being in public – Unmoored Sister

Warning: Small things will sweep your feet out from under you

Today I was studying vocabulary for the language I’m learning for work, as I do every day. It has been months since the family vocabulary upset me. I took it in stride when we learned “to pass away.” I made it through difficult classroom discussions that the teachers didn’t know would pierce my heart. Hell, I even survived breaking down in the language director’s office a week and a half ago when she forgot that I had taken time off early in the course to attend an event in my sister’s honor, and therefore she asked probing family questions trying to elicit language from me. It was totally innocent, but it left me wrecked in its wake.

I would say on the the whole I am getting stronger; I am better at recognizing when I am losing my grip on the grief and can take myself out of a situation in anticipation of it. I can handle pricklier interactions more often.

But today, sitting in the cafe at work and studying vocab on my computer, the flashcard for “siblings” ripped me open in a way I wasn’t expecting. In this language, the word is a combination of the words you use to refer to older brother, older sister, and then younger sibling. That final syllable stayed in my mind as I left the flashcard app to come here. It’s still on my mind now. A syllable I never got to call her. Another way to represent a thing I had but lost. A complicated person who is in my life but is not alive any longer.

So here I am, sitting in a room of a few hundred people, trying not to be noticed as I try to pull myself together. The work day’s only halfway over, after all.

Grief sucks.

How long should you take off work to grieve?

If there’s an answer, I don’t fully know it. The sad truth in my experience is you take what you can and then learn to work alongside the grief.

This feels like a very challenging trick question, doesn’t it? A lot is captured in the word should. The should that meant what was best for me was different from the should of the judgment of my supervisor when negotiating my return which was different from the should of other people’s opinions on the length of my acute mourning.

I can’t tell you how long you should take off, but I can tell you how long I did take off and how those choices affected me.

According to my employer’s policy, I was entitled to three days of bereavement leave per “bereavement incident.” I traveled internationally to get home to my family, informing work I did not know when I would be back. I read the rest of the leave policy during the 24 hours before I could travel, and determined sick leave could be use for “mental incapacity.” I was certainly mentally incapacitated.

I had no concept of how long I would be gone. I made some laughable verbal commitment to some friends that I would still like to go on a trip we had planned for June 1-4. I packed haphazardly as though I might be away a week or so.

After somehow surviving the first week⁠—getting through travel, making cremation arrangements, holding the private viewing, and picking up her ashes⁠—I felt pressured to tell my supervisor when I would return. We settled on June 2, a little under two weeks since I had left. I hadn’t accounted for the stress and physical impacts of grieving, though, and as it got closer to my flight date, I fell sick. The kind of head, ear, nose, and throat sick that would not have been fun to soldier through for major international travel. I pushed my departure back a week, but compromised by teleworking.

In retrospect, I would have been much better off if I had taken three full weeks to grieve and have no responsibilities. That third week would have been more restful (for my recovery from illness, especially) if I hadn’t been working. Nothing that I did in that week was particularly important.

I returned to work three weeks after I left.

Well, more accurately stated, my physical self resumed going to work three weeks later. But the rest of me⁠—my mind, my attention, my emotions⁠—only began to return to work in mid-July. Even now, as I write this, I can confidently tell you that I am not fully present at work ever. Sometimes I get lost on mental tangents. Sometimes I have no motivation to do anything at all and do the New York Times crossword. Sometimes I diligently work on drafting a document while silently crying and my boss comes in to talk to me, looks uncomfortable, and backs out as I say, “No come back. What do you need? Sometimes this just happens now.”

Some people have expressed to me that I was away too long. That they can’t understand why I haven’t “bounced back,” as though losing my sister was a minor inconvenience and not a life-shattering change to my reality that happened without my consent. Others have said they can’t imagine coming back as soon as I did, usually couched in a comment about how strong I am, which makes me cringe. If I were strong, I would have fought to stay with my family longer. I let the friction of other people’s expectations push me to return before I was ready.

So the only advice I’ll give you, if you have come here asking the title’s question, is this: please take as long as you can, as long as you need. It is a big assumption I am making that these are both the same, because many people cannot afford the length of time they need. Take it however you can. In half days off whenever it’s too much. In not-even-a-lie sick days when you are sick in your soul and not your physical body. Grief is exhausting and heavy. You’re building new muscles, but instead of a chiseled physique, you’re building the strength to carry yourself forward, mind, body, and soul. You’ve earned that rest.

It is not the job of the bereaved to make you less uncomfortable

Grief is pain. It is messy. It is unpredictable. And grief is countless times harder to bear if we’re asked to hide it away.

Allow me to start with a definition. The etymology of “bereave” lays bare the brutality of loss itself.

bereave (v.) Middle English bireven, from Old English bereafian “to deprive of, take away by violence, seize, rob.” Since mid-17c., mostly in reference to life, hope, loved ones, and other immaterial possessions.

Anyone who finds themselves in this place has suffered violence of the spirit. But we don’t treat all deaths as equally traumatic.

I have found myself angry during the times when I felt that the people around me were asking me to cower in the shadows to spare them the discomfort of my pain. The times when someone went out of their way to ask me about how I was coping, but they only wanted a chipper answer of no more than two sentences and disapprovingly reacted when that is not what I gave them. The times when people avoided me (sometimes physically dodging like cartoon characters) because they could not handle the possibility of being met with my grief.

To be clear, whenever possible, I have opted to not put myself in a public or social circumstances when I am at my worst. I understand the importance of retreat at times while I ride out the upwelling. However, I have to go to work, because I can’t take months of leave, paid or unpaid. I have to attend certain events, because my future self will regret not engaging with the people I still have and care about. I have to walk out into the sunlight because she loved the sun. I wish it were a societal norm to wear a physical mark of mourning, because I want the world to subtly know that however I seem, however I act, there is a wound under the surface that hurts all the time.

And so I want to unequivocally state here, on this space on the internet I’ve carved, that it is not the job of the bereaved to make the rest of the world less uncomfortable. Grief is pain. It is messy. It is unpredictable. And grief is countless times harder to bear if we’re asked to hide it away. Grief is also the desire in one moment to not mention who we lost and in the next moment, a profound need to tell someone, anyone, about them. Telling stories of my sister still makes me cry, but if I can’t tell them, then no one knows her, and that’s worse.

The people who will sit through the discomfort of watching my eyes fill with tears as I try to finish a sentence before looking away to collect myself enough to speak, those are the people who have made each day more survivable.

I cannot worry about how you feel right now. You may feel as uncomfortable as you wish, and I apologize for that feeling I may cause. But if you’re up to it and willing to lean into the discomfort, that gift you give me is so much more valuable than you know.

The first 39 hours after I knew

I didn’t know what to do after finding out my sister was dead. No one prepares you for how to navigate the complicated first hours of receiving life-altering terrible news.

8:08 AM Missed Call – Mom

8:09 AM Missed Call – Mom

8:10 AM Outgoing Call – Mom (6 minutes)

My Saturday morning started the same as any other. I was up prepping breakfast and deciding what order to tackle chores, a workout, and a social plan, my phone to the side. I didn’t hear it vibrate, twice. They were FaceTime video calls, too, which was weird. My parents never call via video without a text exchange first. I called back with some confusion but no sense of how much my life was about to change, in just 6 minutes.

I greeted my parents, both in frame, anxious looking. My mom asked if I was sitting down. I knew the news would be bad, but I couldn’t comprehend what it could be. Both of them were there in the video. I complied and sat down. With no preamble, she told me my sister’s partner had found her unresponsive in bed that morning and tried to do CPR but that my sister was dead.

I can remember her words verbatim, so I knew I heard them. But I didn’t feel them. I simply could not superimpose my reality with the words she said. It wasn’t surreal or an out-of-body experience. It was just like the part of my mind that ascribes real-world meaning to the things I’m told wasn’t clocked in for work yet. I stared at my phone, at my parents. I am pretty sure I asked, “what?” in a clearly rhetorical way.

And then the overthinking kicked in, big time. Why wasn’t I upset? I should be upset. I better respond upset. “Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. Obscuring my face would help me hide that my reaction wasn’t appropriate. You should be sad. You should be crying. Why aren’t you responding the right way? I felt my face start to pinch in the way it does when you try not to cry. I felt tears well in my eyes. Was I forcing this crying? Or was some deep, subconscious part of me bringing up that well of despair I wasn’t consciously ready to confront yet?

My parents told me to get there as quickly as I could and that they were haphazardly loading the car. It would be a 5-hour drive for them. It would be a 18-hour international journey for me. We ended the phone call and I sat, stunned and lost.

Getting home was a logistical nightmare. It required me to notify multiple people at my workplace and then set a bunch of administrative tasks in motion. Within an hour, news had spread to people I didn’t want knowing. I got text messages and phone calls from people I didn’t have the mental capacity to handle. It took three hours before I had a plane ticket in hand, but the flight wasn’t until 24 hours after the first missed phone call.

I was left in my apartment to ponder, alone, the injustice of the universe. To berate myself for somehow still not being as sad as I was “supposed” to be. To do an absolutely terrible job of putting things in a suitcase in preparation for the long journey ahead. To will time time pass, since it refused to go for me in reverse.

I scrolled through her social media and dissolved into a blubbering mess. I screen shotted a bunch of content and worked myself into a tizzy over how little we had spoken in the last few months. I made my eyes and nose raw with the low-quality toilet paper I was using as tissue.

I only remember sporadic bursts of time from that Saturday. I didn’t eat. I could barely sleep when the time came. I drank tea and did a lot of mental spiraling.

All night I tossed and turned. Every time I woke up and looked at my phone to see the time, I wondered, “Is this when you died, sister?” We didn’t know anything, except that at 5:16 AM in her time zone, her partner found her.

I was afraid to fall asleep and somehow not wake up for my alarm, despite the fact I had set three separate alarms on two devices to ensure it was not possible to miss them. If one thing I could count on had failed, what was to stop the rest of the world from crumbling in on me also?

At 6:30 AM I got in my taxi to the airport. On the way out, the apartment building’s concierge said the very normal human greeting of, “Good morning, how are you?” I couldn’t contain myself and started crying as I choked out, “I’m not okay.” He looked concerned and worried, but I had to leave. I got in the taxi, sobbing.

I arrived at the airport, barely done crying for the moment. I ate something because that’s what I was supposed to do. I got a tea that was so hot I could not drink it for ages. And I focused as hard as I could on achieving the task at hand⁠—being in motion and getting home to my family.

It was three flights, two tight layovers, and I had to rush during both. I nearly lost my mind when people took their sweet time getting off the plane and couldn’t find where they put their roller bags. Some of us had places to be. Being “that person” on the plane⁠—the impatient passenger acting like a bit of an asshole and pushing ahead without waiting their turn⁠—has forever changed how I’ll think of those people moving forward. I know that I was in crisis and just needed to not be standing still.

At 10:49 PM local time, but 12:49 AM the next day to my body, I finally arrived. I had held it together the entire time, not crying since my taxi ride that morning, on another continent entirely. By the time I made it there, I was too tired to cry. But I fell gratefully into my sister’s partner’s arms as I collected my bag and went out to the car to meet up with my parents.

There was a lot to do, talk about, and feel, but not that night. I was running on three hours of sleep and needed⁠—desperately⁠—to not be conscious. We went to the home my sister and her partner had shared, the place I would be staying, with her partner. My parents hugged me many times before leaving to their own accommodation. I stood in the house, a place I had never been before that moment, and willed my brain to not think about all the things I could confront in the coming days.

I told you this story, in part, because there was something cathartic in it for me, to recount the steps of my old life fading from existence. But I also wanted you to know that in that first 39 hours, I judged myself for my reactions, I had long stretches of forming no memory of what I did, I cried and then did not cry for a long time, I was a menace to fellow travelers, and on and on.

If you were not okay and are now berating yourself for it ⁠— please don’t.

If you were okay and think that means you’re broken ⁠— please don’t.

When you receive life-altering news that sucker punches you out of nowhere, you’re entitled to whatever reaction you had. It was a valid response. You are not “doing it wrong.” You need yourself more than ever, so please be kind to yourself.

The unhelpful things people said that stuck with me

I have some strong feelings about what to not say to someone going through grief.

I know many are anxious to understand what to say or what not to say to someone who is grieving. You can find a lot of articles with advice of varying degrees of helpful. I can only tell you which of the painfully inappropriate and tone deaf things that I remember word for word. Consider these exemplars of what not to say to anyone grieving, and especially to someone navigating the painful and often overlooked world of sibling loss.

“Was she your only sibling?” / “Were you close?” I’m sure it was meant to understand the gravity of my loss, but reminding me in that moment that I was now alone in a profound way was not helpful. It didn’t matter if I had one or five sisters, or whether we spoke daily or had been estranged⁠ — I was clearly in pain.
“I understand how you feel, because I was very sad when my 18-year-old son left home three weeks earlier than planned.” Or any variation of anything that is clearly nowhere near the same magnitude. I have tried to convince myself this was the most painful thing this person had ever felt, and it was a genuine attempt to relate, but even writing it now, I’m still angry.
“How are your parents holding up?” The sequencing matters on this one, but I feel it was often a way for the asker to avoid focusing on me because they were uncomfortable, but it made me feel completely erased and unseen. (In a larger conversation that did not completely overlook me and my pain, this could be okay, to be clear.)
“Oh, are you still sad?” Asked on the day of the one-month milestone since my life transitioned from the Before Times to the After Times. Yes, I’m still very much sad.
“She’s in a better place now.” / “Her purpose here was finished.” How dare anyone try to tell me my sister is better off anywhere than in the loving home she built with her partner enjoying music, food, friends, and life? Sometimes these sentiments were tinged with a religious connotation that also does not align with my understanding of life and the universe, which made it that much harder to accept.
“How are you?” This is such a loaded question. I would have preferred a simple, “It’s good to see you.” It would have even been easier to receive, “What’s on the agenda today?” or honestly anything that didn’t come accompanied with that telltale look of pity. To be clear, from close friends or even well intentioned folks in a private setting, this wasn’t so bad. But asking at a table full of people as I sit down to participate in a meeting is not kind.