I Knew You Before: A Sister's Goodbye

Sometimes my son turns his head a certain way and I see my brother.

His name is Matthew, too.

We named him after him.

Most of the time, looking at my son feels exactly like what you would expect it to feel like. Love so enormous that it almost doesn't fit inside my body. He is two years old now, and he looks so much like my brother sometimes that it catches me off guard.

And sometimes, if I'm being completely honest, looking at him hurts.

Because for just a second, I see my brother.

Maybe I see the little boy my brother must have been. Maybe I see the boy I remember. Maybe I see the man I spent so many years hoping would somehow find his way back to himself.

My brother died on May 26, 2021.

Four days before my birthday. A little more than a month after his.

I think I've been trying to figure out how to say goodbye to him ever since.

Six Years

My brother was six years older than me, which meant that when I was little, he was everything.

I idolized him.

Most of the childhood memories I can still access have him somewhere in them.

He taught me how to ride a bike. He played with me. He walked me around the neighborhood when he was supposedly "watching me," although I'm not entirely sure why anyone thought a ten-year-old boy was qualified childcare.

He practiced wrestling moves on me because, of course, that's what older brothers are for.

Later, he helped me practice boxing, kickboxing, and karate.

He helped me get ready for my homecoming dance once. He was sober that day. There is a picture of us from that day that comes out every year and goes on our ofrenda.

I treasure that picture.

My brother was also probably one of the smartest people I have ever known.

And I don't mean that in the way we sometimes romanticize people after they die.

He was just ridiculously smart.

He could sleep through calculus and still ace it. He played musical instruments. He went to the Junior Olympics for karate. He could pick up one of those old Marvel trading cards, look at it, and recreate the image full-scale on a sheet of paper.

No art classes. No training.

He could just do it.

The things I had to work incredibly hard at seemed to come naturally to him.

There wasn't much he couldn't do.

Until there was.

I Knew You Before

I don't know exactly when my memories of my brother begin changing.

At some point, the brilliant, irritating, protective older brother in my childhood memories becomes someone who is struggling.

And then almost all I remember is the struggle.

Drugs.

Alcohol.

Juvenile detention.

Fights.

Homelessness.

Bars.

Picking him up when he couldn't get himself home.

Watching someone you love disappear and reappear and disappear again.

He started using incredibly young, somewhere around thirteen. And sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we knew then what we know now.

What if we had understood trauma differently?

What if we had understood neurodivergence differently?

What if a child who was getting into trouble had been brought into a mental health system instead of a juvenile detention system?

What if the adults around us had made different choices?

What if we had had different parents?

There are a thousand versions of "what if" available when someone dies.

None of them change what happened.

But I still wonder.

Because I knew him before.

And one of the hardest parts of losing him is feeling like there aren't many people left who did.

Loving Someone You Also Needed Protection From

There is something difficult to explain about loving someone who has also caused you tremendous harm.

My brother loved me.

I know that.

I know that in my bones.

Aside from my husband, he may be the only person I have ever known who I can genuinely say would have killed someone to protect me.

And he almost did.

Literally.

He was fiercely protective of me.

He was also one of the people who caused me some of the greatest physical and emotional harm of my life.

Both things are true.

That has taken me a long time to understand.

I don't have to rewrite what happened to me in order to love him.

I don't have to minimize the things he did because he is dead.

And I don't have to turn him into a monster in order to acknowledge that some of the things he did were monstrous.

He was my brother.

I loved him.

I was afraid of him.

I admired him.

I was angry with him.

I wanted to save him.

Eventually, I learned that I couldn't.

When my daughter Caitlin was born, he wasn't someone who could safely be part of her life. We lived across the country from each other, me in Wisconsin and him in a lot of places, but mostly Florida. Distance wasn't the only reason he didn't know her.

I had to protect my child.

Even from someone I loved.

Maybe especially from someone I loved.

Our relationship became what I would probably describe now as low contact. There was love there, but there had to be distance too.

Those things can coexist.

I've learned that about a lot of relationships.

The Last Christmas I Remember

The last Christmas I really remember in our family home has my brother in it.

He was already struggling with drugs and alcohol by then, but he stayed sober long enough to decorate the Christmas tree with me.

He was there Christmas morning.

And then something happened.

Or maybe nothing happened.

Sometimes that's the strange thing about growing up in chaos. You remember the feeling long after you've lost the sequence of events.

There was an argument with our mom.

He was intoxicated.

And whatever version of a normal Christmas we had managed to build for a few hours disappeared again.

Our lives were complicated in ways children's lives never should have been.

There were things we were responsible for that we shouldn't have been responsible for.

There were things we saw that children shouldn't have seen.

There were roles we played because somebody had to play them.

For a long time, I thought my brother and I came out of that childhood completely differently.

I'm not sure I believe that anymore.

I think we both came out wounded.

Our wounds just looked different.

He Cleaved. I Ran.

My brother and I envied each other.

I don't think I fully understood that until I was older.

I envied how easy things seemed for him. His intelligence. His artistic ability. His athleticism. The things he could accomplish seemingly without effort.

He looked at me and saw something entirely different.

He saw the life he thought I had access to.

Opportunities.

Stability.

Education.

Eventually, a career.

A family.

Maybe he thought I had escaped.

In some ways, I had access to things he didn't.

In other ways, he had access to opportunities I never did.

And somehow none of that protected either of us from what happened in our family.

We adapted differently.

He cleaved to our mother.

I ran.

I still do, I suppose.

Except now I don't actually have to run anymore.

For years I wondered whether running was one of the things wrong with me.

I'm not sure I believe that anymore either.

At one point, my brother cleaved to our father too, while I wanted very little to do with him. Eventually, that relationship broke under the weight of my brother's addiction.

Looking back, I don't see one strong sibling and one weak sibling.

I see two kids trying to survive the same family using completely different strategies.

I was eventually able to start repairing some of what happened to me.

My brother drowned in his for a very long time.

I wish I understood why our stories turned out so differently.

I don't.

Maybe I Could Save Someone Else

My first career was in child welfare.

For years, I told myself that choice was about helping children.

And it was.

But I think part of it was about my brother too.

Maybe if I could help kids like us, they wouldn't end up like him.

Maybe I could interrupt something before it became impossible to interrupt.

It was idealistic.

Eventually, it became disillusioning.

I learned that systems can hurt people while insisting they are helping them. I had to confront the uncomfortable possibility that sometimes I was as much a part of the problem as I was part of the solution.

But I can trace a straight line from the little sister who couldn't save her brother to the young woman who went into child welfare and, eventually, to the therapist who became obsessed with trauma, family patterns, relationships, estrangement, and cycle breaking.

I didn't know that's what I was doing then.

I think I know now.

Then He Got Sober

When you love someone with an addiction, I think you learn how to bury hope.

Not get rid of it.

You can't.

You push it down somewhere deep enough that it can't hurt you quite as badly.

You stop getting excited every time things seem different.

You stop believing every promise.

You stop imagining too far into the future.

You learn how to love someone without trusting that they will still be okay tomorrow.

My brother had been homeless on and off. For a while, he was jumping trains across the country. He tried to backpack the Shenandoah Valley more times than I can count, generally without anything resembling adequate preparation.

For most of my adult life, I knew I would eventually get the call.

The call that he had overdosed.

The call that something happened while he was intoxicated.

The call that he had gotten hurt somewhere.

The call that the life he was living had finally killed him.

You start grieving someone before they're dead when you love someone who lives like that.

At least I did.

And then he got sober.

Not for a day or a week.

Long enough that something in me started changing.

That tiny seed of hope I thought I had buried started pushing its way back toward the surface.

Maybe this time.

Maybe he could do this.

Maybe Caitlin could finally meet her uncle.

They were supposed to meet.

He died about a month before it was going to happen.

He wasn't drunk.

He wasn't high.

He wasn't jumping a train or sleeping outside or doing one of the thousand dangerous things I had spent years imagining might kill him.

He was sober.

He was asleep in the back seat of a car.

There was an accident.

They told us he died on impact.

I hope that's true.

I hope he never woke up.

I hope he was sleeping, and then he was just gone.

The Call I Had Expected My Whole Life

Except it wasn't a call.

I was sick that day and had been sleeping.

My mother called a couple of times and I didn't answer.

So she texted me.

"Your brother's dead."

Four words.

I called her.

She was angry that I hadn't answered.

I don't remember everything that was said after that. Grief does strange things to memory.

But I remember how alone I felt.

I was newly separated or newly divorced. I honestly don't even remember exactly where I was in that process anymore.

And now my brother was dead.

Everyone responds to grief differently. I know that professionally and personally.

But I hated my mother for how she responded to his death.

I hated that those four words were how I found out.

I hated the anger.

I hated what happened afterward.

She didn't even want his ashes.

There was talk of giving them to some of his friends from when he was homeless.

And I couldn't do that.

Whatever our relationship had become, whatever he had done, whatever distance I had needed to put between us, he was still my brother.

So I took him.

I brought his ashes halfway across the country to Wisconsin.

And eventually I carried him part of the way back.

Months later. Maybe a year. Time gets strange around grief.

I took him somewhere he would have loved.

I'm not going to say exactly where because I'm not entirely convinced I was legally allowed to spread ashes there.

But it was beautiful.

And it was him.

And I needed to know where my brother was.

So I put him somewhere I believed he would want to stay.

The People Who Never Knew Him

I think this may be the part I struggle with most.

There aren't many people in my life now who knew my brother.

Not really.

My husband never got to meet him.

My children never got to know him.

Even many of the people who did know him knew him after addiction had already consumed so much of his life.

His own children didn't really get to know the version of him I remember.

There isn't another sibling I can call and say, "Remember when Matthew..."

He didn't have a lifelong best friend who remembers the same boy.

There aren't many people left who can tell me stories I don't already know.

And sometimes that makes it feel like I'm carrying an entire version of a person by myself.

The boy who taught me how to ride a bike.

The kid who could draw anything.

The teenager who was so smart he barely seemed to have to try.

The karate athlete.

The musician.

The obnoxious older brother practicing wrestling moves on his little sister.

The brother who helped me get ready for homecoming.

The brother who would have done almost anything to protect me.

The brother I eventually needed protection from.

I knew all of those versions.

I wish more people had.

Five Years Is a Lifetime

It's been a little more than five years since my brother died.

That doesn't sound like very long.

It feels like several lifetimes.

I have lived so much life since he left.

Losses.

Miscarriages.

A divorce.

A marriage.

Estrangement.

Friendships.

More grief.

More babies.

I met and married my husband after my brother died.

There is an entire person who is central to my life whom my brother never knew.

Recently, I lost a friend who was incredibly close to me.

And grief did what grief does.

It opened doors.

One loss doesn't stay politely in its own room. It walks through the house, turning on lights in places you thought had gone dark a long time ago.

Suddenly I was thinking about my brother again.

Not that I ever stopped.

But differently.

Closer.

And then there is Matthew.

My little Matthew.

Gone Till November

My brother's favorite song was "Gone Till November" by Wyclef Jean.

It's on my favorites playlist, so it finds me unexpectedly sometimes.

We played it at our wedding.

It was the song that ended our wedding night.

My brother never met my husband.

He wasn't there when I got married.

And somehow he was.

Every year, the picture of him helping me get ready for homecoming goes onto our ofrenda.

We say his name.

My children see his face.

And one of those children carries his name.

Sometimes his face too.

There are moments when my son looks so much like my brother that it takes my breath away.

I love that.

I hate that.

Both things are true.

Maybe that's what grief has been teaching me all along.

Two things can be true.

I can love my brother and acknowledge the harm he caused me.

I can wish desperately that his life had been different without pretending his choices didn't affect other people.

I can understand the trauma underneath someone's behavior without excusing the behavior.

I can be grateful I protected my daughter and heartbroken that doing so meant my brother never met her.

I can be furious with him.

I can miss him.

I can forgive some things.

I can still be angry about others.

I can remember who he became.

And I can remember who he was before.

A Sister's Goodbye

I don't know if I've ever really said goodbye to my brother.

Maybe this is part of it.

Or maybe loving someone after they die isn't about learning how to say goodbye at all.

Maybe it's learning how to carry the whole person with you.

The little boy.

The brilliant teenager.

The artist.

The athlete.

The musician.

The brother who annoyed me.

The brother I idolized.

The brother who protected me.

The brother I needed protection from.

The man addiction swallowed for years.

The man who got sober.

The uncle who was supposed to meet my daughter.

The brother whose ashes I carried across the country because I needed to know where he was.

The man whose name now belongs to this beautiful little boy who sometimes turns his head a certain way and brings his uncle back to me for just a second.

All of him.

Not just the addiction.

Not just the harm.

Not just the tragedy of how his life ended.

I knew you before, Matthew.

I knew the parts of you the world forgot.

And I remember you still.