the last time I was here...

change.

I've been meaning to update this blog for a long time. My life has been filled with change over the last two months. Happy change, welcomed change. I met my now husband in October of 2009, became engaged in August of 2010 and we were married on May 22, 2011. In less than two years my life changed.
When I began planning our wedding I wanted to remember Brian in some type of way. I wanted it to be a small gesture - nothing big. As a child and teenager I often would dream about my wedding and my brother always played a role. I wanted him to read scripture and maybe be a groomsman This dream died with my brother. It was a reminder of similar dreams that died that night. I decided upon a floating candle in a vase that had his name and dates etched into the glass. I also put a small mention of the candle in the bulletin. I am happy with these choices.
Now in the months after our wedding I can't help but realize where I am. I've moved to a different state, and changed my name. I wear a diamond and a simple band on my left hand ring finger. I call a house without my parents my home. There is little in my new life that connects me to my brother. For a while I've felt something missing and I have finally been able to name it. Would my brother recognize me now? Would he know where to find me?  These questions have sustained me throughout the last three years and now I'm not sure of the answers.

Three years.

Last Thursday was the three year anniversary of Brian's death. I didn't plan anything to do except dinner out with my husband. I never really thought about it. I thought maybe if I ignored it - it would go away. This didn't help. I've become weepy at bedtime and stay up late crying - waking up in the morning with puffy eyelids. Last night I found a picture of my brother and studied his face. I looked into his eyes, looked at his nose and mouth - the shape of his check bones and chin. I'm so worried I'll forget what he looks like. I'm so worried I'll forget the stories of him or the memories I have of him.

Fear.

Tomorrow we leave for my parent's house. This weekend there is a family camp out up in the beautiful hills of western Mass at our family owned small camp. It's a tradition in my family for the last ten or so years. Every second weekend in August we gather - except for the year my brother died. His funeral was held on the second Saturday in August. The last time I was at this camp my brother was alive. You see the camp holds treasures for a boy and young adult man - woods, dirt, fire. My brother loved being at camp. He always set up his tent in the same location, would take walks in the woods with my younger cousins and was always messing with the camp fire pit. He'd sit for hours in front of it, poking it and adding branches. Our young male cousins would sit next to him and learn from his wisdom of fire. After dinner, and once it became dark we'd roast marshmallows, but Brian would try to get the jiffy pop popcorn to pop. The small alluminium pan which was not meant to be used on open flame would sizzle and pop. One year he caught it on fire but still ate the twenty or so semi popped kernels inside. He got better at popping it though, and would sit and eat his popcorn happy to have mastered it.
One year I slept in the small camp building and woke in the middle of the night to squeaky noises of mice. Against my better judgement I had agreed to sleep in the building and not in a tent. However, in the middle of the night, and even though I was afraid of bears or other animals outside (which were unfounded fears) I gathered up my blanket, grabbed my flashlight and walked across the small camp towards my brother's tent. As I unzipped it he woke with a jolt and I told him I was sleeping there because there were mice in the camp. He fell asleep and so did I. I know he wasn't happy about me sleeping in the tent with him, but he dealt with it. I knew his tent offered me safety and protection. I knew he was the one I could turn to in the small crisis. These are the memories that I'm fearful  of reliving when my husband and I camp out this weekend.
Even though I'm fearful I need to go. I need to camp out this weekend and be with my family. I need to go back to the place where my brother and I once went together. I need to make new memories there and invite my husband to do the same. I can't run away forever.

Maybe this sudden sadness is fleeting and will pass just as suddenly as it came about. Is this the new grief of my heart? Is this the new pattern that will continue for the rest of my life. Or could this be more serious? Questions abound without answers and the only thing I know for certain is that my eyelids are puffy, my eyes hurt and there is no one left to call me sister.

home

Today is the last day of my visit home. I've spent nearly three weeks in Massachusetts. Tomorrow I will be flying back to D.C.. My Florida trip has made me not scared of planes anymore. Thankfully.
It's an odd feeling being at home again. The last time I was here was January. Not much has changed in this small New England town. The house hasn't changed either. But little changes in my brother's room have started to happen.
The door to his room is no longer covered with the random assortment of buttons, pieces of paper and various printed versions of my brother's name. There are things taken down from the wall, and a box of random things on the tv stand where the eight-track player once lived. My boyfriend came to stay for a few days, and honestly before he came (and stayed in the room) it looked like my brother had just been home. The top of the dresser has his deodorant, random papers, mints, etc.. All signs of my brother's life. And now all pushed into the top drawers of the dresser, in hopes of presenting the room as empty. Although the wall still have posters, and if you really look around it is full of my brother's possessions. It at least no longer looks like my brother is simply gone away for the weekend.
It's a change that will be finalized soon. At least that is what my parents keep saying. My father remarked that its something he wants to do, clean the room, but every time he tries to, he cannot part with anything that once was my brother's. Its a double edge sword, because my brother is gone, and the things he once used does not bring us any closer to my brother now. Yet, its hard to hold something in your hand, and realize that Brian used this, or Brian use to play with this. It is especially hard to throw something away if you remember Brian using it.
My thoughts this afternoon have to do with home, and what it means to be home, and who makes up this "being home." After my brother died I use to wish him to just return home. I remember sitting up late at night on the computer waiting, hopelessly, for him to come home. When I moved to D.C. I was worried that my brother didn't know that I would have left home, so somehow he wouldn't be able to find me-if he was watching me.
I call my dorm in DC home. I call the house I am now staying in home. Depending upon the person I am speaking to, and where I am. Is my dorm really a home. Not really, but it where I live, and a person who I love lives a few dorm rooms down from me. But the house in Massachusetts will always be my home. Even years from now when this house is sold. This is the last place my brother lived, and regardless of the fact that my old house, with much more family history, that I moved out of when I was twelve, will always be the "true home" for me, this house holds much more memories. I hashed out the troubling times of my teenage years in this house. I spoke on the phone to my first boyfriend in my room, and last night I spoke with my current boyfriend, on my cell phone, in my room.
I miss my brother when I am home. When I am away, I always wish that when I return home, that maybe Brian would be home too. It's something that, after two years, I should know just cannot happen. It still catches me off guard when I realize that it has almost been two years since he died. And I'm growing into the realization that I will always be able to feel the weight of his death in the depths of my soul. And I am still trying to figure out what it means to truly be at home, or really go home. I hate the trite saying "you can never go home again" or some version of that idiom. Except that my home has so radically changed over the course of the last two years, that what remains is a working house, with the remains of a life, lived fast and ended too soon.