It was a busy Monday morning in January. My husband and I were standing with our heads tucked together sharing his headphones. My father’s voice over the phone was tight. My feet went numb. Something was wrong.
“Your brother Brooks took his own life last night.”
Later, Jeff would tell me I fell and he caught me. I only remember hearing blood curdling screams. Who is screaming like that? Only later would I realize it was me.
Lots of us have a brutal Before and After. When something so world-shattering happens that it splits your life like a fault line. You are not the same now.
There is a specificity to our grief as much as it can be a shared experience. My brother’s death by suicide in 2018 was its own world of pain, but so our shared humanity allows us to mourn with each other. We all know or can imagine—within our personal experience—what bone-splitting grief is. And yet, you can never really know until you’re in it.
And—like a tornado—you will certainly never know how grief will change you.
I begin my debut novel Rich Soil with a sudden death. It’s dramatic, sure, but it’s how my own journey began. I wanted to start with the rupture. In a way, death is its own kind of birth. Perhaps they are really the same thing—a portal into the new.
I had lived in fear of my brother killing himself for so long, I stopped noticing it. The truth was that I had stopped noticing a lot of things.
My brother’s death woke me up. When I came out of the intense, immediate period of grief, I found I could not return to my old self. It was impossible. I was not willing to seal myself back up and live in silent acquiescence. But no one was going to make me change, either. It was my business and my life.
I had things to reckon with. I needed to take my life seriously. I had things I had to attend to. I had books to write. I had relationships to foster. I had children to raise. A zombie mom wasn’t what they needed.
I spent several months reading Pema Chodron, Brene Brown, Eckart Tolle. Anyone who I thought could give me answers and meaning. A way to understand myself and this crazy thing we do on Earth.
Naively, armed with platitudes and Buddhist theory, I told the universe/God: I am ready. Let’s go. I’m ready to heal.
And, of course, the universe/God responded with: Really? Are you sure? Okay. (Let’s see how ready you are.) I imagine a cosmic chuckle.
What followed was a series of events that would propel me into hard but important growth the likes of which I'd never imagined. Crying on the couch for hours kind of hard. For the next few years, I was stuck in the birth canal of a long, painful labor of rebirthing myself. I let go of old structures, sat in turmoil, questioned everything I knew to be true. The very fiber of my being seemed to be ripping apart. I did not know when or how it would end. I did not recognize my self or my life.
It was a complete shit show. And also life saving. I wrote more in those years than I had in decades. I un-dammed the river of me.
Death was the catalyst for my rebirth.
Of course, at the time I thought I was special. That my pain was special and unique. That my growth was special and unique. But now I see that it is always like this and we can’t escape it. It is how the natural world works. In order to grow, something must die. I think the universe is benevolent, but when she needs to she squeezes us until we have no air left, until we think we might not make it. But it just then, suddenly, that we emerge and take a huge breath with a new set of lungs.
But you have to choose it, you see.
Eight years later, I’m in a new rebirth. Things are emerging from me (a novel!) and life seems to moving so fast I can’t keep up. My daughter is a senior in high school. My baby is in middle school.
Midlife—like grief—is completely unhinged and also very awesome. This morning I shat into a plastic container. My poo is now sitting on my porch for UPS to collect. I keep thinking about the poor person whose job is to inspect the poo or put it in some device that scans it for colon cancer.
My fertility is dying just as my first novel will debut. My eggs are going to start collecting retirement benefits soon. My eyelids are crepey and sagging. I have arthritis in my hip.
And yet, I feel at home in my body in a way I couldn’t when I was twenty-five or thirty. I know enough now to know that I know nothing. And neither, really, does anyone else. I’ve lived long enough to see patterns and cycles. I take joy into me in a way I couldn’t as a young person.
I find this stage of life thrilling. What’s it like to be eighty? Ninety?
Still, sometimes my precious brother’s death hits me like a gut punch and grief puts her hands around my neck and squeezes. It comes out of nowhere and I can’t breathe. But I am different now. I can meet it, feel it, even be grateful for it. I never believed in the afterlife, in something larger than me, until Brooks died. Now I know that death isn’t the end at all, just a change. If I don’t continue to grow and seek and suck the marrow out of this life, I will wither and die, even as my heart still beats. That, in my humble opinion, is hell.
I’m birthing myself as an author just when my body and mind are beginning a new phase. It’s tempting to want to hang on to my old self, to grip tightly to what once was and can no longer be. I want control, damn it. Change is scary AF. But also, change is the source of life.
Good things are on the other side of this cycle. I remind myself of that old quote It’s all gonna be okay in the end—and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. So let go and trust, listen and stay curious. Enjoy the wild ride.
