the dark, shielded parts of your mind, unreachable by anything but sound.

You become an only child, and you take on the burden of being your parent’s only one left. You step into the role of Being Strong For Them. You rub their backs when they cry, cook them dinner every night, and worry for them more than for yourself. When you’re gone, you share a support group over email, sending them rigorous updates of your whereabouts. They send you obituaries to edit. You send back articles suggesting therapy.

On the tiny screen across continents they look sad and nervous, too small. You haven’t lived within driving distance from them for 10 years, and didn’t think you would for at least another 10 more. But your role has changed entirely, and you need each other more than you ever knew you would.

Relationships take on whole new meanings. You start to need your friends like they are your blood, too. Now that you know that someone you love, young and able-bodied, could be gone in no time at all, and you start to reimagine life without them. The thought is so viscous and stabbing that you start to call them everyday. You imagine reconfiguring your life so you can be closer to them. You start to realize you have so many sisters and brothers, even if the one you really wanted is gone.

You surrender to the sadness, a scar that will never go away, one that will take years to heal. You become the vulnerable person you didn’t know was hidden inside. For the first time, you are emotional putty in the hands of those close to you. For the first time ever, you let your friends take care of you.

Kindness floods into your life in a way that you never expected. In handwritten letters, white roses, a non-negotiable fly-in visit from a friend, a blanket sent from another country from because it was the closest another friend “could come to giving you a hug.”

You gain a sixth sense for authenticity, and suddenly you can tell when someone means what they are saying. You look into people’s souls more. You can see their pain reflecting in small, liquid rimmed pools at the corners of their eyes. You can sense their truth in gentle, calculated touches and soft incantations. You feel their heart bursting with care and sorrow through thin tee shirts against your own.

For the first time, you realize that almost everyone misses someone like you do. That loss is a part of life, and regardless of how things should have been in the revised versions of our lives, this train only goes one way. Only through love can we soften loss.

You’re one month in, and things are getting easier. While you have the rest of your life to explore this loss, there isn’t a sun that sets that you don’t think of him and wish he were seeing it, too.

I love and miss you, Alex.