I Inherited His Ghost
He wanted to stay the weekend. No plans, no reason. This little boy moved slowly up the hill like grief was pulling at his legs, making them heavier with each step. I met him halfway and saw it immediately, that all too familiar look in his eyes, the way his shoulders slumped like even holding himself up was too heavy. His mom told me he’s been emotional lately. I didn’t need her to explain. I could see it all over him.
When he got close enough, I asked gently, “You okay, bud?” He looked up at me, eyes full of glassy sadness, trying so hard to hold it together. His voice cracked as he said, “I just need to be here. I need to do something fun. I just want to be with you.” I bent down, kissed his forehead, and he collapsed into my arms like he’d been waiting all week to pass that feeling to someone else. “I love you, Aunt Cole,” he whispered. And I just held him, my heart splitting right down the middle, because what do you say to a child who’s grieving a parent in ways he doesn’t even have the words for?
He misses his daddy. He misses him in a way that turns into tight little fists, watery eyes, and quiet, aching stares out the window. He misses him in the way his voice lowers when he talks about him, like his absence is something holy and breakable. And as I sat there holding him, feeling the soft heaves of his chest against mine, I felt the fury rise up again. The hot, irrational, loud kind of fury that fills every corner of your body and doesn’t give a damn about logic. I’m so angry with Chris. I’m angry that he left me, yes, but I am furious that he left his children.
It doesn’t feel fair to be angry at someone who was in that much pain, and most days I remind myself that suicide isn’t really a choice, not in the clean, deliberate way we think of choices. I know mental illness can trap a person inside their own mind so deeply they don’t see a way out. But on days like this, when I’m holding his son while he cries for the father who should still be here, all of that understanding burns to ash. Rationality doesn’t stand a chance when a child is sobbing in your arms, saying he just wants to feel okay again but is terrified he never will.
I’m furious that Chris didn’t fight harder. That he didn’t claw his way out of that darkness, even if it ripped him to shreds. I’m angry that love wasn’t enough to anchor him here, enough to tether him right here with the people who love him. I’m angry that our love wasn’t loud enough to drown out the lies in his head. I’m enraged that his babies are left wandering through grief with no map, carrying questions that no one alive can answer and wounds they’ll spend a lifetime trying to understand. I hate that I’m the one left to clean up what he couldn’t carry. I’m angry that I have to be the one to explain something I don’t even fully understand myself, that I have to be the translator of a pain I never asked to speak. I’m angry that I have to keep showing up, carrying the weight he put down… that I have to shoulder pain he wasn’t even strong enough to carry. I am insanely furious that I have to look into his innocent son’s eyes, knowing I can never give him what he truly wants, the only thing that could ever really make it okay. His dad. His whole world. The one person who should’ve stayed. And didn’t.
People love to package anger like it’s a neat little “stage” of grief, like it’s just a pit stop on the way to peace. But that’s bullshit. This isn’t a stage, it’s an entire furious, raging storm. It’s a tornado that rips through everything I thought I understood about love, about loyalty, about family. It doesn’t pass. It circles. It stays. It’s not something I move through, it’s somewhere I live now. I live in this space my bother burned to the ground. Most days, it’s the air I breathe. I don’t visit this place, I exist inside it. It’s got roots wrapped around my spine. It’s got claws in my gut. It’s got a voice that screams in my ear when the world goes quiet - How could you leave him? How could you leave them? How could you leave me?
And I know Chris didn’t want to hurt anyone. I know he loved his babies with whatever scraps of strength he had left. I know he wasn’t trying to leave them, or me, or this world that broke him. But love isn’t always enough when your mind turns against you. That’s the heartbreaking part. It’s not always enough to pull you back from the edge when your own mind becomes a battlefield. And that’s the part that guts me, the part where my fury collides with my understanding and creates this unbearable friction that doesn’t know where to go. Where my compassion tries to hold hands with my rage, and the friction between them sets me on fire. It doesn’t settle. It doesn’t soften. It just burns. Through my chest like a wildfire, down my spine like acid, into every aching corner of me that still begs for him to have chosen differently. It doesn’t wait for quiet moments, it flares up while I’m cooking dinner, when cartoons are playing in the background, when I’m tucking his son into bed and he looks up at me with tear-glossed eyes and asks, “Do you think my daddy can still see me? Do you think my daddy still loves me?”
I tell him yes. I tell him his daddy loves him. I say all the right things. But inside, I’m screaming. Inside, I want to punch a hole through heaven and drag my brother down here and make him see this. Make him hold his son one more time. Make him fix this. But I can’t. None of us can. And right now when his baby is curled up next to me fighting tears he’s afraid to release, afraid they won’t stop if he does, that helplessness is its own kind of hell.
So I hold the boy he left behind. I wipe his face with hands that are trembling from the weight of it all. I whisper, “Aunt Cole loves you, I’ll always be here for you” even when my voice trembles with every syllable. Even when there’s nothing left in me but ashes from his fire. I love him fiercely, like it’s the only thing I know how to do anymore. I let that love swallow me whole because I have to. Because someone has to show up. Someone has to stay. I pour every ounce of what Chris couldn’t give into this child, every hug, every answer, every nightlight left on. I become what he needs, even when I’m breaking. I let that love consume me because I have to. I have to be here for him in every way his dad couldn’t. And yea, I let the anger stay. I let it stretch out and settle in my bones, because it’s the only thing that still makes me feel like I’m fighting for him, for truth, for some kind of justice. Maybe it’s not healing. Maybe it’s not forgiveness. Maybe it’s not even fair. But that’s the only way I know how to survive this.
Author’s Note
Originally written April 12, 2019 – He left me with this grief and called it love.
I wrote this six and a half months after Chris died. His son had just turned nine, and he was starting to crumble beneath the weight of a birthday his dad wasn’t there for, and everything else that absence carries. During this time, he would come to my house frequently. I think, in his little heart, I was the closest thing left to his daddy. Most weekends, he wouldn’t say a word about Chris. And I never pushed. I let him lead, let him decide when it was safe enough to speak his grief out loud. But that weekend was different. His mom called and said he’d been struggling hard. And when he showed up at my door, I could see it all over him, his tiny body barely able to carry the weight of it anymore. He needed to be somewhere he didn’t have to pretend. Somewhere he could set the grief down and just be.
He’s fifteen now. And he’s angry… God, he’s so angry. The grief didn’t vanish; it just changed shapes. It crawled into his fists, into the silence between his words, into outbursts no one else can trace back to heartbreak. It’s still there, just wearing a different mask. Misfired. Misread. Misunderstood. He’s struggling in ways he doesn’t even have the language for yet. Some days, I want to hate my brother for this. For what he left behind. For what his children still have to carry.
Grief isn’t linear, isn’t that the truth. Because right now, as I reread these words, I can feel that old tornado spinning back through me, wild and unforgiving. It’s tearing up ground I thought I’d already buried, ripping open scars I swore had scabbed over. And all I can do is stand there - right in the eye of it - clutching what’s left like it might blow away, too.
Yea... This one still burns.
