I Am Just Really Sad

Tomorrow will be two months since my big brother died, and I am realizing something that feels almost embarrassingly simple.

I am just really, really sad. I don’t think I have ever been this sad for this long.

I keep waiting to feel better…just a little better. A little less like Eeyore walking around with an invisible gray blanket of sadness wrapped around my shoulders.

Of course I’ve been sad before. One does not get to be 58 without feeling sadness, and I’ve experienced real grief. I lost a dear friend after a brutal battle with cancer 10 years ago, and her death greatly impacted me. I grieved her so deeply and for so long that I actually had other friends who were critical of how I was processing it and how long I seemed to be grieving. So I understand heartbreak and disappointment and seasons that have brought me to my knees. I’ve also struggled with depression and anxiety…hello, menopause and hormones…and I know what those have felt like in my own body.

Over the years, I’ve learned what helps me when I feel myself slipping into depression. Getting outside, traveling, putting my face in the sunshine, my body in salt water, and my feet in warm white sand. Reading a luxurious novel that lets me disappear into someone else’s story for a while. Being with the Captain and laughing with my kids and grandkids. Corporate worship…I love it. Yes, I actually love church. Walking like someone was paying me millions to do it. And certain relationships, those people who somehow feel like balm to my soul just by being near them. You know who you are, my dear friends.

Sometimes I’ve had to force myself to do those things when I absolutely did not feel like doing them. I’ve had to get up, put on the shoes, go outside, make the plans, and answer the phone, but eventually something would shift. Maybe not all at once, but the fog would begin to lift, a little light would get in, and I could feel myself slowly coming back online.

And then there are the hormones. Once I finally understood what menopause was doing to my brain and body and got the right help, it was startling. It was like someone turned the lights back on and I realized just how long I had been trying to find my way around in the dark.

So I think somewhere along the way I learned to approach feeling bad with a question: Okay, what can I do to feel better?

Which completely tracks because I am a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kinda gal. I’m a doer. I enjoy taking care of things and checking things off a list; the dopamine hit is REAL. And that is essentially what I did for my brother.

I “happened” to be in Florida on April 20 when Bobby went to the ER because he wasn’t feeling well and ended up being admitted, and from that day until June 27, when his memorial and luncheon were over, I had a job: take care of Bobby.

I did the research, asked the questions, made the appointments, pushed for answers when I didn’t feel like we were getting them, talked to the doctors and advocated for him. I kept track of symptoms and medications and appointments, tried to understand what was happening, and helped make decisions that none of us ever imagined we would have to make. There was always another phone call, another question, another appointment, another decision, another thing I could research and maybe somehow figure out. And prayed and prayed and prayed for the healing that I thought God would grant him.

There was always something to do…until there wasn’t.

On June 18, my precious, hilarious, kind, simple, loyal big brother Bobby took his last breaths with my mom, my dad, and me beside him. We watched him gasp for precious air and watched a few tears trickle down his cheek, and I cannot adequately explain how much that image haunts me.

I ran into the hallway, grabbed the nurse, and said, “I think my brother is gone…” I remember feeling ashen. Then I saw a crash cart coming toward his room and dramatically planted myself in front of it, sobbing and screaming, “He has a DNR! Do not crack his chest! Leave him alone!” I vomited in the bathroom. I watched my dad stand there in shock, muttering words that made little sense, while my precious momma held on to her son’s hand for more than two hours because she simply could not let him go.

Eventually, I had to be the one to tell her, “Please, Mom. We need to go.”

Because Bobby was no longer there.

And then, because I am me, I started taking care of things again. I gathered his personal belongings from the hospital room and refused to throw away his ChapStick. I kept the cup I had bought him because he wanted his ice to stay colder longer, and toward the end, ice was one of the only things he still enjoyed. Suddenly those incredibly ordinary things felt precious simply because they were his…and I have held onto those simple items, as if they were of huge monetary value.

Then I planned the memorial. I called the cremation service, spoke with the pastors, gathered the photos, picked the music, worked on the service, and arranged the luncheon. I made sure we had Luigi’s Italian Ices because apparently there are no details too small when you are trying to create one final act of love for your big brother.

I kept doing what I knew how to do, taking care of Bobby just like he had taken care of me throughout our childhood. There was another phone call to make, another decision to make, another detail to handle and another thing I could check off the list.

Until June 27 came, and the memorial and luncheon ended. People hugged us and said goodbye, the last details were handled and suddenly there was nothing left for me to do.

My job was over…and my brother was still dead.

Except apparently my brain didn’t get the memo.

Our daughter Tessa has watched every season of The Office and Friends several times, and I’ve never really understood rewatching an entire television series over and over again. Apparently, I just rewatch trauma instead, because the last few months of Bobby’s life are playing in my head on a continuous loop. It reminds me of the big screen before church when the same video keeps playing while everyone is finding their seats.

It starts on April 20 with the hospitals and doctors and phone calls and scans and decisions, his face and his voice, and then somehow we are back at June 18 and his breathing and those tears. Then June 27, the worship music and his precious 13-year-old daughter standing up to speak about her daddy.

And then it starts again…round and round it goes.

Because I am who I am, I keep thinking there must be something I can do about all of this sadness, so I do the things I know to do. I walk. I get outside. I relish the California sunshine. I sit outside with Frank and Whitney beside me and recognize that the marina and the sky are still beautiful.

And yet…I am still sad.

C.S. Lewis wrote about the loss of his wife, in A Grief Observed: “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” I feel this in my bones.

That is the part I don’t think I understood before. I can walk miles in the sunshine and still be sad. The sunshine can feel wonderful on my face without ever touching the place inside of me that misses my brother, and the walk can clear my head without changing the fact that Bobby is dead. Vitamin D can do what vitamin D does, but none of it can bring my brother back.

This isn’t depression, at least not as I have experienced depression in my own life. This is sadness. Deep, persistent, soul-level sadness.

Merriam-Webster describes sad as being affected by grief or unhappiness, but another definition describes something as being a “dull somber color,” and I sort of love that one. Except my life doesn’t actually look dull or somber, and maybe that is one of the strangest things about grief.

I can laugh with Frank and play with Whitney. I can travel all over Europe with loved ones, have dinner with people I love, be ridiculous on a boat with my grandkids, worship Jesus and mean every single word I am singing. I can look around at my life and know how unbelievably blessed I am. I can feel real, genuine joy and still be profoundly sad. It is that both/and again.

For years, I struggled a little with my natural tendency toward melancholy because joy is a fruit of the Spirit, and somewhere along the way I think I absorbed the idea that being a joyful Christian meant I should be able to get myself back to happy.

But happiness and joy aren’t the same thing, and faith does not require me to pretend something isn’t devastating when it is.

Jesus wept. He knew resurrection was coming, and He still wept.

I understand that differently now because I believe with everything in me that I will see my brother again, and I still desperately want him here. Those truths do not cancel each other out.

Tomorrow it will be two full months of living in a world where my big brother doesn’t, and if I am telling the truth, the heaviness is not getting better the way I thought it would. In some ways, it is actually getting worse. Time is not healing this right now; time seems to be making the permanence of it clearer. Another day passes, and he is still gone, and then another week and another month. I just want to pick up the phone and call him…at times, for a brief millisecond, I start to think, “Oh, I should call B..” and then I remember.

I am not ever going to be the woman I was before June 18. How could I be?

It really does feel as though a limb has been removed from my body, like I am an amputee learning how to walk through a life that looks mostly the same to everyone else but feels completely different to me.

I feel it when I talk to my grieving, aging parents, who should never have had to sit in the front row at their child’s memorial. That wasn’t how this was supposed to go. Bobby was supposed to be sitting beside me someday at their funerals. We were supposed to support each other and look at each other and know, without having to explain it, what we had just lost because we were the only two people on earth who shared that particular history.

Even with an entire country separating us, Bobby was a kind of security blanket for me. A binkie on the other coast. I simply knew he existed, and I knew that if push came to shove, my big brother would be there.

Now he isn’t.

And I feel utterly alone in a way I don’t quite have words for yet, because so much of my history feels like it was obliterated on June 18.

Who else remembers lying underneath that enormous white flocked Christmas tree on the blue shag carpet when we were little, staring up through the branches at the lights? Who remembers our parents when they were young? Who remembers our childhood home in Sicklerville, N.J, playing run the bases outside and drinking from the water hose (it really was a thing) or our sweet black miniature poodle, “Cookie”? Or the Christmas mornings and completely ordinary moments? Who remembers me before I became all the versions of myself I am now?

Bobby did.

There are memories now for which I am the only remaining keeper, and that makes me unbearably sad.

Maybe that is what I am finally beginning to understand. Not every painful feeling is asking to be fixed, and maybe I don’t need to snap out of this.

Maybe the walk is still good, and the sunshine still feels warm on my face. Maybe I keep taking the vitamin D and moving my body and laughing when something is funny. Maybe joy is still here and God is still good, and maybe I can be deeply grateful for this beautiful life I have been given and still be really, really sad.

There is room for all of it.

I don’t think this sadness will always feel exactly the way it feels today, at least I hope it won’t. But I do believe it will forever mark my soul, not because I have lost my joy or because I have lost my faith, but because I lost someone I have loved for my entire life.

And I’m starting to think some sadness isn’t something we are supposed to fix.

Maybe it is simply the mark left behind when someone mattered that much.

In His Grace,

Dawn