Ten

And what can I tell you,

My brother, my killer,

What can I possibly say?

I guess that I miss you,

I guess I forgive you,

I'm glad that you stood in my way.

-Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat

Dear Jon,

So it's been ten years to the day since I got that phone call from Dad saying that you were gone.  The last decade has been quite a trip to say the least.  I thought, instead of writing another poem or something, I would write you a letter. This stuff doesn't always make sense so bear with me.

First, I want to say sorry, because I don't think I've always been fair to you.  Sometimes I was angry, sometimes I was maudlin, sometimes I was even downright spooky. I went through phases where I totally romanticized who you were and even, to some extent, how you died.  I know that's weird, but so many of my favorite artists and musicians have been heroin addicts, I couldn't help sometimes equating you with Kurt Cobain or William S. Burroughs or Lou Reed.  The clarity that you were just a kid who made some really bad choices took some time to sink in.  But my romantic visions were just one of the ways I had of working through the reality of loss.

After ten years, I have figured out that pretty much everything in my life that relates to your death is now much more about me than about you.  I am not the same person I was when I was 30, any more than you would have been the same person you were at 24.  Your death is a part of pretty much every thing that has taken place in my life in the past ten years.  It has effected the way I do my job, the way I raise my kids, the type of husband, brother, and son I am.  Dad and I started walking the Camino on your 34th birthday, and in our own ways each of us felt like we were taking you with us on that walk.  What I realized somewhere during that 500 miles is that you now occupy a very different place in my heart than you did a decade ago.  What you are to me now is defined more by your absence than your presence.  You're like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle that was eaten by the dog, you're always going to be missing.

I wonder most about what is missing when it comes to our family.  Mom, Dad, Julia, and all the kids, well we are who we are, and being who we are we sort of do our own thing.  The New Jersey crowd has their thing, and the four of us in my family visit it from time to time.  I recognize now that one of the greatest things about the thing that Dad and I did this spring was that it was the first time in 10 years that we actually had a vision that really, fully included each other.

Remember that trip to the Outer Banks the year before you died? The last family vacation?  It really was the last one, and I think that we can never really do that again without you.  We all have the wrong kind of stubbornness to really pull something like that together and make it work.

Speaking of the beach, you have pretty much ruined that for me, that's been sort of big pain in the rear-end for ten years now, because everyone else still freaking loves it, but it makes me sad.  I thought maybe that would pass, but it really hasn't.  I always pictured you and I and whatever assortment of offspring we had renting a big old house together and picking crabs and playing guitar on the deck and doing beach stuff.  I have this imaginary, grown up you in my head, and I just know he's never going to show up.

We have been telling the kids about you too, we have pictures of you holding Jack, during one of your detox visits to Plumville I think, you look pretty pale and sunken, and I remember what trouble you were in while we were welcoming babies and playing house.  I often wish you had actually moved into our basement, but I know somewhere that probably wouldn't have been the solution either.  Cate was born a month after you died.  You would really like her, in some ways her personality reminds me of you more than any of the other Gaskill progeny, she's always asking questions, she loves clowning around and wiling out, very emotional and compassionate, the same way you were when you were little.  And somewhere or other whenever I talk about you with the kids I know they would freaking love you, but they never got the chance.  Even if you never sort of settled down and grew up, they would still like the way you were always moving and always had some plan or scheme.  I think I bore them, the same way I used to bore you, my big adventures are always mostly in my head.  That was another thing that felt important about the Camino: it was out there, it took blood, sweat and tears.  Dad said that your trip to Tonga was sort of like your Camino. I suppose that's true, but I couldn't help thinking how much you would have loved what we were up to, and how much it would have kicked butt if you were actually with us.

Here's what I really want to say to mark 10 years: I'm trying to deal with the actual reality of you now.  I want to thank you, because in a way you helped me grow more by dying than you probably would have by living.  I know that sounds sort of crappy, know that I would rather have an actual 34 year old brother (even if he was a loser) than ten years of grief any day.  What I'm saying is that the suffering has not been for nothing.

Sometimes I look at other people who still have their brothers, taking vacations, going to ball games, having picnics etc, and I get a little jealous, but I think I understand that losing you put the pedal to the metal in some ways. I have had to wrestle with grief in my 30's the way that most people don't until they're old.  I have spent ten years writing about what this is like, singing songs that absolutely strip me raw, and trying to learn from a story that was cut off midway through the first chapter. 

Aunt Fran told us after you died that God told her you would grow much faster with Him, well I think that I have grown faster too, because of losing, and grieving and living with absence.  I'm much happier with who I am at 40 than I was at 30, and I don't think that's a coincidence.  I'm less judgmental, I'm more comfortable with sadness (and yet somehow happier and more content), and most of all I have more empathy for others who are suffering.  Losing you is an awful, yet somehow solid benchmark for a lot of the challenges we face in this life.  It is a constant reminder to laugh, cry and never take any good thing for granted.

So thank you.  Hope your growing up is coming along too.

Beneath the stains of time,

The feelings disappear,

You are somewhere else,

But I am still right here.

-NIN, Hurt