Ten years of mourning

Grief moves on its own timeline

Do you think my neighbors intended their lawn art to be a depressing visual metaphor?

I’m in my hometown to be with family as we observe the tenth anniversary of my brother’s overdose.

I spent the day before wandering the structures around which some of my earliest memories formed. Childhood friends’ houses. The yellow brick middle school. The abandoned railroad tracks from the time the railroad was built. The library designed by a famous architect. The grand Unitarian church we attended until we didn’t.

All these buildings loomed so large in my imagination then, and now they seem so small. Close together, and uninspiring, the only stories they tell are old; and the ones I remember most vividly are sad.

Short stories about all the ways a small, suburban town will try to kill a weird, talented, kid. Stories I shared with a weird, talented kid it did.

They’re familiar, but they’re not my own anymore. In the ten years since my brother died, I’ve written bigger stories—happier stories, considering what else the last ten years have held.

I’ve lived the last ten years on two timelines. Ten years of building a life and ten years of mourning.

I move to San Francisco. The boyfriend who came with me leaves.

Later, I land a job I’ve wanted for years. Donald Trump is president.

I find love again and get married. Twice. (To the same man, this is my happy ending I’m writing, after all). The first time with the world trapped inside by a global plague, the second as it watches a war unfold.

I learn after so many decades of depression, starting in this small, stifling town, to be happy. My brother is still dead.

The older I get, the swirlier celebration and mourning are. Together, they give a life the contours that make it unique.

I would not have moved when I did, to the place where I found greater success, love, health, and happiness if grief hadn’t filled up all the space I’d built out of more familiar shapes.

I’ve struggled to reconcile the two timelines along which my life has progressed. The more I do, the more they split fractally: one branching out and up toward greater possibilities, one where each moment of the last ten years veers off towards something that might have been if things were just…different.

As much as I mourn my brother—the gentle, comic, genius person he was—I also mourn those timelines we might have lived if he was still here.

There’s a life in which I bring him out west with me, where he learns to be happy, too. One in which he brings me to tears (of both laughter and joy) as my best man. Several in which he outshines me as an uncle, and then makes me an uncle several additional times over.

The infinite lives we might have lived spread out like a network of roots that grief hits, releasing its own special petrichor. Like petrichor, it’s not something you find yourself discussing very often, but it’s distinct and familiar and sometimes oddly comforting.

I realize now that this is how grief and celebration connect. Those parts of me reaching toward what could have been are rooted in the love we shared and channel it into the possible lives that are still unfolding.

I can carry that love into the stories I write over the next ten years.