Bring your brains over here. Now!

Look into my mouth and feel Destruction! Feel Apocalypse! Feel What The Hell Is That Pink Flappy Thing?!

Confusion is commonplace. Here’s what’s strange: moments when everything happening suddenly comes together and makes sense. Do these last long enough to be dissected, their meanings recorded? Not very often. They mostly lead to action of the sort that isn’t even advisable.

I don’t know if what I write will be coherent, but I can’t think of what else to do right now.

Imagine a night like scented babyhood, an unrepeatable perfume of flowers smelled for the first time mingling with the earthy odors of a family’s flatulence in a warm room. Awareness is a tunnel slowly widening in front of your eyes, swathed with the hazy colors of skies, carpets, entrancing objects. You love your parents desperately. Your teeth are edging through your gums. The truth you learn about the world thrills and frightens you.

Every day something scary happens, usually only one or two things but it makes you wary just the same. You get mad because people don’t understand you. Sometimes, when your anger makes you babble in a frantic tone, your family laughs at you. This makes you happy and sad at the same time. You know they love you as much as you could ever want to be loved, but they are separate from you. You have feelings they can’t share.

This separateness drives them to hold on to you more tightly, prize you more enthusiastically, but still, it makes you nervous.

You are afraid of being alone. Yet you find that your mind wanders to secret and interesting places when nobody’s talking to you. This is partly because you are young and old at the same time. Every glimpse of this world brings back memories of everywhere you have arrived from. You almost remember those places, but you get distracted when the present compels you to join it. The present’s call is irresistible as soon as you start to feel like part of the team.

Your family, your parents, these are your people now. Yes. You notice the stars for the first time and decide to cling to the ground. You make your decision right now.

This milestone in human life fascinates me. Tonight, as I sat in my front yard admiring the dim shapes of lawn chairs and contemplating the possibility of failure, a vision of a very young person came to me. I saw myself, as a baby, watching my mother play the piano. I pondered what hurts I’d accrued that day, and was perplexed by the language that fell all around me. But I was carried away by that thing babies feel when they hear music, when music is brand new and completely personal.

The tightness in the heart for a second, before the mind relaxes. The blood singing in the veins. My baby self was grateful for it, and said Yes. I will stay here and play this part, and I will even (usually) believe there is nothing else.

That vision tonight was accompanied by a strong feeling of merging, though with what I’m not sure. I didn’t care. Such a feeling of mysterious closeness was a relief. Remembering babyhood returned me to a time before separation had calcified.

This is not quite as insane as it sounds. It was triggered by being around a real baby. Not that I can read his mind or anything, it’s just that the expressions on his face made me remember. At some point, I agreed to be here, and hands reached out to pull me in. If I had chosen something different, would I have been born somewhere else? How much did I know about this place when I signed my name on that line?

Why do I continue to say Yes to all of this?

That last question, though appearing ominous, is nothing to worry about. I will never be able to answer it, which makes it safe to keep asking. For a split-second, every once in a while, I know why I agreed to stay here. Then memory flees and I greet the present again, that layer of confusion in which the truth may or may not be hidden.

Possibly not the picture you’d expect to see at this point.

…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.