The Trees Know Your Name

A shift in my grief startles and terrifies me every time. It feels like I’m trying to hold all of you in my arms as I walk through my days, like an impossibly large and towering pile of laundry, and I drop little bits of you with every step I take. A lost sock here. A forgotten shirt there. I haven’t thought about you for the last hour. . . and then the panic sets in that I’ll forget the sound of your laugh. I got tired and forgot to write you a letter today. . . there goes my endless devotion. I watched the new season of Queer Eye without you. . . and now it begins, the part where I start leaving you behind. Someone put food in front of me and I wanted to eat it. . . let me replay our last hug in my mind over and over again before the feeling leaves me. I joined the kids in the living room, enthusiastically bouncing and dancing along, and then I felt a jolt . . . here I am, having fun without you. All those little shifts create a panic in me, a worry that this is just the beginning of...

Memory: What do you want to remember? What do you wish you could forget? I want to remember your hugs. Those squishy, strong sister hugs. Those hugs that were like no other, those hugs that immediately signaled to me that I was in a familiar place bursting with love. Those hugs that said everything, that were everything. I want to remember your laugh. The sweet sound of your voice. The way your hair would hang in wisps across your face. I want to remember what it felt like every time we came back together. The sweet anticipation of every visit, knowing that seester time was about to commence. The giddy excitement of it all when we were reunited each time, running towards each other with hugs, settling into a familiarity that was decades old, getting ready to commence days’ worth of our secret language. I want to remember the little moments: eating corn on the cob on your porch, making guacamole in Dad’s kitchen, lighting sparklers on the 4th of July. Playing and singing music together ...

Grief is everywhere. It hangs between the lines of every conversation. It follows me, lives in me, an intangible weight and force that touches everything. I can’t find a place to go where you aren’t. Every song, every book, every place, every landscape, every memory, every thing contains pieces of you. There you are, in the dollar section at Target, where you used to buy little gifts for my kids and send them in festive, thoughtful care packages. There you are, as I browse the shelves, unable to break my habit of continually looking for gifts for you (you’ve always been my favorite person to buy for). There you are, in the book I’m reading that seems innocuous enough until I suddenly find myself reading the lyrics of a familiar song, a song that you sent me before you died, a song that you said summed up how you hoped you would leave things when your time was up. There you are, in the texts I can’t send you, that punch in the gut I feel every time I pick up my phone to tell you somethi...

My heart is trembling. It is a caged animal. It whimpers and scurries around, looking for an exit. It is frantic, trying one angle after another, looking for the hidden cracks, the secret passages. It calls for help. No one responds. It becomes increasingly anxious. It feels unmoored, ungrounded. It doesn’t understand where it is, where it belongs. It has no center, nothing to hold it steady. The caged animal that is my heart tries to crawl up walls, tries to squeeze itself between bars, slams itself repeatedly into steel walls. It keeps searching, keeps looking for an open door until it eventually collapses and retreats into itself. It curls up in the corner, exhausted, weeping and alone. It gives up. It stops trying. It falls into a fitful sleep. Then suddenly it wakes, alarmed, immediately aware that something is wrong. The anxious energy builds, the frantic search beginning again. It tries again and again to find its way out, to force its way through, all to no avail. It becomes ov...

You know the old joke, “It’s a brain tumor!”? The one we causally assign to every recurrent headache, every personality shift, every persistent cough? I’m here at the party, drink in hand, reminding you that -- fuck -- it really COULD be a brain tumor. Maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe it’s not such an impossibility. Maybe it could happen to you. As we knock back our drinks, my presence reminds you that maybe you could one day be bright and happy and 35 years old, but day after day you start to feel a little off balance. You could go to doctor after doctor before you finally get an MRI, and then you could get the news no one wants to hear (ha --joke’s on you!). As you pass me the guacamole and remember my sister (because I will make damn sure that she’s not forgotten), you’re reminded that one day you could go into surgery, healthy and strong, and then leave with a hole in your cerebellum so gaping and wide that you can no longer easily see, speak, or move. You will never walk unassisted ag...

If you want me to breathe in this wreckage, I need a place where I can fall apart. I don’t know how to do that when I’m also expected to go on, when I’m expected to keep living. I need more support than anyone could ever give. I need quiet, I need space, I need time. I need to not have to think about money, for my clients to cancel their appointments, for my children to never need anything from me. I need to never have to go anywhere, to never have errands and bills, to know for sure that I won’t lose my friends if I stop taking any interest in their lives. I need the impossible. I need a room of my own. I need a cabin in the woods. I need to be away, away, away -- far away from this world that no longer fits, from this life that suddenly feels foreign. I need unlimited rest and sleep and quiet. I need endless opportunities to scream and sob. I need nature. I need the trees to hear all of this, to hold all of this, to be there with their steadiness and strength. I need a place where I ...

Sometimes I choose suffering. I polish and shine my quills. I choose to stay isolated, to build up my walls, to put up my prickly gates. I get angry at people when they have their own obligations, their own wants, their own joys. I don’t articulate my needs, and then get furious at other people for not anticipating them. I see everything that they are doing to support me, and then get angry for all the ways that they fall short. I know that, no matter how much they do, it will never be enough. They will never be able to bring my sister back. There are not enough phone calls and casseroles and care packages in the world to fill the cavernous hole in my heart. I don’t know that I expect myself to behave any better. What I expect is for the world to behave better. What I want is for everyone to turn and see this gaping hole in my life, this burning fire, and to look at it with horror. I want them to know that this could happen to them. I want them to feel what I feel. But I also know it’s...

Give me all the wonder and all the joy. Let it flood me. Give me all the heartache and pain. If I must, I will let that flood me too. I live and I feel and I love big. It’s the only way I know how to be. There is no such thing in my life as a tempered emotion, no such thing as a feeling that is only half-felt. I’ve always known that loving big would mean losing big. I’ve also known that being madly in love with my life, with my people, with being alive would mean that I had so much more to lose. I know that’s why this hurts so much, why it often feels like I’m drowning and will never come back up for air. And there’s no way in hell I would ever have done it any other way. Thank God I let myself be overcome with so much laughter and wonder and awe. Thank God I let myself be flooded with joy. Thank God I was so madly in love with my sister that we lived as though we could never leave each other, as though our time together would never end. Even as I sit here in the aftermath, with all th...

Green. Your favorite color, and mine. Lush, alive, the color of trees. The color of peace. The color of the Christmas tree that stood outside your door, it’s bright white light steady and unchanging as you took your last breath. It continued to shine -- an obstinate reminder that the world goes on, even when yours goes dark. Green. The rolling green hills of the Smoky Mountains, the place where you lived, the place that always suited you. It was the place where I always felt nestled in, where we sat outside and laughed and ate corn on the cob. I daydreamed about moving so I could be closer to you, so we could always spend our days like this. Green, the color of the leaves that hot summer day when we put on our suits and rode inner tubes down the river, when I shrieked and squealed with every bump and you poked fun at me as only a sister can. Green. The lush, wide field of flowers that we hiked through on our way to the mountains. So many hikes, so much time with the trees witnessing ou...

I am not ready for anyone’s “inspiration” about how they live with this, about how they move forward. I am not looking for encouragement or for a guiding star. I don’t know how to admire someone who just did what they had to do, who had to learn against their will how to live with something that they never asked for. I’m not sure it helps me to look to others for direction; it feels better to trust myself to find my own path forward. I know I will have to find my own way. I couldn't find the words, but I found the images. I don’t really think of this person as my grief mentor - I think of her more as my future self. She is where I hope to be one day.  Sometimes I see tiny glimmers of her. Sometimes I believe she is possible.

An avalanche, a spiritual bone-setting Rigorous and painful A wanting heart, scared and clinging, bundling beloved memories. Zany masks compelling me to turn you inside out Devised fire, combustible and clingy. Work was hard, an unnerving, inexplicable tide -- In retrospect, the ripple effect of being able to receive. I was learning to counteract this pain with purpose -- to enjoy, to want, to experience. Fear calls; there are no delusions. Teach myself presence. Teach myself how to be alive.

Kindness means surrender. It means giving my grief all the space it needs, letting it stretch out, letting it breathe. It means never apologizing for reminding people that this is not “over,” that I am not “better,” that my world is not the same. Kindness means never being sorry for being sad, for being broken, for not being okay. It’s being honest, showing up in all my messiness and pain, and not forcing myself to pretend. Kindness is choosing the stewards of my grief carefully, consciously choosing who walks this road with me and who doesn’t. It means never feeling obligated to bring someone along just because they want to try and make this better. Kindness is giving myself permission to tell people when they’ve done or said something that’s hurt me. Kindness means telling people how they can do better. Kindness is letting myself come up for air, letting myself feel the sun on my face, if only for a moment. It’s letting myself feel happy in those brief moments when I feel happy. It’s...

I am grief. I am small, scared, tucked away. Not small in feelings, but small because I feel powerless, because I’m so scared of what I might lose. I’m a small animal - like a hedgehog, vulnerable but prickly. I’m in hibernation, curled up into a sphere, my body wound tightly like the shell of a snail. I am terrified to move. I hide away, clinging to these precious bits of her fiercely. The world no longer feels safe anymore. I gather all my comforts around me, pulling in leaves and down and fur and bits of grass, hoping they will protect me. Knowing that they can’t. Knowing that I can’t stay here forever. I’m afraid to breathe. Afraid that every bit of movement or change means that something will be lost. If I stay here forever, can I keep her forever? If I stay here forever, can she stay here with me? I can’t endure the noise of the outside world, the light that seeps through the cracks. It is too much. It is a place I don’t belong, a place that will never feel right. I don’t know ho...

It’s 10am on a summer Saturday. The smell of freshly cut grass. The smell of damp earth, freshly peeled bark, sweat. And then the sound of two girls giggling. Their breath catching, their exclamations exuberant as they run full force and heave their bodies into the grass, legs in the air like ninjas, watching each other with a knowing glance as they shout, “Hi-YAH!” They fall to the earth, laughing, rolling on the ground, feeling the itchy grass beneath them and the warmth of the Southern summer sun. They turn towards each other, eyes dancing with joy, sharing the togetherness of this moment. Always turning toward each other. …. It’s 3pm on a Thursday. The smell of leaves, of bark, of moss and dirt. Tiny twigs snap beneath my feet. The ground crunches and cracks as my shoes press against the earth. This is the place where you are, where I know you live, where I know you felt most at home. This is the place that was taken from you, long before you were taken from this earth, as your bod...

You can’t come into my world; you haven’t paid the price of entry. You aren’t permitted to step inside. You can’t know how to join me here. I wander, dazed and confused, heartbroken and angry, trying to figure out what I am supposed to do next, in what direction I am supposed to be headed. In this world, there is no peace. In this world, there is no rest. I live in this world by stumbling through it. By retreating from it. By denying that it exists. By screaming and crying and thrusting my rage upon it. I know where I live. I live in the place where she was - though it is not the same. It is a world where something will always be missing. Without her here, the light has left. Without her, things that were once familiar are now unknown. This world feels like a movie set - it looks the same, but it’s all pretend. It has no heartbeat, no life, no rhythm. It is nothing more than an illusion. I live in this world by putting on a costume and pretending it’s a “normal” day - for those times w...

What you don’t know is that I am never okay. This heaviness never leaves me. When I manage to laugh, there is a darkness behind it. When I chat with you, I’m thinking about her. When I walk about and go through my day, there is a gaping hole in my chest, an ache that can never be repaired, an ache that never leaves, an ache that I feel sure will be with me forever. What you don’t know is that I spend so much of my time looking for pieces of her, collecting memories and items like broken treasures, trying desperately to reassemble them into some semblance of her and yet knowing that they will never add up to all that she was. What you don’t know is that losing a sibling means that I lost my childhood (the keeper of my secrets and my memories), my present (the person I relied upon for everything from advice to funny memes), and my future (the person who I thought would be with me until the end, who was always the steadiest presence in my life). I lost what was supposed to be the longest...

The person I used to be was obsessed with life. She was joy. She couldn’t get enough of living, of how beautiful the world is, of how amazing it is to be alive, of how much she never wanted it to end. The person I used to be was tethered, grounded in the safety of the one relationship that bound all the pieces of her life together, the one that would carry her into forever, the one that would never end. The person I used to be knew who her “go to” person was for everything: decisions to be made, advice to be had, jokes to be told, guardianship to grant. She had a person who could be trusted to raise her children, to make medical decisions on her behalf, to manage her money. She had someone she would trust wholeheartedly to do exactly what she would have wanted. She had someone who knew her inside and out, who knew exactly what mattered most, exactly how things should be done, exactly how to honor all the truths of her life. The person I used to be was whole. She knew sadness, but s...

I’m not going to write about how life could go on without you, how maybe one day I could be okay. I’m not going to write about how I might get to a place where this unbearable weight is not my constant companion - because unbearable as it may be, it’s the weight that keeps you close. Right now it’s my grief that keeps you with me. I don’t trust what others say about moving forward, about bringing you along with me into the future. The thought of moving forward makes me feel like I’m dropping pieces of you behind me, casually letting you fall like breadcrumbs, the distance from my pain becoming a slippery slope toward my forgetting. I’m not going to write about how terrified I am of forgetting you. Forgetting how you laughed, how you moved, how your energy felt in a room. Forgetting the touch of you - knowing that there is no way to collect the feeling of touch, no photograph to capture it, no video that can translate. Will I forget what it felt like to hold your hand? What the warmth o...