Brothers

I went to bed crying, because today marks 11 years without my brother. Some years, I’m sad but ok. Others, the memories are sweet. This year, it feels like it happened yesterday, and I struggled all day with a scream I couldn’t let out. So I dressed the boys with their “biker” t-shirts to honour the uncle they’ll never meet. They don’t know, can’t understand why I’m sad. And I hope they never get to experience (or, you know, not until they’re both super old) that very particular grief of losing a brother. It is a hard to explain grief. A physical absence, like if you’d suddenly lost a limb. You keep walking, because that is what is expected of you; and because the spouse or the child or the parent of the person who died seem to have it worst, and you want to help them, as if grief could really be quantified, put on a scale and measured, and losing your brother wasn’t as bad as losing your parent, your spouse, or your child. You keep walking, and the years go by, and you get angry that it has become normal, the absence of the only person with whom you really shared both DNA and memories, experiences and fights. You think, whenever you meet someone who has also lost a sibling, that it’s sort of a club, the sibling amps, and that you never, never want those you love to be part of it.