What I’ve Learned About Grief

I’ve realized that my grief is not just from losing my brother, but also losing parts of myself that only he remembered.

I used to think guilt was the worst emotion. But since my older brother passed away suddenly in 2018, I’ve changed my mind: it’s grief.

When you feel guilty about something you’ve said or done, there’s a chance to make amends. But when someone dies, all of the unsaid things between you live on for infinity.

I hadn’t lost a close family member since I was a teenager, when my maternal grandmother died. We were close. I spent weekends away at her apartment in Toronto just for fun, and she would let me watch television late into the night and eat treats. When she passed away, it hurt badly. But my younger set of emotions couldn’t fully wrap themselves around the news of her death — I don’t think I even cried.

But roughly 30 years later, I cried like a little boy when I got the call about my brother. It smashed my already fragile reality into tiny shards that stung me from head to toe.

They say your life flashes before you during the moments before death. But when I received word he had died, it was our time as kids together that flashed before me. While we got along quite well into adulthood — with the occasional disagreement and him poking fun at my expense many times — we were thick as thieves when we were younger. He was my creative inspiration. We’d draw comic books together, and I still have him on tape somewhere commentating a make-believe hockey game, which I mimicked.

At one point in our young lives, we formed a music band called the X-People. I recall us in our garage putting on a concert for the locals, and giving away stuffed animals as incentives to show up. I played the Major Morgan, which people of my vintage will probably remember as a musical keyboard shaped like a drum major. We had “hit” songs with deep titles like It’s Food and Lightning, Frightening. My brother actually had a pretty good musical sense (he was always humming or singing something, correct lyrics be damned), and some of these horribly performed X-People songs he came up with might have been catchy if actual musicians had performed them.

As the years went on, I continued to look up to him for inspiration and guidance. But sometimes he looked up to me too. I was the first to get a driver’s license, and I would chauffeur him to his ice hockey games and watch him chase after the puck and even score a goal or two. We would talk about the games over a beer after, and he’d recall the on-ice details with the same enthusiasm as when he narrated the fictitious games on tape as a kid.

But when I got the call about my brother dying, I didn’t think about watching him playing hockey as an adult (we both played as kids) or even the last time I saw him, which was at our parents’ house a couple of weeks prior. Instead, I thought about all of the things in our distant past. I recalled being 11 years old at the dinner table, and getting into trouble because he was making me laugh uncontrollably just by looking at me. He also had that power — to create spontaneous joy in me, to somehow lighten the air around us.

But he also knew how to press my buttons. It turns out you can still be occasionally annoyed by someone who’s gone, even though you still love them intensely and want nothing more than for them to send you a wacky text.

While I was a mess for the first few months after he was gone, there was still something about it all that seemed unreal. Now that two years have passed, I’ve mostly accepted it. But I still have unexpected moments of grief that hurt almost as much as they did at the beginning. They’re more like a dull ache than a sharp pain now, but they stop me in my tracks nonetheless. And I never know when it will happen — it could be triggered by something I know he would find funny, but can no longer share with him. It could be from hearing a song from our childhood that I can picture him humming along to.

I miss his stories about something random that happened a long time ago, that I would never have known about. I’ve realized that my grief is not just from losing my brother, but also losing parts of myself that only he remembered. I have no one to verify the details of our antics as young kids, or to bring up those embarrassing moments I’d long tucked away. He was part of my reality, for better or for worse, and his absence has left empty spaces where there once were footnotes.

My brother was never really one to complain to me about life. He had a “stoic” style — more accurately, if I brought something up he didn’t like, he changed the channel. I vividly remember him as a kid crying in the movie theatre (or maybe it was a drive-in?) when Superman lost his powers, but these moments of raw emotion were rare for him as an adult. I admired him for that in a way, as I was never one that could hide how I was feeling very well. He only opened the book for a select few, and I’d like to think I was one of them.

Soon I will age beyond my brother’s age when he passed. But he will always be my big brother, and I will always be the one clinging to his every word, even though I just have to imagine what he’d say now. I picture us running through a field as kids, me lagging behind, but trying hard to catch up. He was always one step ahead of me, and he always will be.