A letter to my brother, ten years later
Siblings are the forgotten mourners.
When my brother was young, he carried around this orange wooden block that was shaped like a bridge. The curve of a cut out half circle on one side fit perfectly in the palm of his hand like a handle in his little fist. He carried that block everywhere like a security blanket and affectionately called it “kokomydai,” a made up word by a babbling pre-schooler.
My cousin texted me a simple phrase in Korean on Sunday, his birthday: “kokomydai day ❤️”
It made me smile. She is the only other person in the world who knew about Ed’s obsession with this wooden orange block. The message wasn’t heavy-handed—no platitudes, no words of remembrances. It was perfect. Often, it’s the smallest gestures that hit the right note.
Grieving never goes away, but it evolves over time. You sort of just learn to go about your life with this new thread that’s knit into your being. Ten years by any measure, however, does give you pause as a milestone anniversary. Ten years is like a lifetime, but it also went by in a heartbeat and still, not a day goes by when I don’t think about him.
When I look back at the last decade, it sometimes blows my mind that he wasn’t here to witness all the terribleness in the world that followed. The pandemic, the strange politics and media circus of the Trump presidency, accelerated climate change, war and conflict, social unrest. He didn’t see the death of our grandmother who helped raise us, he didn’t experience our dad slip away from Alzheimers, he didn’t watch him die from a nursing home window.
There was, of course, joy in those years too. What is it they say about living life to its fullest? That includes the happy moments alongside the tragic. It also feels like the world got more complicated, more strange and extreme. My brother was shielded from all of that. He shielded himself when he ended his life on his birthday.
I wrote a letter to him shortly after he died and posted it on my blog. I didn’t know what else to do; it was an incredibly lonely time. Sometimes we shout into the void because we want somebody—anybody—to know that we’re still here, to anchor ourselves like a lifeline when we feel adrift. I went into hiding that summer and developed social anxiety, but strangely, didn’t mind crowds as it allowed me to be anonymous which was oddly comforting. Maybe the same was true of writing to strangers on a blog.
I went back to my archives and reread that letter, along with the posts that followed for the next five or so months. It was interesting to read what I wrote ten years ago. What I found were the raw and unfiltered writings of a lost person who was afloat, fighting against the current as the rest of the world rushed around her. I’ve often recalled that time as feeling out of sync, when everyone moves on but you’re still suspended in time, weighed down by the heaviness of grief. It is the strangest form of loneliness.
What happens after a tragedy? How do you move on? What do you do with the flashes of guilt when you wake up one day and the laughter outnumbers the tears? I feel grateful to have a record of that time now, when I felt nothing and everything all at once.
What struck me in particular then, which has played out over the past ten years, was that suddenly, I become an only child. It hit me immediately when I called my mother on the phone to tell her that he was gone. Below is an excerpt from a post on the strangeness of losing my only sibling:
On the first Mother’s Day after my brother died, my mom confided in me that she didn’t know how to answer the question, “how many children do you have?” I told her that the answer would always be two, no matter what.
I’ve struggled with the question myself. It’s pretty innocent, after all, to ask someone if they have any siblings, and yet the answer isn’t quite so clear for some people, is it? Do I still have a brother? Am I an only child now?
I think about how strange it is to suddenly become an only child. I think about how little support there is for grieving siblings because it often gets overshadowed by the grieving parents or spouses or children. I have heard that siblings are sometimes referred to as the “forgotten mourners.” We are expected to be strong for our parents, to be there for the spouses and the children left behind, but we are the ones often overlooked.
Losing a sibling changes your family dynamic. We were four and now we are three. I feel the weight of this as my parents get older. The immense responsibility towards their future care without my brother’s support is what makes me feel the most alone now. I wish he was here to see the changes in our father; I wish he was here to share the grief whenever they both pass.
Paid subscribers, read on for the 2014 letter to my brother, excerpts from a few posts, and a new letter, written today, ten years later. I will see everyone else next week. We are at the cusp of June. Graduation month! My heart!