Category: Reflection

Into the second year

I am three days into the second year of my existence without my little sister. I spent her death anniversary with our parents and her former partner at a lake we went to every year as a family growing up. I had never been to this place without her, and the fact of her absence exacerbated the pain in my heart.

I have trepidation about the second year. No longer can I say “it’s the first time I ____ without my sister.” Now it is just… the way things are. Another of the rest of my ____ without my sister. But I suppose it ultimately doesn’t matter how I feel about entering this second year, because I can do nothing about the steady passage of time.

So here I come.

I wanted to blow up my life

I didn’t expect my sister’s death to make me want to burn my own life to the ground.

Tied up in my job is my housing, my healthcare, my retirement plans, and my actual career. Leaving my job would mean not being allowed back in. I had worked toward this job since 2014, when I figured out it was my dream job, and I achieved it in 2018. So when I tell you I wanted to walk away from my job, I’m telling you a major part of me wanted to destroy what I had built for myself, irrevocably.

Moving to the town she called home would mean living somewhere I already know I would never feel I “belonged.” I would never find a job using my degrees or my talents. I would give up disposable income, international opportunities, career satisfaction, and being surrounded by people who more or less see the world in a way that jives with how I do.

And yet, knowing this, I still wanted it ⁠— desperately. I wanted to run away from everything that had been true before her death and steep myself in the scraps of her presence where she last lived. I wanted to get to know the people she had loved in the community she built around herself. And I suspect part of me wanted to atone for having chosen to roam so far from home by chaining myself as close to where she stood as I could.

It has now been about two months since she died. I have not yet blown up my life, and the desire mostly receded. What has remained, though, is a new sense of being unsettled in my choices. I am staying the course I had charted for myself, for now. But I now have a voice in the back of my mind reminding me of the true cost of the distance and my decisions. That voice whispers to me not to feel too secure in the 5-, 10-, and 20-year horizon line. It tells me I didn’t even realize before that I felt safe to stray across the globe because my sister was an anchor that could tie me to home.

I don’t know where home is anymore. Ten years ago, I stopped living in the place I called home my entire life. Home is a complicated concept, made more difficult by the fact that my parents ⁠— the only remaining relatives with whom I have a relationship ⁠— now are rethinking their own next chapter. The state that is woven in my DNA might suddenly be only part of our pasts. The home we grew up in will be sold. The streets we drove, the buildings we walked, the places we ate will all just be distant memories. I haven’t entirely lost that home, not yet, but I feel like I am already mourning its disappearance, too.

And it’s only now, as I sit here and write, that I consider I didn’t have to make the conscious choice to blow up my life, because my sister’s death already set off a chain reaction that I can’t control. It’s already happening. I’m just sheltering in place until I can assess what is left in the aftermath.

Memories, where have you gone?

For anyone who has been asking, “Why can’t I remember any memories about my dead sibling?” Maybe you will find comfort here.

Note: I write this particular post 52 days in the After.

I am unsure I can fully capture for you the absolute panic of realizing that I could not conjure almost any memories of my sister after her passing. I don’t mean they were hazy or I only had a few. I mean it was like a scene from a movie where I desperately ran toward a closing door but failed to slide under it in time before I was locked away from all of them.

I could remember general themes ⁠— childhood summers, after school activities, general holiday trips home ⁠— but I could not recall any specific event or interaction. It was like she took all of the specific memories with her when she died, and all I was left with was a watered down medley of what it used to be like to have her. I freaked out. For weeks, I was in a low-level state of panic about this additional loss, which I am sure did not help my fragile brain in any way.

Even now, more than seven weeks onward, I look at photos I am in and don’t recall the interaction around it. I’m starting to wonder if a lot of my memories were already this blended sense of the past. Like I had condensed memories down not to individual moments but to a holistic memory of just being with her. The conceptual things we shared, but not the individual days. I still haven’t decide if this makes me feel better or worse. I know this is partially because in the past ten years, I have been away far, far more than I haven’t.

Does it matter that I can’t remember the jokes from one particular virtual session of Jackbox games as a family during the peak of the pandemic in 2020? Or is it enough to remember we had at least a dozen of those sessions as a family unit (our parents, her, her partner, and I) and we laughed really hard and had a great time? Depending when you ask me, I will contradict myself in my answers.

Does it change anything that I can’t remember specific shopping trips we took or precisely when we bought something? Or is it just as poignant that I cherish this blurred sense of shopping and helping each other refine our personal style being a constant touchpoint throughout middle school, high school, and adulthood? The compulsive memory hoarder I have become wants it all.

If you’re also out there grappling with the secondary loss of your ability to remember, I’ve been there. Frankly, I might still be there, no matter how long after this post you read. Talk to people about your sibling, look at photos and messages you do have, and unabashedly write yourself notes in the moments you remember. But above all, whether you remember every day or not, you lived them and they’re still yours.

I became her unofficial biographer

I find myself searching for every photo, post, and story of my sister that I can find. Like I’m researching a biography I won’t actually write.

My sister’s death kicked off an impulsive desire to hoard. Not physical things, but relics of her existence. Photos, message history, screenshots of her social media posts so I could keep not only the photos but the things she said about them, and when. I have thousands of photos now, mostly from 2016 to early 2020, but it doesn’t satisfy me.

I wonder if some part of my subconscious thinks that I can scrape together enough two-dimensional moments in time that somehow the sum of their parts is her. No matter how many times I affirm to myself that finding more photos won’t change the fact that she is gone, she is dead, I can’t stop. It’s practically compulsive.

Every time someone tells me a story about her, as soon as it won’t look weird, I jot notes down. I home and flesh out the story to the best of my ability. Memory is so unreliable, I want to externalize every single scrap of information I can.

It is starting to feel like I am her biographer. Unofficially, of course. And my focus is so intently on the years since we stopped living in the same home. In 2013 I left the country and she went off to school. Our lives diverged, and I stopped knowing the day-by-day realities of her life. That was okay with me when she was just a text or phone call away, but now that I have lost her, I want every bit of her that ever existed before.

I can’t tell you if this is healthy or healing in any way, but it has given me purpose around my constant thoughts of her, so for now, it will continue.

What it meant to lose my sibling

The meaning of this loss changes⁠—daily. I lost my oldest friendship, my closest confidant, and the only person with whom there were no misunderstandings about where I came from and how I became who I was.

In the time that has passed since I lost my sister, I have repeatedly been confronted with the painful truth that many people do not understand what it means to lose a sibling, especially in young adulthood.

You can find some limited articles online about how siblings are considered “disenfranchised grievers,” and how their grief if often overshadowed by parents, partners, or children. There are some pieces that try to give an explanation of what losing a sibling is like, but I found many of them were about children losing child siblings or about older adults losing their older sibling. As I sat in my early 30s having lost my sibling in her 20s, none of it quite rang true. So let me tell you what was true for me and my sibling loss.

I lost a fundamental part of my past, present, and future.

You siblings ⁠— for better or worse ⁠— are often the only people who grew up the way you did. With the same people, in the same places, sharing the same shorthand understanding of the daily growth of the you that exists now. Your siblings are a unique promise of someone who knows your past, walks with you in your present, and is a structural piece of what should be your future. I had always assumed she would be with me through it all.

To lose that is to lose a part of yourself. The only other person who had some of the same memories as you. The only other person who could understand what you were getting at in just a couple words, because you shared the same lived experiences over a lifetime. I lost a critical presence I counted on for important life milestones ⁠— my hypothetical wedding someday, a major career achievement, the eventual loss of our parents, just to name a few. I lost the sense of security I had in my own life and future.

I had to realize that my incorrect judgments of where to devote my time had cost me the only time I would ever have with her.

We did not speak as much as I now wish we did. Weeks would often elapse between contact. I hadn’t been able to see or hug her since four and a half months before she died. At that time, knowing only what I knew then, this was natural. We were building our careers, our lives, our homes. She was happy, loved, and finding success. I was thousands of miles away, busy but achieving career goals and looking forward to being much closer to home in just a few months.

We were supposed to have so much more time.

Instead, in the aftermath of her loss, I beat myself up over all the meaningless ways I spent my time instead of reaching out. (Frankly, I’m still working on letting go of the regret and the guilt and the anger.) I wish I could retroactively unwaste the hours I worked too long or the times I went out to a mediocre meal with people I didn’t really enjoy because “you never know if it might turn out to be a good time” or the times I opted to go vacation somewhere else that wasn’t home. I would take all of those hours and offer them to her, instead.

It has fundamentally changed the way I want to spend the time I now have. My social circle has grown smaller, but the relationships I maintain are far more profound. I am very judicious

I was forced to become somebody else, and I don’t know her yet.

I’m still discovering all the insidious ways this is true. I have been thrust into “only child”hood unwillingly, but must also carry the flame of my sister, because she is dead, not erased.

How do you explain that to someone who innocently asks, “Do you have any siblings?” In my case, it turns out to tell the poor taxi driver you “had” a sister and then promptly start crying when he catches the past tense and gently asks what you mean. But I know there will be many more times in my years ahead that I will have to either say, “No, it’s just me” or, if that hurts too much, obliquely say, “I have a younger sister,” and hope we can leave it at that. Either way, I will end up lying in order to spare someone else the discomfort.

Who do I have to be now that all of our parents’ hopes and dreams are pinned squarely to me? And how do I have to reframe my entire career trajectory now that my sister, the one who stayed closer to home and was there for our parents while I was far, far away, is gone? As I write this today, I don’t know if her death also means I will have to change my career. The entire plan of my life hangs in a hazy state of confusion, now.

I lost all desire to pursue many of my hobbies, and in most cases, that desire hasn’t come back. My drive at work is greatly diminished. Many of the ways people would describe who I was in the Before are no longer true in the After. It is like I don’t even know myself anymore. And that’s terrifying.

I lost my ability to trust the future.

I think this is the impact that will plague me the longest. If one day a healthy 20-something can go to bed and never wake up again, how can I trust anything in this life? How can I make plans for the future? Why do I spend as much time as I do at work? How do I motivate myself to do mundane things that feel pointless if I my time left is numbered in hours instead of decades?

I can also feel the way this is seeping into my thought processes. I would love to find a life partner to share the time I have with. But what if I only have a few years left and I pick wrong? I want to pursue writing as a side profession, but I have no intentions of leaving my main job. What if I squander the only time I might have? My job takes me to many places far from home. While I still love that, I now also feel a gnawing fear of all the things I’m giving up with friends and family by being so far away. Is my career worth the cost?

I lost my oldest friendship, my closest confidant, and the only person with whom there were no misunderstandings about where I came from and how I became who I was. And that chasm that has now opened up in the core of who I am is with me for the rest of my life.