Eight

I've been living with the presence of an absence for eight years.
Early in the morning on July 23, 2005 my brother stuck a needle in his arm and left us.
Since then my family has had a hole in the middle of it.
I've written about it, a lot.
I've talked about, a lot.
It has become a part of me.
What I have discovered, especially over the past year and half, is that the part of me that it has become is actually rather useful.  Painful, but useful.  It is a gift I would rather not have, but I have to admit that it is, in fact, a gift.
It's like there's all this stuff that I have stored up over the past eight years, all this flotsam and jetsam that I have found washed up on the shores of the rivers of Babylon.  When I run into someone who is new to this thing called grief, I can show them these things.
I'm never quite sure it's the right thing to do.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm keeping the proper professional boundaries.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm trying to hand them something that really has no use in their context.
But in the end, I can do nothing else.

Yesterday I was at the beach for a few hours.  I was right up the road from where our family spent years of vacations, where Jon and I learned to ride waves, a place that marked the passage of years, a place we left behind for "better" things about two years before he passed.  I had my kids in the surf, teaching them how to jump over and duck under waves, and I remember doing the same thing with my little brother, when he was still too young to go out past the breakers by himself and he needed someone bigger to take him out and help him.  For the first time in years it didn't make me angry... it just made me sad.  But my kids made me happy, and so I was happy and sad at the same time, as I have been so many times in the past eight years.  The presence of an absence was still there, and it was as big and terrifying as ever...
But it wasn't quite the same.  I think it's like people who learn to work at great heights, or handle dangerous animals, or do other dangerous jobs, you learn to handle the fear, you learn to live around it and live with it.
It doesn't go away, that's the blasted hard truth of the matter, it just becomes something you get used to.
I'm learning to use it, to not be afraid of it.  I'm learning to run it like a chainsaw, which is both dangerous and useful at the same time.

Eight, it feels like counting, as the years slip by.  They do now, it's one anniversary to the next in the blink of an eye.  I realized that I have come to mark my life into the era before Jon died and the era after.  It's hard not to let something that becomes that significant have too much power.  Normally I would use, before I was married, or before I had kids, or even before I went to seminary, but really it's the stone-etched tragedy that gives me my frame of reference.

Eight, and I still don't have "closure," I'm pretty sure that's a lie that psychologists and counselors tell people to fool them into thinking that void will just pack up it's stuff and go home if you handle it right.  It's not over when you close the casket or scatter the ashes, it's not over after a year or two, or three, or eight.  When death comes to the young, it tears open a hole in the fabric of the way things are "supposed" to be, and you can't fix it because it's a hole in the potential of things.  It's what "might" have been, not what was.

It's like those waves, some are big, some are small, but they all demand your attention, or you're going to get clobbered.