5. The scratched print of the pop icons is in the dining room.
6. The collage of butterfly wings is on the landing of the stairs.
7. The what-we-believe-to-be-David-Choe piece is in the hallway right outside of Iris’s room.
8. I framed those neon-colored prints that were collecting dust in your desk drawer and hung them in her room. I have no idea why you had them or what they were doing in your desk drawer, but they say Hello World, Excited, and High Hopes. Perfect for a little being with her long life stretched out before her.
9. The Japanese landscape made of stones and rocks of varying shapes, sizes, and colors that used to hang in Grandma’s house, the one you laid claim to when we were cleaning out her house after she died, now lives in our living room. This is what happens in families. You just pass shit down and around when people die. I remember being pissed at the time that you got that piece. And now I have it. It all feeds into the same stream.
The move, like any move, involves taking stock of what needs to go in a box and what doesn’t. File cabinets are land mines for the grieving. Folders full of keepsakes and birthday cards and happy times captured in actual photos that you can hold in your hands. These feel so much sadder than the digital ones.
In a folder titled Miscellaneous, I find a letter you wrote me from Blue Star Camp in the summer of 1997. You were thirteen and not into capitalization. A regular e. e. cummings.
dear steph,
they have computers so i decided to type u a letter. camp’s cool. i hooked up with monica again but i haven’t done anything u wouldn’t do. 311 is o.k. how’s big ben? i miss a good ass whoopin every now and then. how’s houston? we went to carowinds. it’s like a white trash astroworld. it was really fun. i met a lot of new friends. one is matt. he lives in l.a. i want to go to his bar mitzvah with benji really bad but i doubt mom and dad will let me. are mom and dad getting it on every night because i’m at camp? i went bowling and pissed some carolina hicks off. i have to go to basketball now but i’ll see you in a week n a half. i love u.
love, harris
At some point along the way, you got into the habit of starting notes or emails with Dear Sister, and signing them Love, Brother. I’ll never see that again. No one else in the world can ever sign a letter to me that way.
When you lose a sibling, you lose a huge piece of your identity.
Your history.
Your context.
It’s the loneliest feeling.
17 Before
August 2014
The day after Harris informed me via text message that he had started shooting heroin, he went back to rehab for another thirty-day stint. The first rehab was in Malibu; the second one was somewhere in the middle of Oregon. His AA sponsor got him in.
From what I could glean over the phone and via email, he seemed to be doing the work, but I got the impression that the program felt like work this time around. His voice was less animated and enthusiastic than it was at rehab number one. The novelty of rehab had worn off. Part of the issue was that he’d gone from the Ritz Carlton to the Holiday Inn. It was no longer a spa retreat. No gourmet chefs or ocean views included. The last rehab had the glisten of newness, hope, and promise. This time around, he checked in already feeling like a failure. At the last rehab, he was a shining star. His therapist reported to my mom over the phone one day that only one (maybe two) out of the twenty that were currently enrolled would remain sober once they got out. Those were the odds. Pretty bleak. But she anticipated that Harris would be one of the lucky few. He was just so committed to doing the work. She could see that he really wanted it, that he was genuinely invested in staying sober.
At the end of the thirty days, my mom flew out to Oregon for Family Weekend, alone. My dad didn’t want to go. Again. He’s not a feeler by nature, so when things like this come up, he shuts down. He did the same thing to me when I was fifteen and made a significant error in judgment. He ignored me for weeks and neglected to see that I hated myself enough for the both of us. He didn’t have to take any of the blame—I had it all covered. At the time, I wanted so badly to grab him and hug him and tell him I was sorry and that I loved him. But I didn’t, and neither did he. Time passed, it was swept under the rug, and we moved forward.
But here he was, nearly twenty years later, doing it again. What I understand now that I didn’t understand then is that he wasn’t ignoring me to punish me. He was ignoring me because he was punishing himself. When his children failed, it wasn’t their fault. It was his.
He needed to call his son and get on a plane and look him in the eye and love him through this because that’s what love is and that’s what the boy needed. But stoic he remained. My mom couldn’t get through to him. I couldn’t get through to him. I wanted to shake him out of his catatonia, but he seemed so fragile underneath all the effort to hold it together that I was afraid I might break him, so I didn’t.
My mom was nervous about the weekend. Once she got there, she had to spend the bulk
