Last January was full of hope and promise. You called me on January 4 to check in. You’d only been at rehab number three a few days, but the humanity was already seeping back into your voice. You said this place felt different than the others, and you planned to stay for a good, long while. “There are cool, funny people here who play music. These are my people,” you said. All of us were optimistic that this would be the time the sober would stick.
Last January was a much-needed fresh start. Things were finally looking up. Iris would turn one that month. We had lived through what we thought was the most turbulent year of our lives—becoming parents of a baby with a disability, spending the first three months of her life in hospitals and doctor’s offices, running all sorts of terrifying tests, being told when she was two weeks old that she would grow to struggle academically, socially, and emotionally. But each new sound, new word, new milestone proved this shitty doomsday hypothesis totally wrong.
Our daughter was a force.
My brother was safe and sober and finally in the right place. I knew 2015 would be a good year. The trauma was behind us. And we had survived.
There was so much hope and promise last January.
• • •
This January, I wake up feeling like shit. I am neither refreshed nor hopeful. I don’t want to go back to work today. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to do anything anymore under these circumstances.
Most days, I wake up to a screaming two-year-old who doesn’t understand the distinction between morning and the middle of the goddamn night. Mike and I alternate wake-up days. On my days, I pick her up, smother her in love, rock her back and forth, put in her hearing aids, pour some milk, watch an episode of Sofia or Elmo or Mickey Mouse. I make hash browns, cut grapes, toast mini whole-grain pancakes. She cups her hands over her mouth and says, “Oh my god,” or calls her father Mike instead of Daddy, or attempts to floss her teeth. I think of you whenever she does something funny, which is often.
I mindlessly scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. I see your friends. I think of you.
I kiss and hug and say love you and have a good day to Mike and Iris as they head out the door for school, leaving me alone to get myself together. The house is quiet. I think of you.
Sometimes I get back in bed for a few minutes. I think about how I should go to the gym. In some sort of delusional state back in November, I paid for a yearlong membership and have only gone twice. I don’t want to go to the gym. I scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter again or answer some emails or pay some bills or do some writing. I make breakfast, usually two eggs and Ezekiel toast. Sometimes, I make a Greek yogurt–fruit-nut bowl thing and think about how you once proclaimed that “all white girls like Greek yogurt.”
I shower, stand in my closet, and hate that most of my pants no longer fit. I put something on. I spray some stuff in my hair and scrunch it. I pour my coffee, start the car, turn on a podcast, and drive the eight minutes to work. I turn off the car, linger for a moment, take a deep breath, think of you, and try to prepare myself for the students and the parents and the emails and the lesson plans and the ungraded papers and the letters of recommendation that all wait for me on the other side of the car door. I don’t know how to do it anymore. Or maybe I don’t want to do it anymore. Or maybe I don’t want to do anything anymore. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s grief.
The day happens. It takes energy. I mostly want chocolate.
I get back in the car at four o’clock, turn the podcast back on, drive the ten minutes to Iris’s school. I think of you.
When I walk through her classroom door, Iris smiles with all of her teeth, which have little spaces in between them like her daddy had when he was her age. She runs hard into my arms. It’s a legitimate, daily high. It’s a thing I need to keep doing all of these days. We drive home listening to Toddler Tunes on Pandora and calling out all the red lights and green lights along the way. I think this is impressive. I think everything she does is impressive. I think of you.
We pull into the driveway. Iris insists on climbing into the driver’s seat. “I drive the car!” She orders me to sit in the back seat. “Seat belt on, Mommy!” This is both adorable and maddening. I watch her press every single button in my car ten times in a row and wait for something to break. I think about how I’ll have to drive out to the fucking dealership in the suburbs. Or Mike will do it. Of course, Mike will do it. He does it all. I think of Mike. I think of what a raw deal he’s gotten. I need to be more present in our marriage, I think. I must be the world’s worst wife. Unpleasant. Detached. Disconnected—emotionally and physically. I try to remember the last time we had sex. It’s been so fucking long; I can’t. Please God let him still love me if I ever crawl out of this hole.
Iris continues to play with the hazard lights. I’m impatient and want a snack and eventually peel her out of the car by bribing her with television.
I cobble together some semblance of dinner—pasta, so much pasta—while she pulls at my shirt and gets out her little metal stepladder to “help” and narrates the TV show and sporadically cries about something the dog did.
We sit down around six. I complain to Mike that I can’t eat like this anymore. I long for vegetables but it takes so much work. Iris starts melting down. Depending on the degree of the day’s highs and lows, I can sometimes talk her through her feelings calmly and lovingly, assuring her it’s okay to be mad and sad. I can offer her hugs and give her pots and pans to bang on as an alternative. Other times, my head falls into my hands or onto the table, I grumble and wait for Mike to intervene. On darker days, I lose my patience and walk away from her completely, leaving her alone and screaming for mommy. I hate myself in these moments. I hate myself in lots of moments.
After dinner, we bathe her, make some jokes, play some hide and seek, put on some pajamas, read many books. I think of you. I tell her goodnight, she tells me to go drink apple juice, and Mike puts her to bed.
At this point, I usually collapse into my own bed. Occasionally, I fall asleep. Mostly, Mike and I binge-watch something and tune out the world. I think of you.
I scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter again. I post yet another picture of Iris. I think of you.
Around 11:30, I take 5 mg of Ambien. (Or, lately, 7.5 mg, sometimes 10.) I stole the bottle from your medicine cabinet when we were cleaning out your house. I figured I would need it. I think of you.
The house is quiet. I do some writing. I think of you. I kiss Mike good night and lie there in the dark and eventually fall asleep and wake up too early to the sound of a screaming child. I think of Iris, then I think of you.
It starts all over again. Every day, wading around in the toxic waste of longing for a person who will never return.
I certainly feel moments of intense pride and delight. There are also acute moments of exhaustion and the blood-boiling frustration of constantly negotiating with an individual who has not yet developed the mechanics of rational thought. This is how it is for any parent of a small child. It’s all very normal in this way. There are highs and lows. It’s just that, in the midst of my highs and lows, I’m always thinking of my dead brother. It adds another layer of low.
Thinking of you is as reflexive as blinking, although the thought is no longer a drone strike. I’m no longer standing in a field, bracing myself, looking up at the sky in terror. This isn’t a war zone. This is just how it works now: I feel my feelings of despair, get out of bed, and participate in the world anyway.
I finally understand the meaning of acceptance on the grief chart. It’s not that the bereaved ever accepts the death of the loved one—I will never accept your death—it’s that you come to accept that these really are your shitty, irreversible circumstances. One day, it just becomes clear: this is the way it is now. The delusions, denial, hysterics, depression, torment—it eventually starts to melt into this pit of mush that lives in your stomach and just sort of weighs you down. It’s not even necessarily fueled by emotion any more. It’s just the way your body works now. Like the day you accept that your stomach will never again look the way it did before you grew a child in it. You’re never gonna like it, but you’ll eventually get to a point where you go to the fucking store and buy pants that are the next size up because you have to wear pants. Acceptance.
• • •
January marches on. The mushy-stomach feeling is compounded by the fact that my family has literally been sick since early December. I know you hate overuse of the word literally, but this is an instance of justified and appropriate usage. On December 21, Iris had to get ear tubes for chronic ear infections, which is a minor surgery with anesthesia and the whole nine. Then, she got another cold and cough a couple days after going back to school. Then Mike got her cold and cough, which developed into bronchitis. I got some horrific cold or flu that forced me into a sleep state for three full days. Two days on the mend and then a sinus infection. Meanwhile, Iris developed pink eye and vomited four times in one night. We literally ran out of clean sheets. The next day, she was running a high fever and had to stay home from school the rest of the week.
Now, we’re all stuck watching Sofia the (Fucking) First on repeat, surrounded by mountains of dirty tissues and coughs that shake the walls of the house. It’s hard to be stuck in some sort of emotional feedback loop when four loads of your child’s vomit-soaked laundry and pajamas need attention in the middle of the night. In this way, toddlers are an ideal distraction from grief. Everything revolves around them, and everything must be done right now. Trying to get the fever to break, running around the park on a gorgeous day, navigating the world’s most irrational tantrum—there’s no time to stop and think. It’s all go-go-go, now-now-now-now.
I think we’re all just doing our best to survive the inevitable pain and suffering that walks alongside us through life. Long ago, it was wild animals and deadly poxes and harsh terrain. I learned about it playing The Oregon Trail on an old IBM in my computer class in the fourth grade. The nature of the trail has changed, but we keep trekking along. We trek through the death of a sibling, a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse; the failed marriage, the crippling debt, the necessary abortion, the paralyzing infertility, the permanent disability, the job you can’t seem to land; the assault, the robbery, the break-in, the accident, the flood, the fire; the sickness, the anxiety, the depression, the loneliness; the betrayal, the disappointment, and the heartbreak.
There are these moments in life where you change instantly.
In one moment, you’re the way you were, and in the next, you’re someone else. Like becoming a parent: you’re adding, of course, instead of subtracting, as it is when someone dies, and the tone of the occasion is obviously different, but the principle is the same. Birth is an inciting incident, a point of no return, that changes one’s circumstances forever. The second that beautiful baby onto whom you have projected all your hopes and dreams comes out of your body, you will never again do anything for yourself. It changes you suddenly and entirely.
Birth and death are the same in that way.
In 2014, there was birth. In 2015, there was death.
And in two years’ time, we’ve experienced both.
I’m no longer the person I was before The Tragedy. I’m becoming someone else. I’m becoming a person I don’t yet know.