Steps

 

In 2022 my brother died by suicide and I remember so clearly the feeling of panic and despair on New Years Eve. I didn’t want 2022 to end, even though it was the most awful year of my life, because it felt very deeply like that year ending took me further away from my brother.

2023 felt very similar and now 2024 is coming to a close.

 

Yesterday morning I was out walking, as I do most days. This walk felt especially sad. 2024 was an extremely discouraging year and the disappointments have stacked up on me lately. I have come to realize that I put too much time and effort into certain relationships that aren't healthy. I've done this time and again over the years, it's never worked out for me, and yet here I am fully forty-nine years old and still trying. I didn't win the big award at work...again. I didn't get the promotion that I deserve either. Despite all my hard work, I am still not Beyonce and it seems really unfair for me to put as much time and effort into my workouts and eating as I do and still be so absolutely mid.

 

It's more than that too, of course. It always is.

 

I am worried about my children. As usual.  I want everything for them and the world around them seems blindingly unfair. I worry about my nieces and nephews, particularly the ones who share the most with me...the ones who have become my bonus kids. I want everything for them too. I worry about our country and the direction we are headed. I almost completely avoid social media and news, but the news I have seen and heard has been troubling. 

 

Also? I miss my brother. He loved Christmas. He loved me. It feels lonely and hard without him and it's never going to get better. No one ever asks me how I am. They ask how my parents are and I'm sure they are not great and will never be great again. I am also not great but it doesn't matter. My grief is mine and that's it.  It's been almost three years and my grief only matters to me now. The passing of each year just reminds me how much further away he is and I hate it. I hate it so much.

 

I paused to take a photo of the sunrise and in that moment I had the most overwhelming feeling of peace. 

 

 

You aren’t walking further away from him. You are walking toward him.

 

 

I can't fix any of this. I can't bring him back. I can't change the world or the country or even the minds of people who have lost them. My grief is mine alone and I can't make anyone else care about it. I'm a fixer, I always have been, and it's almost overwhelming to me sometimes that I cannot figure out a solution for any of this.

 

Yet.

 

I will be 50 in 2025 and if I am anything like the women on both sides of my family this means I have at least 40 years of my life left to life. I fully intend to live these years as big and bold as I have lived the last ten, but thinking that I am walking towards that beautiful light that made up my sweet brother gives me so much hope. 

It was a gift to walk alongside him while he was here. I did not realize I was walking him home. Not then.

I don't have to fix everything.

 

 

I just have to keep walking.