the future – Page 2 – 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.

Accepting death is distinct from accepting loss

I don’t think I ever understood before, but there are two completely different and difficult tasks. One is grappling with the reality of death. The other is realizing that the loss never really leaves you alone.

I don’t think I ever understood before, but there are two completely different and difficult tasks. One is grappling with the reality of death. Someone’s life⁠—vibrant and complicated and real⁠—is over. Their story stops. Their body ceased. However you think of it, that’s the final punctuation, with nothing but empty pages after.

The other is realizing that the loss never really leaves you alone. It’s all the moments when you want to text or call them, send a meme, buy something you find at a shop that they would like… it’s all the impulses that are hardwired into how you live your own life, and they pull you back open when your conscious mind realizes the impulse leads to a dead end. There’s no reason for the impulse anymore.

I think it took me about six months to really, truly, deeply accept my sister’s death. In that I knew she was dead, she had died, she would continue to be dead, and I could not change this. The biological fact, no matter how jarring, became part of the narrative of my life. The inner voice that previously would conjure the reminder “your sister is dead” has mostly quieted, satisfied that I understand this now.

I have not yet even begun to accept the loss. There’s still a cosmic injustice that keeps me a little angry. And there’s a seemingly unending amount of despair and sadness and pain and regret I can pull from, if I wish. I try not to lower the bucket into that well too often, but at any moment, I could.

I don’t know how to accept the loss, if I’m being honest. How do I accept something that shouldn’t have happened? That doesn’t really make sense? I’m sure part of me also thinks that accepting the loss is akin to being “okay” with her death, which I am not.

If you have advice, I’m all ears.

Celebrating my sister’s first birthday without her

Her birthday is the first of many milestones that I am not sure I’m ready to face in the coming year.

It has come and gone.

The first of the rest of the days of her birth she won’t be alive to celebrate. The first reminder of 2024 that the cadence of my life as I knew it has been disturbed. I still acutely feel that she is missing, and I want the world to know this is not okay. But there’s only so many times you can force others to stare into the depths of your grief before you worry you’ll push them away.

I cry privately, often. I’ve made space for it now in my weekly agenda, and I’ve learned to let it happen when it creeps up on me by surprise. I almost never cry publicly, now. I’m torn, because in some ways this means I’ve reasserted my own control over my displayed affect, but it also means I’ve accepted that there needs to be a difference between the public and private way I walk through the world.

My sister would have been 29 this year. I would have convinced her to fly out and visit me as her present. I would have shown her things I’d told her stories about. I would have lavished her with sweets.

Instead I wrote a post on her memorialized Facebook page and lamented the painfully small number of people that seemed to even notice the day come and go. I wanted the world to pause, for a moment, and know what it was missing, but of course it did not.

I’m spending this month of her birth trying my best to honor her life by not letting the memory of her bring pain. She was a joyful presence to those that knew her, and she would be mortified to know thinking of her brought anyone pain.

So, my dearest sister, I promise this month I will:

Revel in the music of your favorite band when I go to their concert in a few weeks.
Find news ways to deepen my love for myself and believe in my worth.
Indulge sometimes in the things that bring joy, including your favorite desserts.
Do my best to be a bright spot in the lives of those around me.
Live my life as fully as I can, and not take a moment of it for granted.

Happy 29th, little sister.

Thresholds

I’ve been dreading the end of 2023, because 2023 was the last year that held some of my sister’s joy. I’ve fruitlessly imagined ways to freeze time or turn it back or defy reality and physics to undo something impossible to undo. And now, as I write, there are approximately 14 hours until the year that will be on documents and timestamps and anything else dated will numerically separate me more from her.

I hate it.

I haven’t been able to figure out how to succinctly explain why. Recently, I settled on the notion that passing from 2023 to 2024 feels like passing through a metaphorical doorway of some kind. And I think part of me is afraid that with this doorway comes the risk of losing her more. When I was still in undergraduate psychology, I remember learning about the “doorway effect.” When we pass through literal doorways into new spaces, we’re apparently more prone to forget memories from the past space. Because they’re less likely to be relevant. Less tied to your current reality.

I can’t handle that idea.

If I could sit in the 2023 room for longer, I would. I don’t know how long it would take me to feel ready to walk out of it, but I know that today isn’t that day. Except I don’t have the ability to slow time or ask it to let me off the ride⁠—just for a while.

I’ve unwillingly already stepped across many thresholds this year. Since May 20, 2023 I’ve entered many rooms that I never wanted to. Something about this one, though, this change of scenery that will be surrounded with celebration around the world, it hurts differently. I haven’t decided where I will be or what I will do for this New Year’s Eve. In some ways, it doesn’t matter to me at all. At the same time, it feels like it matters the most.

The first holidays in The After

In the seven months I’ve been without my sister, a lot of firsts have come and gone.

Halloween (her favorite).

Thanksgiving.

My birthday.

Our mom’s birthday.

Christmas looms large on the horizon now, and I can’t stop myself from sort of dreading my trip home. My trip to our family home where I’ve never spent a single Christmas without her. I don’t know how to prepare myself to bear what is to come. Christmas, then the new year, then her birthday shortly after… this never-ending cascade of occasions that should be happy but instead feel muted, dull, and sometimes tiresome.

I think it’s been hard for people around me to understand why I’m not filled with holiday spirit OR filled with despair. More often than not, it’s an apathy toward festive things right now. I think some part of me knows if I treat these big moments as just another Tuesday, I can handle crossing the threshold from The First ___ Without Her to the next room, labeled The Rest of the ____ Without Her.

I am doing things differently because I don’t know what else to do. I bought decorations (Halloween and Christmas) because they made me happy and would have made her happy. I have tried to find events and traditions I’d never done before so I could mark a year of excruciating newness with some memories of something good. None of it feels like enough, but nothing will, I guess.