There are three of us kids, I'm the oldest, Lane is the middle child, and Emmit is the baby. At the time, I was very used to Emmit's health issues. Juvenile Diabetes, congenital heart defect, brain malformation, autism and the list goes on. Looking at him, a stranger would never know. Looking at me, a stranger would also never know. Know what? How familiar I am with blood test strips, hormone injections, MRIs, the anatomy of the heart, balloon angioplasty, sitting in my windowsill watching the ambulance leave with my brother inside, and a million other things.
Those million other things include brain tumors, paralysis, and morphine. At the age of 12, my brother passed away from unknown circumstances related to his malignant brain tumor found less than a month before his passing. This year marked the fifth year without him which I hate saying because it makes it seem like so long ago when grief has no time stamp.
This is what I can tell you about being one of the surviving children in a family, guilt has no expiration date. I have guilt right now, as I'm writing this, just because I am making this story about me and not him. There is guilt in almost everything I do now, graduating college, buying a house, getting married without him in my bridal party, getting pregnant knowing my child will never have met someone who would have made one of the greatest uncles out there. I always wonder why the world made me the one who deserved to live more life and why his was taken away.
A parent's loss is different of course, it is the loss that people focus on the most making the intensity of a sibling's grief feel like lesser and therefore often overlooked. Do they know that an older sister's job is to protect her brothers and what it feels like when she fails? I spent my school bus rides checking blood sugar and hurrying Caprisuns into Emmit's stomach when it was low and he was lightheaded. Holding empty water bottles under my brothers when they had to pee but couldn't hold it because we still had 45 minutes left on the bus. I spent car rides making sure I was the cool sister and taking music requests from them on the drive home or to get ice cream. I went to every doctor's appointment and changed more diapers than your average child, and for what, to have failed? Of course not, but that is what it feels like.
Right after a sibling passes, surviving children feel new responsibilities that forever change their lives and personalities. They begin to feel an urgency to grow up so that they can care for their parents during the immediate loss and any other siblings. Associated with the need to grow up quickly is the need to stay home and cut off social ties. This becomes most prominent in a grieving teenager when many others are at social and high school/college events, there is a new need to stay home and be with family to assure that tragedy won't strike while you're away or leave your parents or siblings feeling alone. As for going out and being with friends, you're the walking rain cloud and the sight of you makes everyone sad because they feel bad for you and don't know how to act around you. And you feel the same, you feel older and wiser than these people who seem to not understand the value of life or what loss feels like. Listening to your friend's drama and problems and having to comfort THEM makes you want to scream because their problems seem so miniscule and insignificant. And while you know that it was just you not long ago diving into this gossip and complaining about small things like boys and how a girl looked at you with stink eye… everything is just too hard to understand now. And during this time, you lose a lot of friends. There are going to be people you thought were your friend but you realize how frustrated they get when you don't "get over it" quick enough or when you never become "yourself" again. There are going to be friends that you will never hear from, you'll see them in public and they will look the other way. To this day, I'm not sure if it was because they just didn't know what to say or because they didn't care to say it and didn't need my friendship baggage.
There are everlasting effects of losing a sibling that I want to explain. Like the fact that I believe everyone I love is going to die a tragic and unexpected death. If my husband gets a headache, he's dying of brain cancer. If my mom has a scratch, it's turning into a blood infection that gets to her heart and kills her. The smallest things turn into the people I love dying, and trust me, I wish I didn't think like that and I wish my mind didn't dramatize these things. Even on my greatest days, I end it crying over how much I miss my brother. And for my husband, I feel sorry. I feel sorry because he will never know my brother and the amazing and incredible child he was. I also feel sorry because how do you comfort your grieving wife when you weren't around for when it happened and never even met the person she is grieving the loss of? I don't know honestly, I don't know how he does it.
There are songs I can't listen to, movies I can't watch and places that I can't go. Places I promised Emmit we would go, movies we watched together and songs that were his favorite. If I told you I didn't listen to the songs or watch the first ten minutes of some of the movies just to cry, just to feel the loss and to remember him, I'd be lying. Sometimes I do it on purpose, to make sure that I still remember him and make sure that I never forget any of the details. Sometimes, when I'm least expecting it, something completely random happens in public or private and it makes me remember a feeling or a moment that was so buried in my trauma and it can be an awful, sad memory or a really, really great one. One of the most difficult things is having a beautiful dream where Emmit, Lane and I are all together again and a unit like we always were and then I wake up, and sometimes it takes me a couple seconds before I realize that none of it was real and I don't really have him back. Those days are the hardest, those are the mornings it is the most difficult to get out of bed and survive. And that's what it's like being the surviving child.
