Sometimes I forget just long enough that I select her username on Instagram or I start typing her nickname in the text “to” field. In those brief moments of suspense, she’s alive again. Sort of.
But then it’s like that feeling when you think you’re on the last step, but there’s another. You fall—just a little—and it disrupts your flow. You twist your ankle, you drop what you’re holding, or you break down without warning because of a stupid cat video.
This post is a snapshot of what grief looks like on our parents. It has been 400 days since we lost my sister. I didn’t set out to commemorate the specific day, but it worked out that way when I sat down to write.
Our father’s grief is quiet, subdued. His phone wallpaper is a rotating set of photos of my sister. He’s found ways to craft symbols of my sister into his hobbies and onto his vehicles. He is characteristically reticent to speak of his emotions, but the cloud of sadness that passes over him at times speaks for itself. I sometimes wonder if he has places he goes to break down, because since the day we said goodbye to her body, I have not seen him cry. I could not tell you with any amount of certainty whether he is “okay.”
Our mother’s grief is grasping and still raw. My parents are nearly drowning in photos and objects both of and from my sister, all of which my mom has been amassing. Hundreds of photos, no matter where you stand in the home. My parents always had a decent number of photos around, but the contrast is striking now. My mom also has only just barely begun to consider the possibility of not holding onto every one of my sister’s worldly possessions, but right now my sister’s childhood bedroom is a shrine to all that she once had.
Both of my parents look older. Far older than 400 days should have worn on them. They have only just begun to figure out what their future and retirement looks like, because my sister’s death absolutely imploded the prior plan. They slowly seem more stable in many ways, but the sadness and sense of meaninglessness still hangs heavy in the air. That said, they’ve started making plans for their future again. Spending time with friends. Slowly stepping back out into the world after a year of mostly being cloistered away. I was allowed to take away two bags of my sister’s things that no one had strong memories or attachments to.
It took only seconds for our old reality to crumble, to burn to the ground. Sometime during these 400 days, a tiny sprout of something resembling a new life also began to grow.
On the one-year anniversary of my sister’s death, exactly four people reached out to me. Two of them are people I have never met in “real life” but connected with on grief spaces online. There was something profoundly lonely about the lack of recognition of the significance of the date. Or, I suppose, about the reminder that the date is of little significance to most of the world. Because that’s the core of it, isn’t it? I want her to loom larger in the minds and hearts of more people than she does.
But how many important dates for people in my life have I forgotten or never even committed to memory? I don’t know any friends’ anniversary dates. I hardly know birthdays anymore—maybe ten percent, if you don’t give me credit for when Facebook reminds me. I have certainly forgotten death dates of friends’ loved ones, too. I simply cannot hold someone else to a standard I can’t meet. It just feels infinitely more personal when it’s a loss that still wracks me with grief.
It took several weeks for me to be able to write this, because I needed space from the acute pain to think. There’s a delicate intertwining of the isolation of no one remembering the day of her passing and the quiet, background noise of my subconscious reminding me that I am alone in a different way, too. I’ve lost the companion I was supposed to have by my side for decades to come.
This grief has also twisted my view of myself and the fact that I am single. I used to feel genuinely okay with the prospect of waiting—perhaps forever—to find someone I would enjoy being with. I now feel some existential dread about the fact that I am alone in this way. (And you know what I bet isn’t attractive to potential partners? That level of desperation.)
And then there’s the loneliness of a career for which I move a lot. I am surrounded by people, but I lack a depth of relationships, a community, and a stable sense of home. These, too, used to be things that excite me, but I now regard them a little warily as I wonder whether I am enough of who I used to be to be able to continue on this trajectory.
Only time will tell.
I am on the precipice of moving far from home again. To a new place, but to a life and situation that will have the echoes of where I was a year ago when my sister died. I don’t know what to expect from myself or whether this new environment will set me free or pull me back into the guilt, the grief.
That’s the problem with this journey, I think. You can prepare to the best of your ability, but you never can quite pin down what will be totally fine and what will bowl you over.
Every date that happens in this next year is the second ____ since she died. Second birthdays, second holidays, second arbitrary marks in time that remind me of the growing distance between the time that I had her and now. Dates and counts that remind me how time marches on, the earth continues orbiting the sun, and the universe has only stopped inside of me.
Now I face another cycle of moving somewhere new, meeting people, building a life. This will be the first time that I am a grieving sibling. I still don’t know how I am going to handle this, truthfully. I will learn in this first iteration how much is too much—or how much is just enough—when it comes to talking to people I’ve just met. And when this, too cycles back around, I hope I’ll be better prepared to handle it…
Unmoored Sister 