Sibling love

I watched Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet last week, and it broke me open. While there’s been a lot of criticism about the story manipulating emotion, I felt seen. Grief isn’t often portrayed in such a raw way.

The narrative largely focuses on the mother’s grief and Jessie Buckley deserves all the awards. But the sibling bond is integral to the story. Losing someone who exists in parallel to you, someone who shares your world and rhythm, is unlike any other kind of loss. The pain of continuing to live when your companion has been left behind is both silent and deafening. Every birthday, every milestone, feels like a betrayal.

I watched the film alone in the cinema. By the end, my face was soaking wet. I cried for a full day afterwards. It felt precious, in a way, I felt closer to my brother that night. That raw, open-heartedness is something that, when you’re fully in it, you don’t want to go away.

One thing Ive been grappling with lately is that I don’t like who I was when my brother was alive. I was a bitchy big sister who was pretty self concerned. Im not sure how much he liked me either.

I always hated it when people asked me "were you close?" as if it made things any easier if I said "no". Because thats where regret resides and in my case, I have a lot.

Have you read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking? For me, it captured the visceral shift in who you are before and after losing a loved one, too soon, and especially unexpectedly.

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.”

― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I made my own personal post but I figured this might also help someone that may be grieving.

It's been 14 years since the accident that killed my brother. Officially his anniversary is 2 days later but the accident always stood out in my mind and sapped my emotional energy so by the time the actual anniversary came I was numb.

This is the first time in 2 years I've been home for the anniversary since I was away at school. And it's early in the day no telling how I'll feel in a few hours but for the first time I'm okay.

I don't feel like the world is crashing, that it should be in standstill, I don't feel like I'm burning up inside and no one can see. It took me many many years to get to a place where even saying my brother's name outloud didn't end in tears. So I want to say to anyone else suffering a loss especially a sibling take your time. It was only last year that I went the whole day without crying I could actually smile and laugh and feel okay. Obviously with a pandemic I'm not doing that but I feel okay now.

I'm sure there will be relapses where I'm crying to the world how unfair it is that I went through such a traumatic loss as a child and wish he was still here. That's normal. But to give others hope time doesn't heal all wounds but adjusting isn't as hard. I'm not about to say it's easy it's not and never is but eventually you will regain your life.

I've done a lot of personal reflection and not for the first time wonder what my brother would be like if he got to grow up. I wish he could meet our little brother who was born a few years after he died. I wish I could help our parents heal but they have to do that on their own.

I wish a lot of things that I know can never happen. But I've made a vow to myself to help others like he wanted and leave the world a little brighter than I left it.

Death and grief are apart of life it never gets easier but you get manage. So don't feel bad if a year, five, ten, or more go by and you think you're not getting better. There's no set date no set time where you can feel secure. Grief is different for everyone and not linear it's less the pyramid everyone thinks and more a winding road with tall and short hills.

It took me a long time to get to this place in my life. My condolences to everyone who lost a loved one especially if it's their birthday or the anniversary. Never feel like you're a burden you're not, heal at your own pace.

Tyler I love and miss you so much. I wish you were here with me, I hope you're proud of who I grew up to be and continue to become. You're never far from my thoughts.

I have spent so much time worrying about my memory after my brother died, terrified that I didn’t remember enough about him. How can I have spent a lifetime with somebody by my side every day and have so few memories? This has caused me immense guilt and confusion.

A friend of mine did some research and told me about the link between trauma and memory. Memory responds to trauma in ways we still don’t fully understand. We can forget traumatic events, or memories associated with them, and later find ourselves able to access them again.

For me, I remember the day my brother died down to every detail. I have replayed it so many times in my head that it’s debilitating. But the before, the life before that day, is a blur, and has been for years.

The good news is that our memories are still there somewhere, tucked away in our minds. It’s just a matter of accessing them. It’s been five years since my brother’s death, and I am slowly remembering more and more of the small moments we shared. It’s a beautiful thing. I feel him coming back to life in my mind.