a lot of dust

The irrational urge to be angry with A and pull away from him in his grief is powerful.  Fortunately I am not nineteen and I have learned to use my pause button, but I feel my insides continuing to pull back, even while I actively force myself to be still and wait.

I cannot remember a lot of the details of how I managed my grief when my sister died.  Of course it was not the same because she had been, effectively, dead for years before she died.  A significant portion of my mourning had already taken place.  A's brother had been alive and an important part of his life.  So it's different - and we are different, he and I.

But I feel a shift, a change in his perspective, and in that new (imagined) picture, I am not where I was.  I may not be in the new picture at all.  And frankly, this would be for the best for me too, for me to fall off the edge and quietly disappear.

I am left with the question about how I can do that without it being an abandonment, without it being wrong.  But I sense it would be right for him too.  I really do.  First death makes everything surreal and blurry and disorienting, and then it drops in a new lens that is incredibly sharp and clear, ushering in a time for changes when one is still numb and it hurts less to make those changes happen.


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And Jesse's brother.  I have texted with Jesse a bit, and the picture there is not the same, perhaps because Jesse is so practiced at loss and mourning.  He is open to my overtures, he wants to talk, he wants the hugs.  I want to comfort him, but I also want him to comfort me, and that's selfish... but that's how community grieving works, isn't it?  Isn't that why we come together in the first place?

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When Colleen died, I went to the funeral home alone.  J was too young, I think, and needed someone home with her, so S stayed home.  I talked to the death man (what are those guys called again?) about the disgusting details of cremation, and chose a casket.  And listened to him make some weird jokes about his ex-wife.  And turned down the offer of a visit with my sister's body, because I could not bear to see her any more dead than she had been for the last several years.

Alone, alone, alone.  I feel as though I did most of it alone, while trying to hold up J, who was surprisingly resilient and strong.  Maybe I wasn't as alone as I think I was.  I barely remember my parents being involved, but they must have been.  They must have been.

At work, I told C not to let the stupid "sunshine committee" send me flowers and cards.  I didn't want the house to fill up with dying flowers.  And I read the condolences that people posted online.  They all said they were sorry to my parents.  None of them seemed to remember that I had lost someone too, and that stung, while I simultaneously refused to make any public acknowledgment of my loss.

At the service, my parents both spoke.  J sang.  And I sat in my chair, paralyzed, and refused to participate in the process more than just to be there.  I didn't even want to do that much, and wouldn't have if I could have avoided it without hurting my family.

In retrospect, it wasn't helpful to me.  I could have had some support if I had held open my arms for it.  But I was hurting too much for that to be possible.  That's what I am trying to remember as A shuts down and turns away.  Perhaps he is more like me than I thought.

And most of all, absolutely none of this is about me.


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I wrote these things this morning - and have come back to edit,  because this afternoon I met with A so we could sit in a parking lot in my car together and cry while watching the video he made for his brother's funeral, and wiping our noses on fast food napkins stored in my console.

A told me his brother had been cheating on his wife with more than one woman.  When he died, there was a collective effort on the part of a couple of friends and family to sanitize the phone before returning it to his wife, to protect her from knowing.  This made me feel ill.



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