Your absence will always be palpable but so will your spirit, your presence, your memory.
This is the new normal.
40 One Year
He’s dead.
He died.
Your brother died.
He is dead.
A year has passed.
It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at the same time.
I leave work early to beat rush-hour traffic, and Mike drives us to the cemetery. We bring flowers. We tidy up the area. I brush off all the ants that are crawling on the headstone and all over the Friday Night Lights box set. I prop up all the little toy soldiers. I fall to my knees. I show you a few videos of Iris. I tell you how much I miss you. I tell you how much I hate you. I tell you how much I love you. It’s hard to walk away. It’s hard to know what to say. Every time I come here, I don’t know what to say. Every time I come here, I have trouble walking away.
After the cemetery, we pick up Iris from preschool, and I breathe her in like she’s an oxygen mask on a plummeting airplane. The babysitter arrives at 5:30 p.m., and Mike and I head back out to meet Dad at the synagogue. Mom won’t be joining us for the service because she opted for a weekend trip to New Orleans with her best friend, Kay. I don’t blame her. Everyone has to grieve in her own way. I wouldn’t want to be here for my kid’s Yahrzeit either.
Even though we’re here for the shittiest of reasons, the service is notably upbeat, featuring a mini jam-band. There are bongos and a tambourine. You’d like it. I lean over to Mike at some point and tell him we should bring Iris. Like you, she goes bonkers over live music.
At the end of the service, the rabbi reads a list of congregants who died this week. I think about how ripped apart I was last year when we sat in this service. I think about the families who are sitting here today, how ripped apart they must be. Then he reads the list of congregants who died this week in years past. The list is exceptionally long and alphabetical, so we have lots of time until we get to the W’s. When your name finally comes out of his mouth, I spill tears, lots of tears. It’s hard to catch my breath. I cry through the Kaddish. I’m unable to say it. I look up at the ceiling and wonder if you’re looking down.
• • •
I think about the day a person dies, how the morning is just a morning, a meal is just a meal, a song is just a song. It’s not the last morning, or the last meal, or the last song. It’s all very ordinary, and then it’s all very over.
The space between life and death is a moment.
Last February 19 was an ordinary day. I took some photos of my baby flipping through a thick book called Lost Beauties of the English Language. I made coffee, drove to work, taught my students, ate some lunch. I noted the beautiful day. I met my family at speech therapy. After my daughter’s session, I changed her diaper like I’d done a thousand times before.
All the while, you lay lifeless on a rug a thousand miles away, and I had no idea. Until I got the call, I had no idea. In one moment you were alive, and in the next, you weren’t. That fast. In one moment I was myself, and in the next, I wasn’t.
Because a huge part of my identity is being your sister.
And while it was over for you in a moment (at least I hope it was that fast), it will remain alive in me for hundreds of thousands of future moments. I am forever changed by something that happened to you in a moment.
The Greeks called it a peripeteia: a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances. A point of no return.
I wonder what led up to your point of no return.
I wonder about the first thing you thought when you opened your eyes that morning.
I wonder what you ate for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. I hope one of them was Chili’s nachos. Or a plate of melted string cheese. Or the chocolatey bottom of a Drumstick.
I wonder what Phish or Alkaline Trio or Islands songs you heard while driving in your black car with the windows down, smoking a cigarette, wearing your Ray-Bans.
I wonder what jokes were brewing inside your head.
I wonder if you watched any adorable videos of your niece and, if so, which ones.
I wonder what plans you made for later that day and for tomorrow.
I wonder what you thought about before you did the thing that changed all of us forever.
I wonder if, despite the bruise on the inside of your arm, you were happy.
• • •
The 5:45 p.m. possum that Mom deemed your spirit animal stopped coming around a few weeks ago. But this morning at 9:30 a.m., as I sipped my morning coffee while staring out the window, I saw three possums strut back and forth across the back fence, one of them carrying a baby on its back.
So, it turns out that Mom was right. Your spirit is alive and well and living in the shape of a possum.
41 One Year, One Day
I carry the most painful memories inside my muscles and bones. I remember falling to the ground on the bathroom floor. Pounding
