An Unwilling Archive

It’s been eight years since Chris died.

I don’t know why that number is hitting me so hard this year. Maybe because eight doesn’t feel like a number anymore. It feels like evidence. Like someone laid the last eight years out in front of me and asked me to look at just how much life can fit inside the space where one person should have been. CK is five years old, which means there is an entire little person in our family who has never existed in the same world as him. She has a voice he has never heard, a laugh he never got to know, little mannerisms he never got to tease her about. She has never walked into a room and found her him sitting there. Blue is ten now. Lane is fourteen. Melody is a senior. Those sentences feel almost obscene to write because I can still picture the versions of them he left behind. I can still see their smaller faces, their little bodies, the children they were when he was still here and somehow I am supposed to reconcile those memories with the people standing in front of me now. They have grown taller. Their voices have changed. Their faces have changed. Their interests, their personalities, the things that make them laugh, the things that break their hearts… all of it has kept developing without him here to witness any of it. There are entire versions of these kids that Chris never got to meet, and entire versions of Chris that they either never knew or were too young to hold on to. Eight years used to sound like a measurement of time. Now it feels more like measuring an absence by everything that has managed to grow around it. Life did not leave an empty space for him and politely wait. It grew over the edges. It filled calendars and bedrooms and school years. It added inches to height charts and candles to birthday cakes. It kept building itself on top of the place where he disappeared, layer after layer, until sometimes I look around and realize there is an entire lifetime of things that have happened since the last time my brother existed in this world with me and I still don’t understand how the world had the audacity to keep going.

And somehow, every September, my body remembers before I consciously do. Maybe that is part of what makes eight years feel so cruel. I remember enough for all of us. The kids who were little when Chris died have had their memories softened around the edges by time, the way water slowly wears the sharpness from a stone, and the ones who came after him can only know him secondhand through photographs, stories repeated so many times they have become family scripture, and whatever pieces of him the rest of us have managed to preserve. But I knew him before he became a photograph. Before I had to explain the sound of his laugh to someone who cannot remember hearing it. Before a picture of his face could make my chest tighten because I know there will never be an older version of it. Before his entire existence had to be carried in stories because there would never be anything new to add. I knew him when he was just Chris… my brother, real and irritating and funny and complicated… and alive. I knew him before September became the month that took him from me. And now September has become something my body seems to recognize as a threat. I can feel it approaching before I ever turn the calendar page. There is something different in the air, something about the way summer begins loosening its grip and the evenings start arriving a little earlier, and suddenly there is this familiar heaviness settling into my bones. I sleep differently. I think differently. Everything feels closer to the surface. The whole month begins narrowing toward one square on a calendar, and some primitive part of me starts bracing like a body that remembers the intersection where it once wrecked. It knows the collision is coming even though it already happened eight years ago. That is the strange cruelty of an anniversary: nothing is actually happening to me, and somehow I am reliving something anyway. I can remind myself that I have survived this September seven times before. I can watch the date approaching from weeks away. I can tell myself that when I wake up tomorrow, the sun will rise exactly the way it did today, people will go to work, traffic lights will change, grocery stores will open, and to almost everyone else it will be an entirely ordinary Wednesday. But grief has never cared much about technicalities. My body knows what happened on September 23rd. It remembers a before and an after even when I am desperately trying to live somewhere in between.

This year feels heavier. I have tried to explain that to myself, as if grief might become more manageable if I can diagnose exactly why it hurts. Maybe it is because Melody is a senior. Maybe watching her move through this year of “last firsts” has made his absence louder than usual, because every celebration seems to come with a ghost standing just outside the frame. Her last first day of school. Her last homecoming. Senior pictures. Graduation announcements. College decisions. All of these beautiful things I have spent eighteen years hoping I would someday get to watch her experience, and somehow joy keeps arriving with grief stitched into its lining. She just won Homecoming Queen, he should have been here for that. He should have seen her face when they called her name. He should have been somewhere in those bleachers losing his damn mind, obnoxiously proud of her, probably yelling something embarrassing enough that she would have pretended to be mortified while secretly loving every second of it. He should have gotten to watch the little girl he used to carry around on his shoulders walk across that field in a dress and a crown, almost grown now. That is the part that guts me: he knew the little girl, but he will never meet the woman. There should have been a bridge between those two versions of her, years and years of ordinary life connecting them, and instead there is this violent break in the middle where his part of her story simply stops. He should know who she is now. He should know what makes her laugh, what makes her mad, how tenderhearted she still is, how easily she talks to people in a way I never could. He should be here for senior pictures and graduation plans and the thousand insignificant moments nobody thinks to photograph… the conversations in the kitchen, the stories about school, the eye rolls, the jokes, the ordinary nights that don't feel important until you realize someone is missing from all of them. He should be watching me look at this nearly grown woman and still somehow see my baby underneath her, wondering how the hell seventeen years disappeared so quickly. And maybe that is why this year hurts differently. Because senior year is already an exercise in learning how to let go, and I am trying to do it while being reminded of someone I never got the choice to let go of. Even the other kids don't remember much about him anymore. I hate writing that sentence. It feels like a betrayal even though I know it isn't one. They were little. They did not choose to forget him. Eight years is simply enormous when measured against a child's life. Childhood memories are fragile things; if there aren't enough years beneath them, they don't have much to anchor themselves to. Details loosen. Voices disappear. Faces become photographs instead of memories. And while I would give anything for them to still be able to reach backward and find him clearly, I cannot be angry at their minds for doing what time has always done… carrying them forward.

So I remember for them. I have become a kind of unwilling archive, carrying around all these pieces of Chris that time keeps trying to turn into history. I carry his voice and the cadence of his laugh. I carry the stupid shit he did, the things that made me want to strangle him, the arguments that felt enormous then and would be worth almost anything to have again now. I carry the things that made me laugh until my stomach hurt, the inside jokes that have nowhere left to land, the stories that begin with his name and inevitably end with someone saying, “That sounds like Chris.” I carry the ordinary version of him, the one photographs can’t preserve. The living, breathing version who could walk into a room and change its temperature just by being himself. I carry proof that he was not always a tragedy. That sentence matters to me more than I know how to explain. Because death has a terrible way of reaching backward and swallowing an entire life, reducing a whole complicated human being to the manner in which they left it. Chris died by suicide, but before Chris became someone we lost, he was someone who lived. He took up space. He was loud. He was infuriating. He was funny. He was somebody’s daddy, and somebody’s uncle, and somebody’s son, and somebody’s nephew, and somebody’s cousin, and her was my brother. He existed for decades before one terrible day became the date everyone learned to associate with his name, and sometimes I feel almost desperate to protect the rest of him from being consumed by the ending. Maybe that is why I keep searching for an explanation for why this anniversary feels heavier. Maybe I have convinced myself it is Melody’s senior year because I need grief to behave like an equation… if I can identify the variable that changed, maybe I can understand why the answer hurts more this time. I need something tangible I can point at and say, There. That’s it. That’s why I’m struggling so much this year. But maybe there isn’t anything to solve. Maybe eight years just really fucking hurts. Maybe grief compounds. Maybe every anniversary arrives carrying all the anniversaries before it on its back, and then quietly adds another year before handing the weight back to you. Because these dates don’t only commemorate the day someone died; they measure the ever-growing distance between you and the last day they were alive. One year. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Every September adds another mile to a road I never agreed to travel, and there is no turning around because the only direction time knows how to move is away from him. Eight years since I heard his voice come from his own mouth instead of reconstructing it inside my head. Eight birthdays he never got older for. Eight Christmases with one less person in the room. Eight summers that came and went without him. Eight years of ordinary Thursdays he should have been here for, the kind of days nobody photographs or commemorates because you assume there will always be more of them. Eight years of things I have instinctively wanted to tell him before remembering, all over again, that I can’t. Eight years of both of our children growing taller, changing faces, becoming people he would have been so proud to know while he remains exactly where memory left him. And maybe that is what is breaking my heart this year. Life has kept moving with absolutely no regard for the fact that Chris cannot move with it. Melody is becoming an adult. The kids are growing. I am getting older. My face is changing. The world is changing. Everything keeps becoming something new, except him. Chris is still twenty eight years old. He will always be twenty eight years old. He is frozen somewhere behind me in 2018 while the rest of us are being dragged farther and farther away from him, kicking and screaming or willingly, it doesn’t matter. Time does not ask permission. It just keeps pulling. And every September I turn around and realize I can still see him back there, but look how far away he is now.

There is something deeply unnatural about becoming older than the version of someone you loved. About accumulating years they never got to have, like I am somehow stealing birthdays from a pile that was supposed to belong to both of us. Chris and I were only fifty-one weeks apart. We were supposed to grow old side by side. There was never supposed to be this much distance between us at all, and now I am thirty seven years old while he is still twenty eight, and that math feels fundamentally wrong. Every birthday I have is another year I move past him. Every gray hair, every line beginning to settle into my face, every tiny betrayal of my body reminding me that I am aging is also proof that he isn't. Someday, if I am lucky enough to live that long, I will have spent more of my life without my brother than I ever got to spend with him, and there is something about that realization that makes me physically sick. Because the world did not stop when mine split completely in half. That is one of grief's first and cruelest lessons. The morning after someone dies, the sun has the fucking audacity to rise. People still complain about traffic. Someone stands impatiently in line for coffee. Bills arrive. Laundry needs folding. Grass grows. Seasons change. The world heals over the wound with such casual efficiency that eventually you begin to wonder whether you are the only thing that didn't. People say time heals, but sometimes I think time has healed everything but me. Time didn't heal this. Time taught me how to carry it, and those are not the same thing. It taught me how to laugh with a missing person lodged somewhere behind the laughter. It taught me how to celebrate birthdays and Christmases and Homecoming Queens and imagine graduations with an absence sitting beside me like an invisible member of the family. It taught me how to say his name without always crying and how to answer questions about him without my voice breaking. It taught me how to look functional while carrying something that once felt heavy enough to kill me. But grief is patient. It can sit quietly in some back room of my body for months, barely making a sound, and then a song comes on. A smell catches me off guard. Someone tells a story. Facebook shows me a photograph. September appears on the calendar. And suddenly grief comes charging out of wherever it has been hiding and puts both hands around my throat, and I am right back inside something I thought I had learned how to survive. That isn't healing. I just learned how to build a life around the hole. I decorated around it. I raised children around it. I worked and laughed and loved and made plans around it. I learned where the edges were so I could walk through my own life without constantly falling in. But the hole never closed. And this morning, for the 2,922nd time, I woke up in a world where Chris is still dead. I hate writing that sentence. I hate the violence of its simplicity. Chris is still dead. There is nowhere for my mind to negotiate inside those four words. No loophole. No “but.” No amount of surviving September changes the ending. I can cross this date every year for the rest of my life and there will never be a September when I finally make it to the other side and find him waiting there. There will only ever be another number. Nine. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty eight. Numbers I don't even want to imagine because eight already feels obscene. Maybe that is why this year feels heavier. Maybe there isn't a hidden reason I need to uncover. Maybe I am not grieving incorrectly. Maybe I haven't gone backward. Maybe nothing happened to reopen the wound because maybe some wounds simply remain open underneath everything we build over them. Maybe eight years is simply eight years too many. Eight years of loving someone who has nowhere left for me to send that love. Eight years of sentences I have started in my head with, I need to tell Chris… before remembering there is no Chris to tell. Eight years of carrying memories for people who can no longer remember them themselves. Eight years of carrying my brother forward into a future he never got to enter. Eight years of watching the distance grow while some stubborn, terrified part of me is still standing somewhere in September of 2018, holding the door open with both hands, as if keeping it open long enough might somehow mean he can still walk through it.

Today makes eight years since Chris died. Eight years of putting one foot in front of the other while some part of me has remained behind, still reaching for him. And maybe that is what hurts most about this number. Eight years haven’t taught me how to miss him any less. It has only given me eight more years of life he should have been here for… and eight years’ worth of new reasons to wish he was.