On Grief

I miss you, I love you, I'm so sorry

Welcome to Not a Doctor. I’m Melody Schreiber, a journalist and the editor of What We Didn’t Expect.

And today, I’m talking about grief.

My youngest brother, Casey, died on Friday. The day before, he was happy and smiling, and the next, he never woke up. He was 23.

It will be weeks or months before we learn what happened, but even then, we won’t know the full story.

We are all heartbroken, stunned, full of regrets about all of the things we never told him and the future he won’t have. The memories keep popping into my head: the way he would look up at me like I knew everything in the world; the way he would hurt for me when I was hurting; the way he always seemed to see us as two friends on an adventure, with no age difference at all.

Once, when he was 10 and I was 21, we went snowboarding together on a class trip, and he found $20 in the snow. (My brothers’ secret power is finding money on the ground.) He brought it over to me, cupping his hands around the treasure and brimming with his good luck before he slipped it to me for safe keeping. Later, we found a used snowboard at a yard sale, and we bought it with that money. It was ours to share.

I wish we’d taken it on another trip. I wish for so many things.

🌡 🌡 🌡

The strange thing about grieving is how alone you feel. But the strange thing about grieving right now, during a pandemic, is how I’m not really alone. Thousands of people have died in the past few months, of all kinds of causes.

I’ve seen the messages on social media. At first, I responded to them, stories about aunts and uncles and parents who had passed away. I’m so sorry for your loss; I’m holding your family in the light. It seemed so small, so insignificant, a few uncertain words in the face of unimaginable loss. Soon, I stopped. Who cared about a stranger’s clichés?

But when I posted about my brother, the messages flooded in. On Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, there were public responses and direct messages from friends and from people I’ve never met. Along with these same halting sentiments, there was advice: seek therapy; call your mother as much as you can; try not to blame yourself; remember the good times. Some of this advice is easier to take than others.

I read over each of those messages whenever I feel the loss rolling over me. It staggers my mind: The friends and even strangers who took time from their day to feel for me and my family, to hold up a tiny corner of our grief in the hopes that it will be slightly less heavy — oh, what that means.

Over the past few months, I’ve often struggled with knowing what to do, how to help. How could I move from helplessness to helpfulness? I started this newsletter so I could keep people informed, because I just needed to do something. Still, it never felt like enough. How could a few words do anything to stem the tide of a calamity this mind-numbingly enormous?

But now I know. Those little words do so much work. Those words are all we have at times — and sometimes they’re what we need the most.

So please, keep holding each other in the light. Keep trying to lift this blanket of grief, even just a tiny bit. Keep sending messages, even if loss stacks higher and higher. Sometimes it feels like we’re sending all of our hopes into the void. But that’s okay. That’s what grief is.

It won’t last forever.

🌡 🌡 🌡

Another memory, from that snowboarding trip:

Casey picked up on snowboarding immediately, while I struggled and fell and collected bruises all over. He didn’t quite understand why I kept falling so much. Ah, the difference between being a kid and a grown-up.

When we hit our first slope, I seemed to spend more time on the ground that I did upright. Tired and sore and dejected, I slumped down in the snow after yet another fall. I looked back to where I started, not that far away; I could just unlatch the snowboard now and walk back. Why not? It would save me pain and pride.

But Casey was already at the bottom of the hill. Even as his friends trekked back up through the snow to push back down again, Casey waited for me, waving me on, cheering for me to join him. It had looked like such a small slope when we started, but now it seemed impossibly vast. I honestly thought I would never reach the end.

I did, eventually, because he would not let me give up. He was so sure that I could make it, not even thinking about how far he himself had come.

I can still see him now, just a kid standing in the snow, smiling and waiting for me.