today is not unlike yesterday

Last night I started crying and this morning again I find myself holding back tears. I'm not sure of the reason anymore. I know that I need to admit to myself that I can't figure this all out on my own and that maybe talking to a professional would help me. However, it is a lot easier to type it or even just think it. It is a lot hard to dial the phone number.

I think part of the hesitation is the New England culture in which I was raised. In my home I never saw my parents cry. I know now they both had much to actually cry about. I remember very vividly sitting in my great Aunt's house watching an old movie (that was recently transfered onto VHS tape) and seeing my mother's sister riding a horse. I watched as that scene caused my grandmother to begin to cry, a loud sobbing cry. She left the room and when I tried to follow her my grandfather told me to sit. I was never quite sure why I was not allowed to follow my crying grandmother, or why I was never fully explained her reaction to the video until years later. The pain, hurt and devastation was not known to me until I was a teenager. It was kept hidden. This is the model I was raised on. When I cry, I do so but only so long and then its back to business as normal. It is this very reason I think I can cry so easily. It is this very reason that when I look at a picture of my brother sometimes my stomach turns and I feel the rush of his loss new again.

Our lovely bones

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections -- sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-- that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

I recently reread the book The Lovely Bones, and the quotation above is from that novel. I had read the novel during my senior year in college and enjoyed it deeply. However, the experience of my brother's death has shaped by opinion and reaction to the novel in a different way. I view Susie as I'd like to think of my brother, looking down on earth from heaven. While my brother was not murdered, his death was sudden, unexpected and he had no chance of saying goodbye, and in turn we could not say goodbye to him. This unexpectedness leads to many questions. The question of not knowing, and sometimes not wanting to know, how his final moments on earth were spent.
I think, though, the part of the book I find hardest, is the understanding Susie gains while watching her friends and family on earth. She finally realizes that their lives continue, and continue without her. Experiences are had that she herself can never experience and that moving forward without her is natural, expected and uncontrollable. Its hard for me to think of my brother coming to this same realization. Yet I know that if like Susie he's been watching, then he's most likely turned away from earth and moved into heaven. My greatest fear is that one day I'll go many days, weeks or months without thinking about my brother. My fear is that one day I won't remember how his voice sounded or be able to close my eyes and see his face, his height. Like Susie's sister in the book I find myself in a healthy loving relationship, planning with him vacations and class schedules. There are days when I forget I have a brother that died. I am part of the lovely bones that have sprung up since my brother's death. Along with my parents, close family and friends we have attempted to figure out life, the life we live without his presence Life had to continue. It couldn't stop at my brother's death, and however painful and unbearable his death I cannot change anything. I'd like to think of my brother in his heaven; riding a motorcycle on a bright sunny summer day. The roads empty of other traffic, just him and the loud hum of the distinct Harley Davidson motor, and because of it being his heaven the breeze would be just cool enough to not make him sweat. The open road before him, and no care in the world. He'd ride to the beach, and walk down the shore, watching the waves, and tides pushing towards shore. And maybe that is the night he'd understand the world without him, and that everything will be okay.