A Year Without Hugs

A year ago today I hugged my little brother for the last time. We’d just wrapped up a long weekend family reunion/mass birthday party. I know we probably traded insults, as we so often did, in those final moments, but I cannot recall what exactly I said. How sad that makes me: I cannot recall the last words I ever said to my little brother. I drove home to Virginia; he drove home to Georgia. We never spoke on the phone or saw each other again. I exchanged two emails with him in December and then he was gone.

Everyone said, and keeps saying, that time will make it hurt less. Well, it doesn’t. The hurt is just different. Some days it’s all I can do to get out of bed and get through the day. Curling up in a ball and sobbing for hours seems like a better solution. Other days, sometimes several days in a row, I will hardly think of him and then a careless comment made by someone will stab into my heart and slice away all the scar tissue. I’ll be open and bleeding and raw, choking back tears.

If Mark pulls me aside with a frown and says he needs to talk to me I have to fight the urge to flee. I don’t want to hear what he has to say, even though it’s often “the dog peed in the floor” or “What should we get the boys for Christmas?”. It’s this subconscious psychological fear, a hazy terrified sense of déjà vu that he’ll once again hold my hand and say “Honey your brother is dead.”

I can’t sleep or I can’t get enough sleep. Once, last summer sometime, I tried drinking until I passed out. All I did was make myself vilely ill. Not my finest moment and all I could hear was Adrian’s sarcastic voice saying “Nice going, moron.” Alcohol definitely not working as the drug of choice, I moved to food. I’ve gained 20lbs since he died and I hate myself for it.

I sit and play my music too loud and ignore the boys. Or I smother them and won’t let them out of my sight. I panic if the bus is a minute late or if Ian sleeps past 8am.

And it occurs to me, a year after I last hugged him, that if Adrian read this he’d be saying “Typical. It’s always about you. Your pain and your hurt and your loss.” I was selfish and uncaring to him in his life and now that he’s gone all I can do is live in a private bubble of pain, refusing to share this last horrible piece I have left of him.

Selfish and horrible as I am, I would live through a thousand more years of this if I could only have the chance to hold him one more time and tell him I love him.