Marnie Szpieg

Our annual celebration for my brother’s 17th birthday that defies the laws of tradition.

We still watch your videos, you know.

The hammering ache is permitted, just for one night, until the tape recording engraved with your name is sent under the couch, barely out of reach, where it will stay until this date next year. Where it’s almost concealed enough to be forgotten.

In my head, I know the facts and figures that look illegible on paper give the only explanation, but the reality of our situation has become warped and deformed. Imaginary. Like we’ve been placed in a land of fiction. But I’ve heard that’s what loss can do to you.

What makes it even more insufferable is that you’ve somehow hidden pieces of yourself all throughout my life. “Adapt or perish” is what I’ve been told when faced with those pieces, when burdened with the impossible grief that it makes me feel.

The pictures that adorn the gray walls tell a story that presents us as four siblings, even though it’s only me and two others who keep writing chapter after chapter. Adapt or perish. Your baby shoes still sit, collecting eighteen years of dust, by the front door, waiting for the moment you choose to come back and walk in them once more. Adapt or perish. The cold, uninviting air of our basement becomes unbearable when, time after time, the dried roses that hang from the ceiling expel the memory of when they stood in the vase by your picture all those years ago. Adapt or perish. 

The heartache we all suffer is beyond what we can endure. It’s excruciating; inexplicably so. Describing it simply as “sad” is downplaying the worst of the worst: the ever-present bad days. It is on days like these that I pretend not to love you. To love you is painful, but to shatter that facade, to believe the opposite makes me angry at you for something that is out of your control; it is then that I slowly forget the true idea of you, and that is much worse.

However, the family and I have learned how to drag ourselves out of the hole that grief throws us in every so often. 

Not only do sunflowers decorate the front yard, your picture frames, and our phone cases, but every Oct. 9 we get to watch one float down the river and out of sight. We enjoy your favorite ravioli on your birthday—taking extra care to set another plate at the table that goes uneaten and cold—and watch in the bitter night as the flame of the lantern we free into the sky burns warmer than ever. And, although it pains me that I’ll never be able to fill you in on the unimportant aspects of my life as we drive home together, your stuffed bear that still wears your favorite beanie sits in the passenger seat. You never miss an adventure.

Somehow, our suffering gives me hope that maybe someday, long into the future, when the world is colorless and cold, when there’s another you and another me, I wouldn’t have to endure a lifetime of missing you for an eternity of never knowing you.