Six weeks in spring

On shipwrecks, system failures, and whatever could come next

Things started to fall apart in April.

The 27th was a Monday. After pilates and a shower, I sat down at my desk at 9:45 AM to dive into a project I’d been excited to work on. An hour later, I was jobless. Restructured out of a company that, just the week before, I’d declared felt like home. I couldn’t imagine leaving.

So much for loyalty.

The loss felt like a knock to the teeth, but in a way, I was invigorated. I’d been writing a book in earnest, outlining a second, and felt excited by the prospect of a creative summer. So what if Ben’s long-term contract was ending just a week after my layoff, rendering us both unemployed? So what if we were still dealing with the monthly devastation of infertility? I had severance, COBRA paid for through October, and a bank account that had been fattened for renovations that were now on hold indefinitely. We could make it through, and perhaps an unemployed summer was what we needed.

Ben and I looked at one another and laughed. Hey, it can’t get any worse, right?

Just one month later, May 27, I sat in our fertility doctor’s office with Ben. I was naked from the waist down, cold under the crinkled, white paper sheet they’d given me before my ultrasound. Both my nurse and my lead doctor, who I’d been seeing for the past nine months, stood across from me, sharing the news I’d been bracing myself for since our failed egg retrieval just two months earlier. While there’s still a chance you could get pregnant on your own, it doesn’t seem like any of the interventions we’re doing here are giving you any more of a chance than just trying at home. We’d recommend you start looking into donor eggs.

I cried the entire way home, calculating the costs of this next phase in our journey — mentally, emotionally, monetarily. Nothing could happen until one of us found a job with good health insurance, a problem that hadn’t been solved in the month since we’d been unemployed.

I crushed my eyes closed and pictured the babies I’d imagined Ben and I having when we first met. Dark, curly hair. Light hazel eyes. His wide, eye-brightening smile. The gap between my two middle teeth that braces had corrected. I let the images float away like balloons, hoping against hope that they might return to me as fulfilled wishes.

When we got home, Ben and I curled up on the sofa together. We mourned yet another future we’d planned for ourselves. We bargained, imagined the joy any child would bring to our lives, joked about going to Italy to find a donor.

We held each other, raw and wrung out, and promised we’d get through this additional hurdle together. Hey, it can’t get any worse, right?

One week later, my brother Billy died.

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Writing about losing him feels impossible. It’s too close and too raw. He was my younger brother by 16 months, and I loved him, dearly. But loving someone struggling with addiction can often feel maddening — like reaching out a hand in support, only for them to cover their eyes and claim they can’t see it.

My memories of him are complicated. I’m angry about that. And yet he still feels close. I still expect him to send me an old clip from Viva La Bam or a voice note asking whether I remember some convoluted story he’d told me years ago. My family has received hundreds of messages from people who knew and loved him so desperately, whose lives he touched in a million ways that we would never have known about had he not died.

I wish I could present these anecdotes to him, lay them out as evidence, one right after another, in an attempt to get him to stay. I wish I could sit him down and tell him that we greeted over 500 people at his service. That loved ones waited in line for two hours to pay their respects and tell my parents what an incredible man he was. How so many people came that traffic was backed up in town, and people parked a mile away before calling Ubers to the funeral home. That even though the air was thick with humidity and heat, the funeral directors reported that nobody complained. People always complain, they’d told us. But for Billy, they waited patiently, even when the rain came.

I wish I could tell him how many pictures I got of the rainbow that stretched across the sky as people were leaving.

But he probably knows, right? I’m not a religious person, and my compounding tragedies haven’t suddenly turned me in the direction of organized faith. I don’t necessarily believe my brother is sitting on a cloud somewhere watching over us. But I have to believe that he is nearby, with my grandparents.

500 people don’t wait for two hours in the humidity for someone who doesn’t wind up in the good place.

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I feel like I am clinging to the wreckage of a ship that just went under, carrying both my past and my future. It sank beneath my feet almost all at once, seemingly without warning, but I keep grappling through the debris, looking for the moment in which I might have caught the hull breach. Was there a loose rivet I could have tightened? A brief loss of power I ignored? Was there a way for me to go back in time and plug up any of the holes that might have contributed to this disaster?

But I realize that there is very little one can do to prepare for catastrophe, because it happens when you least expect it. I didn’t expect it, at least. I’d always been good at my job. I’d always been told there was a chance we’d have a biological baby. Billy had always come home. What warning did I have that all systems would fail, one right after another, in rapid succession?

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Being one’s own boss during loss means I am responsible for my own bereavement leave, and I have no idea how to calculate what I deserve. Some days I feel ready to dive back into work, and write 100 newsletters about curl cream. Other days, sitting on the couch and disappearing into romance novels is all I can manage.

I’m learning how unique sibling loss is, especially a loss like ours. In the immediate aftermath of his death, I incorrectly felt like I needed to handle my grief on my own, separately from my parents. They were dealing with a loss that was not only profound, but unnatural. Parents aren’t meant to lose their children. But if you have siblings, eventually, hopefully much later in life, you lose each other.

So I dealt with my grief by trying to hold theirs. Making sure they were drinking water. Calling their friends to tell them what happened. Happily taking on asks that would typically have me using words like “boundaries” and “when I have a minute.” Falling into my natural role gave me a place to channel the sadness. I just didn’t realize that I was only delaying the inevitable, adding to a pile of emotions shoved behind a door that would eventually burst open due to the weight of what was behind it.

I’ve experienced grief as a noun now, the physical weight of it. How it manifests in different sizes and shapes depending on who it belongs to.

For me, it exists in sandwiches wrapped in clear cellophane. In the way my thoughts seem to turn off mid-sentence. In how, even though there were multiple expectant mourners at my brother’s visitation, my brain didn’t register a single swollen belly. In how, even though I knew the deep trauma I was experiencing and the abundance of wine I was consuming would likely impact my chances for IVF next cycle, I still dutifully downed my supplements and rubbed testosterone gel on my upper arm each evening, tears in my eyes, in preparation for a future that might have already been beyond my reach.

I don’t have the luxury of grieving one thing at a time. Ben is mourning all of the same things that I am, but in different ways, because the infertility is happening to my body. It’s my genetic material that won’t appear in our child if we use a donor. And while he lost a brother-in-law, and that is devastating in its own way, Billy was my brother. I didn’t just lose a person. I lost a part of my history — the sibling whose childhood most closely paralleled mine. I’ll never get that back.

One story I heard over and over again was how my brother, a gifted hairstylist, gave so many children their first haircut. It was a life experience I hadn’t even considered until he was gone. But suddenly I became obsessed with the realization that my children would never have their first haircut from their Uncle Billy. What if the children Ben and I have don’t look like me, because they genetically aren’t mine? They won’t look like Billy, either.

And suddenly, I have a new list of things to mourn.

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The six remaining members of my immediate family — we’re all now drowning in the same ocean. But our struggle is not the same, and there is nothing we can do to save one another. All we can do is stretch our fingers across the vastness between us and try to offer each other comfort before the waves pull us back under again.

In that way, and so many others, my grief has left me all alone. No matter that I still fall asleep to my husband breathing beside me, when I finally am able to sleep. No matter how many people check in, or offer condolences and stories about my brother. No matter how many videos I see about people having children after years of infertility, or finding jobs after months of unemployment. No matter how many people who have dealt with loss in their lives reach out in comfort.

My grief is my own. My parents’ grief is their own. My youngest brother’s grief is his own. And on and on and on it goes.

One day, I hope I’ll be able to process everything that has happened over these terrible six weeks this spring. My fear, though, is that I may never understand what it is all for. So much of my life, so much of my writing, has been in search of understanding. I’m constantly exploring my pain, dissecting it in real time, trying to parse the meaning. It’s how I’ve always operated.

But I’m terrified that there is no meaning here. I’m worried that the understanding I’m about to discover is that bad things happen, often randomly, sometimes all at once. There’s no meaning. No kismet. No larger discovery waiting at the end of a painful road.

It can, in fact, always get worse.

What then? What then? What then?