I am supposed to grow old with you by my side.
Here is what I am not supposed to do:
I am not supposed to tell funny stories at your funeral about when we were kids.
I am not supposed to sit on the ground, peering into a giant hole at a casket we chose for you from a brochure.
I am not supposed to wonder what you look like in there, wearing your favorite pajama pants and Phish T-shirt, holding a set of drumsticks.
The permanence of death is unbearable. I can’t fix it. I can’t make it better. I am powerless—the thing you could never quite accept. My inner victim is loud and self-pitying. Why did my brother have to be a drug addict? Why did he have to die? Why do I have to live life from this point forward without him? Why is all of this happening to me?
It all blurs together and feels like a punishment for some transgression in a past life. I feel like that tragic family that people reference in conversations to feel better about themselves.
It all feels so unfair.
• • •
I was five years old when Mom informed me that life wasn’t fair. You were there. I saw the scene just the other day in an old home movie. In the wake of your death, I’ve been watching lots of them. It’s a masochistic exercise. The ones in which you’re a little baby, cooing and kicking your feet, laughing wildly when someone says Boo! are especially painful. The one where I wore a white tutu and married you and your friend Andrea in our living room when you were five years old is also a tearjerker.
Most of them are hilarious. Like the mock interview you did in the fifth grade with your best friend Ryan that quickly devolved into you taking off your clothes and mooning the camera. Or your ten-year-old karaoke birthday party, where you performed Mariah Carey’s “Hero” at the top of your lungs. Or that Hanukkah when you got your favorite Michelangelo Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume set, complete with nunchakus. On the tape, Dad calls you Michael and you quickly correct him in your tiny three-year-old voice: “Michelangelo!”
“Oh sorry, Michelangelo,” Dad says.
There are piles of DVDs with which to torture myself. Mom has gone to great lengths over the years to organize them. It borders on mental illness. They’re all labeled and dated neatly in black Sharpie. She’s a former second-grade teacher, so her penmanship is Pinterest-worthy.
In this one home movie, you’re two; I’m five. Dad is recording, as usual. Mom chimes in regularly off-camera. You’re standing in the breakfast room of our old house on Yarwell, shaggy-haired and tiny, holding a big, red plastic bat in one hand and an inflated pink ball with stars all over it in the other.
“Okay,” Dad says as he focuses the camera on you. “You’re on TV now. Harris, you ready to play ball?”
I take the bat out of your hands and stand inches in front of you.
“Give him the bat, Stephanie,” Dad demands.
I hold my ground. “No!”
“Let him have it first, then you’re next,” Mom says as she takes it out of my hands and gives it back to you.
I scream as if someone has set me on fire, then cry and collapse, face down, into the couch.
No one seems to care.
“Harris, you ready to play ball?” Dad asks. “Let’s play ball!”
Within moments, I am on my feet and creeping back into the shot.
“Move, Stephanie. Stephanie. Move.” Mom demands, audibly annoyed.
“Ready, Harris?” Dad is still trying to get you in the zone. He doesn’t yet know that you will never really be into it, that a couple years later, when he’s coaching your Little League team, you will pick flowers in the outfield during baseball games like Ferdinand the Bull.
“Me!” you shout. “My bah!”
By this point, I have taken the bat again and am standing right behind you, ready to swing hard into your head.
“Harris, move,” Mom says. “She’s gonna hit you with that bat.”
You turn toward me and reach for the bat that I hold high over my head, so you can’t reach it. (It’s really the only time in my life this tactic worked for me. As an adult, I stand at barely five feet.) You scream in frustration and scratch my upper arm.
“Ow!” I shout and drop the bat. I swat you back on the arm.
You are unfazed. Rather, you grab the fallen bat, run right up to the camera, and smile. You are proud of yourself for getting the bat and winning a round. Dad finally throws the ball to you. You swing.
“Pway bah!” you say with enthusiasm.
“That’s not fair,” I whine.
“Nobody said life is fair, Stephanie,” Mom says. “You’ll learn that soon enough.”
06 One Month
Even time moves differently now.
It used to be measured in minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. Now, it’s measured before you died and after. It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at the same time. It feels like I want to burn something to the ground and do nothing forever.
Going back to work is terrifying. I don’t know how I will form words, much less inspire the gifted and talented youth of America where you and I once went to high school together. It’s a demanding and rewarding job that’s often emotionally draining and requires me to be fully present. But I’m not. I also don’t give a shit about theater anymore. Or anything, for that matter.
I carry one of your sobriety chips in my pocket that whole first week back. It reads:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
An impossible task.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, I feel like some sort of alien—seemingly human and going through the motions but from another galaxy altogether and unfamiliar with the ways of
