impact of grief – Page 11 – Unmoored Sister

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.

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.

The pain of someone else’s birthday song

Eleven days after my sister’s death, sitting in a restaurant and hearing happy birthday was too much.

We went to Red Robin a few after we said our goodbyes at the funeral home. It was the four of us ⁠— our parents, my sister’s partner, and me. It was the first time we had gone out anywhere to eat or do much of anything. We watched a Memorial Day jet flyover in her honor and then went to eat. Eleven days in the After.

We prioritized ordering her favorite dishes ⁠— a pre-meal Oreo Cookie Magic Milkshake, some Clucks & Fries, a Whiskey River BBQ Chicken Wrap. These had been staples since middle school. We sat around the table doing our best to hold it together and look like a normal family out to lunch, but I know we were all lost in memories.

Memories of past meals at this and other Red Robins. Meals attached to high school sports and family dinners and then later to dates and fun life events. We were doing okay, until behind us the staff began a rousing round of the restaurant’s birthday song, wishing someone a happy 29th birthday.

29.

An age my sister would never get to be. Her time ended 7 months too early for that. An innocuous number that brought the world crashing down around us. We shrunk into our booth and avoided eye contact until we each had managed to bury back within ourselves the renewed grief.

I don’t have a witty end to this story, nor do I have some insightful way to turn it into something meaningful. Sometimes it just sucks to sit in the middle of a restaurant trying to survive when someone else’s celebration reminds you of all that you’ve lost.