“I had a brother.”
That’s how the story always starts. Soft emphasis on the had, hoping that the past tense gives my listener a moment to prepare for what I’m about to say next — a proverbial tensing of their muscles before impact.
“I was six; he was one and a half. He died of brain cancer.”
Always the same three sentences. All the facts someone needs, and none of the ones they don’t.
I remember practicing saying them without crying, repeating them over and over in an effort to separate the words from their meaning. Their formula was a bulwark against breaking down; their brevity no accident.
My own version of: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
I always hated that example in creative writing class.
* * *
I’ve been telling that story for almost twenty-five years now. The sentences are familiar at this point, their edges rounded with time. A small comfort in a difficult conversation: at least I don’t have to think about what to say.
Now, it’s funny, but I don’t mind if I cry anymore. At least, not for myself. (I do feel bad for the other person.) But regardless of if I cry or not, I still carry a sense of guilt whenever I recount the story to someone.
Because of this, I’ve often waited a year or longer before telling new friends or acquaintances about what happened. Most people simply don’t need to know our personal tragedies. But there comes a moment, sometimes, where the omission would be a greater lie.
Yet even waiting until there’s intimacy established, until there’s a sense of necessity to the conversation, doesn’t prevent me from feeling like I’m asking people to close their eyes, hold out their hands… and then handing them a porcupine.
Here’s this painful thing you didn’t ask for! Surprise!
This sense of apology, of reluctance, began early. I was young when it happened, after all, which meant that my friends were young too. No first-grader knows how to process the death of her brother, and no other first-grader knows how to get you through it. This led to a lot of conversations on the playground where I’d say what happened and then watch as panic, worry, and sadness flitted transparently across their faces. (I found out about a lot of kids’ dead pets as a result of those bumbling conversations — which could either feel like attempts to empathize or like some strange competition of misery that I hadn’t agreed to enter, depending on the kid.)
At the time, what I learned was this: telling someone about death is burdensome. I also learned, although I wouldn’t put words to it until later, that I was living in a society that didn’t know how to confront death.
Looking back, though, I also feel a deep affection for those kids on the playground. They were trying their level best to meet me where I was, even if they had no idea how to. Something beautiful about children, and that I find adults tend to forget, is that they’re used to not knowing what to do. Children are used to being thrown in the deep end, because so many things don’t make sense when you’re growing up. To them, a grieving playmate was just one more unknowable mystery of the universe, I’m sure. But they were willing to stand with me in the face of that mystery, side by side.
It was from them that I learned one of the most valuable things I know about grief: you will never say the right thing, because there is no right thing to say. But in the attempt, in being willing to tread water in the deep end with them, you are doing the right thing. Your words are immaterial. It’s your presence that matters.
* * *
Over time, as I’ve gotten older, people have gotten better at responding. They know their lines in the script.
They say, “I’m so sorry.”
Translation: well that’s horrific, but thank god there’s etiquette for what to say here.
I say, “Thank you. It was a long time ago.”
Translation: I’m not asking you to fix it, and I probably won’t start crying now, if I’ve made it this far. Sorry about the porcupine that’s now loose in the room.
From here, the script can diverge into any number of scenes, depending on why it came up in the first place. It could even end there, if this macabre little play is set in the context of a doctor’s office, for example. I’ve bared my soul to a lot of medical professionals over the years, thanks to basic health questionnaires that require family medical history.
Yep, your brother died. And do you take any vitamins?
Doctors are used to porcupines. Bless them.
* * *
I found myself thinking about this unofficial script recently because I went through the breakup of an eight-year relationship… and early on in this breakup, I hit a point where I needed to change the way that I was talking about my ex. It turns out that the past tense is one of the most insidious carriers of grief.
Not “I love him.” I loved him.
I ended up breaking down mid-sentence, admitting through tears to my mom that I hated the past tense. Hated it with a passion, hated the infinitesimal pauses required to revise present-tense sentences before they left my mouth. The way the verb endings felt heavy, packed dense with pain.
I wondered aloud if I was even normal; if it was, maybe, a more painful transition because I’m a writer. But my mom just hugged me and said, “Of course it hurts, because you remember doing this with your brother. New grief dredges up old griefs.”
That had from my carefully worded story was back to haunt me.
I remembered then that, for a period that may have been months or years, I’d said something along the lines of “I have a brother and I love him, but he’s gone.”
Is somebody still your brother, even if they’re no longer here? Are you still their sister, all the same? Is there a way to authenticate a sibling bond that spans the banks of life and death? (Maybe there’s a spirit whose job it is to check on these things. Some sort of Ghibli-esque creature that rows up and down the River Styx? And if so, can I meet them? Can I ask them if that bond attenuates as the years stretch on? Does it ever start to fray? Does it ever snap?)
I’ve spent more time with these questions than I care to admit.
* * *
The thing about love is that it doesn’t just disappear because the object of our affection is gone. It’s not a tap that can be turned off abruptly. Instead it eddies and flows around us, turning the air humid with sadness as it tries to figure out where to go.
I think this is what bothers me most about the past tense. It feels like a linguistic sleight of hand, because in bowing to the necessity of acknowledging that a person is no longer in my life, the conjugations also end up disavowing the way in which the love remains. Because grief, at its most basic level, is love without a home.
In a way, I find this comforting. If I think of grief as something separate from the rest of my life, like a natural disaster, then it can be hard to even wrap my head around the fact that it’s happening to me. I struggle to come to terms with the fact that such a tragedy walked, unbidden, into my life.
But when grief isn’t separate, but is instead a part of loving others, then it becomes something that I can understand, even if it still feels like drowning. In the less painful moments, it can even be something to be grateful for in its own way — it’s the most devastating force I know, yes, but it also stands as a testament to a life well-lived.
I think Raymond Carver put it best:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
We don’t become beloved without loving others. And if we’re loving and being loved upon this earth, then grief is inevitable.
And so a life without grief is either all too short, or it’s one with a dearth of love. Both are tragedies in their own ways. But if we must pick our scars, then I will always choose the ones that come from love rather than from a lack of it.
* * *
When I was going through my breakup, it surprised me at first how much the grief of losing my relationship mirrored the grief of death. I’d assumed, perhaps naively, that it would be easier because the person in question is (thankfully) still alive.
It feels strange to offer you an accounting of the losses in my life up to this point, but I feel the need to give you a bit of context in order to explain my surprise. While my brother was the first loss of my life, he wasn’t the only one. I went on to lose grandparents, teachers, a childhood friend — and while the landscape of grief was different each time that I passed through it, like walking different routes through the same city, it still retained a familiarity that lent me a sense of… if not comfort, then at least reassurance.
Something like: Yes, I’ve seen that street before. I remember crossing this river, even if I’m on a different bridge this time. The business in that building is different now, but I recognize the awning — that sort of thing.
Yes, this is the part where I don’t believe they’re gone. This is the part where I end up crying somewhere that doesn’t even remotely make sense. This is the part where the fact that the earth continues to spin feels utterly incomprehensible. Yes, I’ve been here before. It will pass one day.
I think I imagined that losing a relationship would be like walking, briefly, through the outskirts of this city. After all, in Western culture, we seem so much more comfortable with breakups than with death, so surely it must be… easier?
Instead, I found myself walking a path that was closer than any other to the one I’d walked when I lost my brother. Not quite the same, but enough to recognize landmarks that my psyche hadn’t revisited since childhood. The past tense was one of them, standing there like a long-forgotten statue.
* * *
It now strikes me as incredibly strange how much our society, at least in North America, differentiates between different types of grief.
Like I said, we seem very comfortable with the idea of a breakup. There are plenty of songs, movies, and books that deal honestly with the experience. If I had to guess, it’s probably because breakups are more universal. Most people have experienced a breakup by the time they’ve reached their teens or twenties, and often more than once.
People are comfortable talking about it, offering support and care to others who are going through it, and don’t even seem particularly afraid of experiencing it themselves. It’s a landscape that we’ve mapped collectively; when we see people cross its threshold, we don’t hesitate to hand them a guidebook, a pint of ice cream, and some creative epithets about their ex.
“Here,” we say. “We know what journey you’re about to embark on, so we packed you some things that might help.”
We call out encouragements to them on their way, check in regularly, make sure they have snacks. We’re not surprised by how long the journey takes, and when they eventually reach the finish line, we stand there waiting with hugs and offers of help to create profiles on dating apps.
Over and over on this journey, I’ve been surprised by how many people extended their hands toward me when I admitted to them what was going on. Friends showed up in force. Classmates and teachers I barely knew offered unstinting sympathy. Even people who I had no real ties to — an acupuncturist, a car insurance broker, a ski lift ticket salesperson — all had the same supportive reaction when they found out that I was going through a breakup.
There was no panic, no worry about what to say on their faces. Only understanding and a sudden willingness to help.
Ah, I see, you have a broken heart, that explains it.
Here, let’s sort out that new car insurance — yes, of course you just moved out and don’t know what address to put. Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out for now.
Oh, your lift ticket is under your ex’s name and we usually can’t change that but… here we go, all fixed.
Men, women, young, old — my community showed up, even people I’d never met before. It honestly left me in awe, and feeling so loved. I would’ve preferred that my relationship had worked out, don’t get me wrong, but this silver lining was so bright that it was practically blinding. I hadn’t known how much care was out there, how good we are as a society at reaching out and catching people who are heartbroken.
It’s beautiful, quite honestly. One of those things that gives you faith in humanity.
But it also makes the gulf between how we treat people who are grieving different losses that much more jarring. Tell someone that you’re grieving somebody who died, and you’re going to experience a lot more discomfort from them than if you’d said you were going through a breakup. They won’t know what to say, will want to get out of the interaction quickly, will want to change the subject. They won’t check on you and ask how you’re doing in the same way that they would if you were going through a breakup. If you’re still grieving in a year, still bringing the loss up sometimes, they may be surprised that you’re not over it already.
Let me be clear: I don’t think this is because people care less. It’s because they don’t know what to do, don’t have the same collective knowledge at their disposal that we have for heartbreak. There’s a general unease with even talking about grief openly, because there’s not the same level of storytelling about it at a societal level.
We even saw this during covid, when a far larger number of people were experiencing grief than ever before in my lifetime. Did you notice that, once the pandemic sputtered out, we didn’t really reckon with it out in the open? There are very few stories or songs or books about the pandemic. A handful, sure. But not in proportion to the amount that it affected our lives.
The thing is, not talking about a thing doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
Not talking about loss doesn’t mean that we haven’t lost people. It doesn’t mean that we won’t lose others in the future. All it does is deprive us of the chance to support each other, to share our collective wisdom and compare our maps and build a better picture of how to help others when they find themselves walking the same landscape.
* * *
Lately, I find myself wanting to reach out gently to others, to press into their hands anything I have that might help. I have a friend who’s afraid of death, for instance, and I catch myself wanting to tell them: it’s ok, grief isn’t this unknowable thing. You’ve experienced a breakup before, haven’t you? The two experiences may not be exactly the same, but they rhyme. If you lose someone, then you’ll go on a journey, and you’ll be different when you reach the end of it, but you’ll still be yourself.
I haven’t told them this. After all, I don’t wish grief upon anyone. I hope they keep their love, keep all of it, if they can. By some miracle, maybe, they’ll get to.
But if they do lose someone, then I want them to receive support and understanding from those around them. And the only way that can happen is if we talk openly about grief more.
So this is me, standing in front of you, saying: if you’re grieving, if you’re wandering and don’t know when your journey will end, just know that I’ve been somewhere similar. Not the exact same place as you, but close by. Maybe your version of the city of grief doesn’t involve the past tense. But maybe it does, and in that case — hi. You’re not alone. You’re not crazy.
We’re all just doing our best to exist in this world, to make sense of the love we feel for others, and to give it form in the English language. Sometimes things get messy in the process. So it goes.
* * *
I loved my brother, and I love him still. I’ll go on to love others and wish that he’d had a chance to meet them. And when I eventually see him again, I’ll be able to tell him that:
I called myself beloved, felt myself
beloved on the earth.
Postscript: it’s been six months since I wrote this piece, and a curious thing has happened. In the process of telling this story online, it slowly became easier for me to start telling people about my brother in real life. It was like a seal had finally broken, and the story I’d never had words for finally had a shape that didn’t sit heavy on my tongue. This was twenty-five years in the making. And while it remains a story that I wish wasn’t mine to tell, the fact that my brother’s death shaped who I am today is as undeniable as breathing. This is, maybe, one of the ways that the dead stay with us.
I wanted to add this postscript as a reminder to myself of the power of writing: of how it can take pieces of our lives, of ourselves, and give them back to us anew. And I also wanted to say that the people I’ve told — many of whom I feel lucky to now count among my friends — often surprised me with the kindness and emotional intelligence of their responses. People can often offer support and understanding, but it still falls upon us… or, to drop the royal we… upon me to reach out for that understanding in the first place.
When I was initially writing this, I left my brother’s name out of it. When I’m telling the story in real life, I often do the same. It’s an old habit, but I’d like to tell it to you now:
His name was Ryan. He remains, and will always be, beloved.
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