After all this time, here is what I know for sure

This letter deals with issues of grief and loss. I hope it finds you well.

My little brother would have turned 29 today, but he died many years ago when he was just fourteen. Every year when this day comes around I think about the boys who used to be his friends, the ones with whom he went to basketball day camp in Shoreline, who used to pile into my old Camry while I yelled at them to not stink up my car by taking off their shoes. The loud, happy, rambunctious boys who scarfed down entire pizzas and belched to each other like it was a talent. Except for my brother, they have all now grown into men - on the cusp of their 30th years - but to me they are still just boys, frozen in time and inexorably attached to the specific kind of grief that visits me on these days of the year. I never think about them at any other time except this one, and I wonder if they think of him today or if they’ve moved on with their lives, my brother, their friend, a distant memory among the things one loses on their journey to adulthood, like innocence.

I have been a host to this grief now for fifteen years and it has taught me a few things, two of which I’d like to share with you.

There was a time when I resented this day. I couldn’t understand why life, in its cruelty, would give us birthdays that are not happy. It was a day that reminded me of all that was lost; his life, his presence in my own life, the future he imagined for himself, the future I imagined for him, the way his eyes would become so small when he really smiled, how his little curls would wrap around my fingers when I combed his hair, the sound of his voice in the backyard. Anger filled my every vein. In my language, we call this kind of anger mirirta, a kind of bitterness that is impossible to describe in English. One year at such a time, I read an interview with Toni Morrison in which she talked about losing her son and how she was able to transform her grief from something that was “self-serving” to one that was rooted in her love for her son. She explained how people kept saying to her “I am so sorry” but no one said “I loved him so much.” That statement reached further than anything else ever had and it became my companion, a reminder that I can find ways to express the love I still have. That is how I started celebrating his birthday. I buy balloons, flowers and a birthday card. It is the simplest way for me to say “I love you so much,” and center that love instead of indulging only the anger, which is centered on me. And in this practice I learned that light and darkness can and do exist together, that while anger is a valid and powerful emotion, it is our duty to investigate what is at the center of that anger, what purpose it serves in our lives.

Alongside anger, regret visited me that day and it has never left. Just after his fourteenth birthday I made a fake promise that I’d get him a pair of Carmelos for Christmas. Carmelo Anthony was yet another basketball player with a Nike deal and I, the English major, thought the whole concept of paying over $100 for a pair of shoes just because it had a basketball player’s name on it was absurd. Besides, I was a first year college student and I did not have Nike money. It was almost exactly a month later in October when I sat in an anthropology lecture while my silver Motorola - my prized possession - buzzed in my pocket. My uncle, already a man of very few words, only said “you need to come home today.” I found a flight connecting through Phoenix and I sat in that airport frozen, knowing that something horrible had happened to one of the adults. It never, in a million years, occurred to me to imagine the reality of what I came home to that night. Early the next morning after the worst night of my life I snuck out of the house and drove to the mall. I sat outside the JCPenny entrance and waited for the mall to open. I didn’t find a pair in his size at Alderwood, but I kept searching until finally I found a pair at Southcenter. I drove home with those shoes on the passenger seat but I did not feel any better. I thought that by buying the shoes I could repair the deep and crushing regret that enveloped me. But I was wrong. It took many years to learn that there really is no cure for this kind of regret. It is not a regret of things said or unsaid, done or not done. I learned that there is no shortcut through this void but that I can learn how to let it visit and then let it leave. I know now that to live, to really live, is to also be a host to unanswerable questions. It is freeing to know that in the end, it is not a single decision that will define my life or my relationships. There will be mistakes, there is no way to live without them, and to try and live each day “with no regrets” is a fool’s errand that in the end will not save me from the monster when it comes. Instead, it is better to embrace the uncertainty that is inherent in living not as a race to “live every moment like it’s my last” but to live every day in such a way that if suddenly my world turns, I can still try to walk through it.

“Let yourself be inert. Wait until the incomprehensible power that has broken you restores you a little. I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.” - Marcel Proust