Today is the twenty-one-year anniversary of my brother’s suicide. Twenty-one years. On his twenty-first birthday, I planned to take him skydiving. I was researching drop zones, having already made ten jumps myself. I couldn’t wait to give him the thumbs up as he scooted to the open doorway and prepared to leave a perfectly good airplane for the first time. To free fall and experience the vast silence of the sky.
On his twenty-first birthday, I stood with family members around the patch of tender new grass marking his grave plot and sang happy birthday to the wind, hoping he would stop freefalling long enough to relieve the silent wringing of my heart. We placed a cake made of flowers by his plaque (his gravestone was still on order) and released balloons that floated skyward—to the air I wanted us to touch together.
During the hardest times, before and after my parents’ divorce, my twin brothers and I were inseparable. That life was short, was a certitude we never forgot. Deep in our marrow, we knew at least one of us wouldn’t survive to adulthood, that this short childhood was our only gift. We made each day an adventure—the good ones epic victories, the bad ones battles to surmount. We didn’t always behave wisely (there were way too many fires) or do the right thing, but we captured what we could, even during the darkest of times.
I’d forgotten that lesson just before Joe’s death. Busy adulting and trying to get ahead, I worked sixty-hour weeks and let important events slide. During the January before he died, Joe and I chatted on AOL during the nascent days of the public internet. We almost always said I love you at the end of our sessions.
I say almost because the last time we were kicked off early and never reconnected. Had I known this was the last time, I would’ve tried harder. I would’ve made sure he knew how I felt. I would’ve stayed up all night trying to get online or braved a long-distance call I couldn’t afford.
Rarely do we know it’s the last time.
Most days we expect to wake up along with the rest of the world. Our time feels endless. Since Joe’s death, I’ve operated as if any day could be my last, paying attention, sucking the good out of life and seeing the challenges as cinematic battles I’ll one day conquer. I say I love you, even if it means no one else will.
Courses in grief are a human requirement we can neither drop nor escape. A year doesn’t go by when I don’t cry at least a couple of minutes on this anniversary or his birthday. Nor does a year go by when I don’t hear his cackle in my laugh or see the outline of his face in mine and light up with joy.
After Joe’s death, I made three more jumps out of perfectly good airplanes. Each time, I carried the heaviness of his ghost in my jumpsuit and said, “This one’s for us.” I imagined us sharing the harness, him probably complaining that the straps were ball crushers, but also hitching his breath as he experienced an unencumbered view of the earth from sky—reveling in how at sunset mist rises to the sky, how heights are relative above 1,000 feet, and how we’re all just specks from up high.
For everyone who reads this, may your courses in grief teach you about abundance and love. I love you for all that you are and all that you will be. May you find comfort in knowing your sorrows are equivalent to your love. Each wave of grief is an opportunity to experience the preciousness of life and to love again. And may you enjoy this song. Listen to it, sing it, and pass it on. Namaste.