…sweet little babies giving people the finger. @!*# yeah!

Today, February 24, 2008, is the five-year anniversary of my brother Josh’s last day in his earthly body. He drowned in a river that afternoon; I wouldn’t find out about it until over a month later, because he was missing, hidden under the water for several weeks. He was 26 years old. His death was an unsolved mystery on many levels, and even now we aren’t sure exactly what happened that day.

If you are mourning the loss (whether past or impending) of your own loved one, let me remind you that you are not alone in your grief. If you’ve lost someone in a sudden, unexpected, mysterious way, please know I have a profound respect for what you are going through. That grief is a special hell of its own.

Grief isn’t the essence of this day for me anymore, though the pain of grief is still very real. The meaning of this day has changed over the last five years, and now I experience it as the point of departure from the reality I knew before Josh died, the moment when the universe shifted out of place forever.

While he was drowning in that river, I was far away from him. I didn’t even know where he was. But when I look back at my journal from that month, I see that a tremendous depression lifted on that day, February 24, 2003. A sense of inexplicable lightness entered my heart, and I felt more willing to live than I had in many months.

Several weeks later, I heard that he was gone, and grief overwhelmed me for a very long time. But throughout my grieving I would continue to remember the lightness I felt on that day, and be comforted by the strength of my connection to him, as evidenced by the relief my soul felt when he departed from what had become a painful existence here. Even if it meant I had to give him up and never see him alive again. Even though I believed with all my heart that his life didn’t need to end that way, that something could have been done.

Eventually, the dawning awareness of spiritual dimensions beyond what I’d ever imagined became part of that comfort, too.

If I were to write thousands of words here, with nothing held back, I could convey some of the truths I’ve glimpsed as a result of knowing and loving my brother even after he’s gone. I’m not holding back, but such stories take time to tell, and the courage and energy to keep telling them. There are times I look at his picture in my room and I’m jolted out of the present; sometimes a person on the street reminds me of him and I gulp down an unexpected sob. Sometimes I am sure he is somewhere nearby, the way you can feel a person’s presence in a house even when they’ve made no sound. I learn something new every time, once my heart has come to rest after its disturbance.

I’ve learned even when I didn’t want to, because love is a powerful, irresistible teacher. Some of the people we love are so close to us, whether or not we know it, that our love for them will continue to teach us long after we’ve said goodbye. Josh was one of those people for me. He came into my life when I was just one year old. Three more were born after him, and as the oldest, I had to grow up fast. But Josh remembered me as a child. I could see that in his eyes when we spoke, even when he seemed to forget almost everything else about who he was. Josh was my first friend, someone I began loving before I knew what love was, and by now I have accepted as fact that he is not ever really going away.

Here’s my family, back when Josh was my only sibling:

Five-year-old Josh:

Older, but still not grown up:

Reckless, adventurous, and really fond of trespassing:

When I look at these pictures now, this seems miraculous to me: the forms that we take on this planet, the feelings we have that are specific to our individual selves, and the affection we’re able to contain and offer to each other. How does it all fall into place? Especially when I look at the first picture, which has made me weep for the openness and trust on my parents’ faces, before they knew what it felt like to outlive their child. Now when I examine this photograph I think, how did we all get so lucky, to be in this picture together?

Of course I have raged until my bitterness has nearly exploded me. I’ve felt abandoned and angry and I’ve cried unfair, unfair! deep inside myself. Especially when other people didn’t grasp how much this hurt me or how helpless it made me feel, or grasped it but didn’t care. When they betrayed their hidden belief that this loss made me and my family somehow crazy, contagious, and scary. Or when I remembered who harmed Josh, intentionally but mostly otherwise, when he was alive, who didn’t know how to help him and let him slip away— a list that includes me.

But my anger subsided, leaving all the other, more durable feelings, so mixed in character that it became hard to distinguish the good from the bad. Isn’t it strange, some of you will know what I mean, isn’t it funny how different a family picture looks when you aren’t starting from the point of “I deserve a pain-free life!” When you aren’t defending your right to avoid loss because you know it’s too late for that.

I’m not a Buddhist, but this passage from the Samadhirajasutra has had special meaning for me ever since just after Josh’s death, when I read it in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.

Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.

Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.

Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.

Nothing is as it appears—not your safe haven, not your broken heart, not even death. Especially not that.

We miss you, Josh.

A whole bunch of us (me and some strangers) stood on Westcliff and watched it all go down. Color clung to the horizon the way drunk people sometimes linger outside a bar after closing time.

It was pretty.

I like to imagine this picture as a weathered, long-saved snapshot in someone’s collection of bizarre momentoes.

It would accompany this letter on faded yellow paper:

Dearest Eleanor,

Thank you for your kind inquiries. The honeymoon was over before it began. Gerald has left me, taking all of our survival gear, and I am reduced to eating beans out of a can in the Bonny Doon hills of California. Saw the legendary Santa Cruz polar bear with her young, picture enclosed. Little guy almost looks human, doesn’t he?

Anyway, I am ruined, and have vowed to exact my revenge on Gerald and his loved ones. I hope I may count on your support.

Your old friend,

Richard