I’m relaxing today with Key Largo (1948). It’s my comfort movie when missing Jess. You see, she died a few years—
Knock, knock, knock. Someone at the door.
Ugh. Visitors are rare here in the country. Our neighbors keep to themselves. Whoever it is can wait. I’m at one of the best scenes. “When your head says one thing, and your whole life says another, your head always loses,” Bogie tells Bacall.
Tap, tap, slightly louder. Fine.
I answer to a young woman, pregnant, and not an inch over five-six. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought this house might be for sale.” That’s when I notice her eyes. I don my ball cap, step outside, and tell her that our house hasn’t been on the market since we bought it years ago. I pause, shrug, and do what I always do when I see that look. Wait.
In a torrent, within moments of our meeting, she tells me her brother Matt died two-and-a-half weeks ago. He was eighteen. She reared him herself after their father died. “It’s like I lost another child,” she says. “I miscarried a few years back at eighteen weeks.” (Baby Mary Helen. I asked.)
“You may be surprised at this,” I say gently, “but there are people who dedicate their lives to researching how we grieve. And you’re right. They say that losing a younger brother or sister is as close as we come to losing a child.”
“I never heard that before,” she says, digging a toe in our driveway. “I’m Sandi.” She’s thirty-four.
Looking at my visitor, I recall that Therese Rando, director of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Loss, also mentions that sibling death gets little social acknowledgement. So I explain that my wife also lost a younger brother. Then I mention my parents now dead and my daughter, Jess, who died in 2015 of a fentanyl-laced heroin overdose. Sandi thinks for a moment. “People want me to work through the grief,” she says with a trace of bitterness. “But you don’t. You just learn to hide it.”
“Oh yeah, we hide it,” I agree. “And every day I’m learning to live with it. Some days more than others. But it never goes away. Don’t let anyone tell you different. It helps, knowing what to expect, I mean.”
The weather is pleasant: clouds, a slight breeze. Neither of us seems to be in a hurry. And Sandi has more to say.
Ten years ago her fiancé died in her arms from a reaction to a previously unsuspected asthma condition. She lost her step-dad a few months back. “We used to play marathon Canasta,” she says. I smile and nod and spot another look in her eyes. We love our dead; we want to talk about them. Listening is a balm for both of us.
Sandi has five children and another on the way. She and her current fiancé are house-hunting. With all these changes, she arranged for Matt to take her job at a local store. Driving to work one day he swerved off the road without applying his breaks. Did he fall asleep? Was he messing with his MP3 player? They will never know.
Sandi revisits his death in her mind over and over. She is guilt-ridden, thinking that somehow it’s her fault. She found him the job; he wouldn’t have been on that road if not for her. Matt lingered in the ICU for three days. The hospital permitted only one visitor, his fiancée. Sandi was not allowed in. “I know I could have given him hope,” she says desperately. “I know he wanted to live, he just needed me.”
Ah, regret, I think. You old bastard. Shame and remorse can be particularly acute with unexpected death, those we imagine to have been preventable, such as my daughter’s overdose or Matt’s car accident, suggests clinical psychologist Laurie Ann Pearlman. Siblings feel a tremendous sense of failure at the loss of a brother or sister, adds Albert Cain (University of Michigan). He says that a shocking ninety-two percent feel persistent lifelong guilt. I think of my wife’s enduring sorrow. And my own.
“After Jess died, I started writing about grief,” I tell Sandi. “Articles, books, that’s what I do now. It may help to know that thinking about how they died is really, really common. Maybe we can’t stop doing it, but you’re not alone. And the main thing—”
Again I pause. Hawks float overhead. I listen to the leaves.
“I was certain Jess’s death was my fault. I tortured myself with all the what-ifs and maybes and if-onlys. It nearly drove me nuts. Then finally I realized that there’s nothing I could have done. There’s nothing you could have done, Sandi. I think people get that part right. When it’s our time, it’s our time.”
Sandi nods. “I know, I know. When it’s time, it’s time.”
“On good days that thought really helps me,” I say. It’s my turn for confession. “On bad days, well, nothing much helps. I might break down again tonight, next week, next year, but the idea that it was her time eases things a little, I think.”
Sandi’s sister, irritated at waiting in the car, insists that they go. Sandi shrugs and calls back okay, okay. She stops in the driveway: “God wanted me to knock on your door today.” I tell her that Matt probably had something to do with it. Maybe Jess, too. “You helped me,” I say. “Thank you.”
They leave. I collect our mail. Those hawks are getting noisy but they seem to be enjoying themselves. Me too. I sit on the porch with my package: a new book. In it I read that Kabir Helminski suggests in shared sorrow we find a connection to the divine. Then I come to this thought from Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, founder of the Jewish studies program at City College of New York:
The good news is that God has come closer so we are never alone. God shares our pain. God holds our hand. We walk together even in the valley of the shadow of death. The Bible has given us God’s promise that if we choose life, then “Love is stronger than death.”
This strength is a paradox of loss: I am more vulnerable since my daughter died and in other ways less vulnerable. The daily struggle to survive ultimately leads me outside myself. Yes, I am broken. Yes, my heart is laid bare. Memories and tears come unbidden. I know now just how vulnerable I have always been. Because of this, it may seem odd that I open up to strangers. But mourners do it all the time. You may have met a few.
Many who grieve have discovered that we are not weaker but stronger in our newfound awareness of what matters to us. Our search for meaning takes precedence over worries and obsessions that once seemed so important. What we valued most is gone. The bulwarks that we built prior to loss, usually out of fear, crumble in the face of such sorrow. Our moats are overgrown, windows broken, reflections of old selves shattered.
With ailing spirits and wounded souls we might come to realize that our old priorities aren’t worth further construction. Any thought of rebuilding such metaphorical walls smacks of folly, a waste of energy that is better spent in loving those we have lost and those still with us. Ultimately we may look into life’s broken mirror and find not despair but compassion, for ourselves and for others, vulnerable as we are vulnerable. We cry out and find to our astonishment that they are crying with us.
Later I tell my wife about our visitor. Her laughter is calm and heartfelt. “Matt must really love his sister to send her to you today.” I’m sure he does, just as my daughter loves me. Who can say that Matt and Jess didn’t arrange a tapping on my door? For a blessed moment, Sandi and I are kindred travelers on a desperate road. Apparently our dead won’t leave us be, even when we want to watch an old movie.
_____
(“Sandi” granted permission to tell her story under an assumed name.)
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