February 2024 – Unmoored Sister

Grief is still like a subtle filter over everything nine months on

Grief is a filter, but you can’t change the settings anymore.

An acquaintance asked me yesterday when I realized I had moved past my grief. The question left me stunned, and I had a trio of strong reactions:

How could anyone possibly think that there would ever be a time I had moved past my grief?
Was I living my life in a way that misled people about the continued depth of this loss, and was that somehow dishonoring my sister?
What the hell do you say to a question like that?

I paused longer than the other person was comfortable with before eventually saying that I had just integrated the grief into my everyday experience, not left it behind. She seemed intrigued but afraid to ask more, so I elaborated anyway. I am my grief, and my grief is me.

Any negative emotion I experience easily becomes heavier than it would have before, because the weight of the grief easily thumbs the scale, so to speak.

The prospect of giving things time and being patient feels suddenly frightening, because my relationship with the promise of the future has been cracked.

Sometimes my day-to-day experience feels just a little muted, like someone got too zealous with an Instagram filter and added shadows to the edges. I’m not always aware of this, and go about my day thinking this perception is objective truth.

It’s a slight edit to the raw experience of life, and I don’t know how to turn it off. I doubt I can. So I have to find a way to make new images with this filter.

Load at last save point

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 lately, and I’m bad at it. This isn’t relevant, except to say that I have often had to reload the game from a prior save point after I single handedly get the whole adventuring party into an impossible pickle. In the escapism of the game, I have let my mind escape reality even further and try to imagine having the ability to reload life from a prior save point.

This then led me down a rabbit hole of when? Not actually having true answers about the why of my sister’s death makes this hard.

The night before she died? Would it be possible to somehow bring her to a hospital and change the trajectory of her death, despite the fact she went to bed and was totally fine?

A few months before she died? Perhaps there was something about the medicine she was using that could have been adjusted? Maybe the dosage and frequency her doctor prescribed was responsible (though the autopsy did not make this conclusion) and a different option would yield a different result?

A year or more before she died? Maybe if I had not taken for granted that she was happy and fine, we could have talked more and I could have encouraged her to take on the fitness goals she put aside because she was tired from 12-hour work days. Would a couple more 30-minute workouts have had a butterfly effect on her heart, the most likely culprit for her otherwise mysterious death?

Would I go even further? Five years? Ten years? All the way back to the day she was born to replay the game and do it better this time? To love her more overtly and to not take for granted the time that seemed endless?

I drove myself crazy with this line of thinking until I had to put it to rest. You can’t load at a save point, because there aren’t any. This life thing is a one-time-only playthrough and there aren’t even tutorials.

But still…

Wouldn’t it be nice?

Do things that hurt, like seeing my sister’s favorite band

Walking deliberately through the fire sucks a lot but sure feels better than sitting in the burning room and trying to convince yourself there’re no flames.

My sister loved live music. A pillar of her relationship with her former partner was sharing music and traveling regionally to see shows. She used music to get he through the most turbulent part of her early and mid twenties. Music was a foundation upon which several of her close friendships were built.

One band in particular resonated with her more than all others. This band’s early discography is quite dark⁠—the lead singer/songwriter used their music to work through his struggles with addiction, depression, and lacking self worth. I only learned after my sister’s death how much she identified with what I see as the darkest, angriest, most helpless album in the lineup, but it was through the catharsis of listening to this music that she was able to shrug off a lot of the baggage of a bad former relationship and significant self doubt.

That same band put out the first single of their most recent album in late 2022 and several others in early 2023 that had a distinct tone shift. Like the sun’s first rays breaking through stormy skies, this album promised to be an assertion of the growth and happiness the lead singer had found. My sister adored each new single and told her friends that it felt like the album was tracking with her own life. These were songs about not letting oneself be pulled under anymore and taking your rightful place in the sun.

The full album dropped in October, five months after my sister died. I listened to it on repeat and sobbed, wishing she could be in her house rocking out to music she would have loved. Some of the songs on the album knocked the breath out of me. But honestly, how could a song about not fearing death because you know you lived while you were alive not bowl you over?

So when they announced their North American tour for 2023-24, I knew I had to go to a show. I bought a ticket the same day and then buried the email in my inbox and kept my head down, focused on work and life, until the date arrived. I made the trek a few hours away with a friend, wearing one of my sister’s tees, the music-themed lapel pin I had made last year to gift people, a black choker that my sister would have always worn to shows, and the maroon (her favorite color) concert boots I had bought before a different musical pilgrimage for my sister last year.

I do not have the words for the familiar sense of guilty pain I felt standing there, wondering why I was at a venue enjoying this music and she was gone. Several of the songs made me cry, which I’m sure confused people around me, because they don’t seem like they should be emotional songs. The show was great, and seeing them live made me like them even more, though I will never know how much of that is the implied threads of my sister that are twisted around my experience of this band.

Every time I’ve gone out of my way to do something she would have done or experience something we never got to share directly in life, it hurts, a lot. I cry. I ruminate. I spend the next day or two trying to keep the wave of emotions at bay. But I also feel a sense of gratefulness in my core. If I let these opportunities pass me by, the regret would be insidious and far longer lasting than the acute sting I just described. I have to forge new memories and live new experiences without her, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be present implicitly.

So I guess if I have any advice for anyone, it’s that walking deliberately through the fire sucks a lot but sure feels better than sitting in the burning room and trying to convince yourself there’re no flames.

Is every holiday going to make me spiral? The Valentine’s Day edition

Every holiday seems to bring a unique chance to feel my grief come at me from a new angle.

For now, it seems the answer is yes.

Today’s flavor is ruminating on Valentine’s Day and how, as I have for all of my prior years of life, I am doing nothing special on this day because I am not in a relationship or even in something that could be one. It’s just Sarah, out and about on this normal Wednesday.

And then I think about my sister, and the fact that she would have been⁠—should be⁠—doing something sickeningly cute with her partner. She wasn’t a toy on a shelf hoping to get picked⁠—she was actively part of building a future with someone else. So why is that I am still here, on February 14, and she is gone?

I’m really messed up around the topic of love right now. I would genuinely, truly, entirely be delighted to have a partner. I don’t want to be single forever. But whether it’s timing (as many have told me) or not having found the right person (as close friends chime in) or the fact that maybe I’m broken and unlovable (which the darkest part of me says in the quiet moments when I’m alone with my thoughts), the fact remains that I am single. With the exception of two real relationships and a bunch of murky question marks, that’s always been true.

The grief of losing my sister compounds my feelings about it all. I used to be very vocal about being okay with being someone’s perfect second wife someday, and until then living a cool life on my own. It used to not freak me out that this major life stage seemingly passed me by when it didn’t pass most of my peers. But now there’s this insidious idea in the back of my mind that the time I’ve always assumed I had is a mirage. If tonight I go to bed and never wake up, like my sister did that life-altering evening in May last year, I will have squandered every last chance and not even realized it.

I guess if I die, though, I won’t really care or know it anyway. I know that’s a very dark place to leave this post at, but that’s how it is today.