Grief is an Ocean

There’s a photo of my mom at Daniel’s funeral that haunts me. My mom is with all of her siblings, but she’s off to the side. Her eyes are far away and she looks lost. There hasn’t been a day in my life that my mom hasn’t been in control but today she looks lost. She looks shell shocked. Like she doesn’t know where she is. She’s not smiling and grief is written into every line of her face. 

 

Who would ask her to take that photo? How cruel to ask someone to pose for a photo at their son’s funeral. 

 

I don’t know whose idea the photo was but I’m glad I have it. My mom has always been more power than person to me. An unquestionable authority, tempestuous and unpredictable. In this photo, she feels human.

 my mom is on the very left

 

Daniel’s death was a wrecking ball aimed at Mom’s worldview. Her personality and way of viewing the world are predicated on her total inability to deal with negative emotions. And her emotional immaturity isolated me and placed all of the emotional responsibility for the family on my shoulders. I wasn’t prepared for it. 

 

I’m the child! I was sixteen when my brother died, my whole identity and history ripped away from me suddenly, cruelly. My future, gone in an instant. Every momentous life occasion from then on—every birthday, every holiday, relationships, weddings, graduations, the birth of children—everything for the rest of my life will occur without my big brother, someone I always assumed would be there. A sense of security, now totally erased. It felt like the ground fell out from beneath my feet. Nothing can prepare you for a loss like that. In the space of a phone call—with a single sentence—my whole life changed. I had to tell the family, why did you put that responsibility on me? I’ll never forget Brooke’s scream, Claire retreating into herself, Hannah sobbing, Anita praying; the group of us huddled on a bench at the Pinnacle Mountain playground, sobbing like the world was ending while toddlers played around us. I should’ve been taken care of. After that phone call, I was frozen. It felt like I was watching myself cry from outside my body and I couldn’t understand it. I lost a sense of agency—now, the world was happening to me instead of me having any effect on the world. I had to take care of you! I wanted to run away when you called me. I wanted to drive as far away as I could and maybe never stop. No destination in mind, just a need to get away from that awful house. Maybe if I drove far enough it wouldn’t be real anymore. Instead I went home and I stood by dad’s side. The dutiful daughter. I listened to him. I comforted him. He said losing Daniel hurt more than losing his mother. He worried that Matthew didn’t grieve Daniel at all, that Matthew didn’t love him. He tried to minimize his grief, rationalizing it this way and that way. He said that God had given Daniel to us for a short period, that he had never really been ours. 

 

I drove Brooke home from Little Rock. I wanted to go alone but the aunts wouldn’t let me. Tears leaked from my eyes and blurred my vision the whole way. My hands were tight and shaking on the steering wheel. There was no one home when I pulled into the driveway. Mom and Dad and Ethan had all gone to the coroner’s. It didn’t occur to me to be angry they hadn’t waited for me until far too late. I never got to see him one last time, never got to say goodbye. I have no grave or space to visit to talk to him. I have no closure. I remember so clearly the dread and the numbness alternately overtaking me as I entered the house. I remember clearly the silence of the house, the food already coming in—some kind of casserole or dessert on the table and sweet tea in the fridge. Brooke went into her room and I walked slowly down the long hallway into my room—the room that Daniel used to live in. 

 

The next few days and weeks are both a heavy blur and crystal clear in my mind. More people in my house than there ever has been. Food filling both fridges and the freezer and stacked on all available surfaces. Friends and family and members of the community filling the house and yard. People who had never even met Daniel, people whom Daniel had hated. I wanted to scream at them all to leave, I wanted to be anywhere but there. But they weren’t there for me. They were there for my parents. Everyone swirled around me and I remained outside my body, detached. I talked to God a lot: begged Him, made deals with Him. None of it brought Daniel back, because it doesn’t work like that. 

“You’re in a long-term relationship with grief and it’s okay for it to keep evolving. It has to.” Grief is not a solitary event. It is a dragon that lives in me, lifting its head every holiday, every birthday, every anniversary. Grief is a dark color on the canvas of my life. It is an ocean. Some days, the waters are calm and I can swim. Others, I'm holding on for dear life, just trying to survive. 

In the four years since he died, I've struggled to define my relationship with the event and with grief itself. I’ve struggled with how to talk about my family—it feels strange to say I have three older brothers but it feels worse to say I have two and pretend like that pain doesn’t exist. Like he didn’t exist. I’ve struggled with how to talk about my childhood, about the brother I idolized who no longer exists. Daniel was larger than life. He was charming and charismatic and intelligent. He was fearless, like the Old Testament prophet he was named after. He cared more about experiences than education or the future. He was funny and could be incredibly kind…or incredibly mean. But ultimately, Daniel was reckless. He believed there were no consequences for him and he probably never even saw the oncoming car. 

 

During my psychology training I’ve learned about something called operationalizing—giving a definition to something nebulous. I’ve tried to operationalize grief, to categorize and quantify everything I lost when Daniel died. But it’s impossible to capture everything a person is or to calculate exactly how our lives changed. Whatever future I might have had is gone now. And memories, I’ve since learned, change every time you access them. Every memory I have is blurred by my grief. Many of my thoughts about Daniel are regretful, sad. I wonder who he would be now, had he gotten the chance to grow and change and learn. I wish he had had the opportunity to become a man. I wonder what kind of relationship I would have with him now that I’m older. Now that I’m older, my relationships with Matthew and Ethan have grown deeper and are filled with more wisdom and understanding. I wish I’d gotten the chance to have that with Daniel.

 

Something that seems obvious with grief but that you don’t really understand until you do, is that death steals the future. Daniel was 22 when he died. I am 21 now and I understand just how young he was. How much life he still had to live, how many more experiences and how much growth he had left. Everything that could have been never will be. It’s final. There is no changing his story, only how we see and remember it. All his mistakes are final, etched in stone. He had no time to learn from them, rectify them. Daniel never had the opportunity to be a man, a fact that becomes more apparent to me with every passing year. I will never get to see the man he could have been. Will never get to talk to that man, love him. Daniel was a soldier, a brother, a son, a father. But he was just a kid. 

When Daniel died, I didn't just lose him. I lost myself, my family and life as I knew it. For the first 16 years of my life, I had three older brothers. I was the middle child; it was part of my identity. Every single memory I had, that’s who I was. Now I don’t know what to say or who I am. I tell people I have three older brothers because it feels so wrong to say anything else. And I think of him every time I say it. I lost the people my parents were. Once so close, suddenly my father was a stranger. My mom was gone, building the house they started together. I lost the people my siblings were and I lost the relationship I had with them. Ultimately it brought us all closer. Daniel’s death feels like a dark thread tying us all together, something we all experienced that no one else in the world has. They didn’t know him like we did: the child, the boy, the boy-man. They didn’t love him like we did. 

It’s true that grief, in some ways, becomes easier to hold inside you over time. You begin to understand all the things that have so suddenly changed. Your mind can trace the shape of the loss and it becomes clearer. It becomes an ache rather than a stab wound. In the beginning, the grief is the only thing that defines you but you grow around it over time. As time passes, you fill your life with experiences, with laughter and love. But that loss will always be there. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was wrong: the final stage of grief isn’t acceptance. It’s incorporation. I don’t think I'll ever really accept Daniel's death but I've begun to incorporate it into my life and my identity. My brother died. I am a person whose brother died. I am a person who will carry grief with me forever, a tribute to my brother whom I love.