Milestones

“The holiest of holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart: the secret anniversaries of the heart.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I think we all expect milestones to be difficult in the first year after losing a loved one. The first holiday, first birthday, even just returning to certain places or stepping into certain rooms for the first time after they’ve died can jar us into a face-to-face confrontation with their absence and feel like a punch to the gut. We may even steel ourselves for these moments, bracing against the impact as they draw near. But what about the moments we can’t prepare ourselves for, the ones that sneak up on us, knocking us down and leaving us broken? 

In the first week or two after someone dies, it can feel as if we are being carried aloft in the arms of others, our feet never having to touch the ground. At my sister, Cathy’s, funeral, I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of love, support, and genuine desire to be there for my family and me. Friends and extended family traveled distances to be with us, to be witnesses to our grief. In the days after, they brought us food and flowers and their memories of Cathy that they shared with us openly. Those who loved her, who loved us, called to check in on us, sent cards and emails. It was truly a gift to feel how many people had been touched by Cathy, who loved her and mourned her loss right alongside us. I remember my sweet cousin, who herself had lost a sibling – her teenage brother – a few years before, came up to me at the funeral. She took my hands in hers and looked into my face. She said, “You will not remember a single thing anyone here says to you today. But you will remember who was here for you.” It’s amazing what the presence of others can do when you are first facing the shocking pain of new grief. That support and presence helped me to feel less lonely; it helped to cushion me so that I didn’t bump into the sharp edges of my grief while I was still too raw, too vulnerable to withstand them.  

But then time passed. Life began to resume, and I realized I was expected to keep living even though I couldn’t fathom how to possibly do it. I remained in a cloud of shock, I think, for much of that first month after returning from Prague, returning home to this new reality in which Cathy was no longer present. It all felt like such a foggy blur, dreamlike even, like a nightmare I just couldn’t wake myself from. And yet, life began pushing forward despite my resistance to it. The witnesses to our grief had to return to their homes, their jobs, their lives. The support and presence that had cushioned me from the jagged edges of my pain were gone, and I was left to face the sharp reality of my grief. We celebrated our first Christmas without Cathy, my parents and sisters and I, grateful for the innocent joy and delight my youngest niece, who was only a year and a half old at the time, brought to an occasion that otherwise felt very bleak and empty. It didn’t feel like Christmas, like anything worth celebrating; it felt more like we were going through the motions, just trying to get through the day. We all sat with our memories, our grief, our gaping hole in our own way. We talked about Cathy, shared our favorite stories about her, broke down into tears often. And though we shared a loss so immense, I think there was also a certain amount we held back for ourselves, feeling our own unique loss that reflected the unique relationship we each shared with Cathy. But I wasn’t surprised by these feelings. I had expected that milestone, that first holiday without my sister, to be difficult. I had expected the day to feel a certain degree of emptiness.

And I think I expected all of those big days in that first year – all of the first holidays without her, what should have been her due date, the first time we celebrated Cory’s birthday without her twin, even the first anniversary of her passing –  to be difficult, even tried to prepare myself for them. What I didn’t expect were the smaller moments that hurt just as badly if not more so, moments that reminded me in unanticipated, jarring ways of the new reality I was facing. Cathy’s cell phone was one of those ways. After Cathy’s death, her fiancè, Freddie, had continued paying her cell phone bill so as to keep her outgoing message. He told me this at her funeral, how he planned to keep the line open so that he could still call her number and hear her voice in the message that answered. While I found this utterly heartbreaking to hear from him, I soon found great comfort in doing the very same thing. In the beginning, I would call her number every few days, just to hear her voice. There was a mixture of soothing comfort and startling pain every time I did this: the familiarity of her voice was a like a cooling balm on a searing wound that had been aching all day; and yet hearing her voice on the other end of the phone line could also smack me with the cold, sheer reality that she was gone, giving me vertigo – a sense that I was falling, spinning, that the ground had been suddenly pulled out from under me. I don’t know how many weeks or months I continued calling, desperate to hear her voice even as it felt as if I was continually picking at a scab, not allowing it to heal. And then, one day, her voice was just gone. I called her number and instead of being met with Cathy’s recorded voice, there was the generic, slightly robotic female voice of the default voicemail message. Once again, I felt as if a door had been slammed shut, never to reopen. It brought a new finality to the multitudes of endings that had been dropped at my feet since my sister’s death, one more way I had lost whatever small, tangible part of her I felt I had still held. 

Another one I did not expect? The day I discovered that the bottle of shampoo that Cathy had left behind was finally empty. In the weeks after Cathy’s funeral, when time spent in the cocoon of friends and family, of remembering and crying and laughing together, gave way to more practical matters that needed to be attended to in the wake of her death, Cory and I found ourselves in the home that Cathy and Freddie were preparing to move into. The house was going back on the market, and Freddie was planning to put most of their belongings into storage, unable to bring himself to sort through Cathy’s things or get rid of anything yet. He had asked us to pick out whatever we wanted to keep of Cathy’s before it was all moved out. We singled out things we thought my parents would want, like boxes of old photos and a basket of her journals, as well as items of clothing that held special significance for each of us. I kept a tank top that she had bought while we were traveling together in Spain and the pair of pants she wore throughout the month we traveled together. We also took most of her make up and bath items, knowing they wouldn’t keep in a storage unit for very long. And that’s how I ended up with a giant bottle of the shampoo that Cathy had used daily. It was something I clung to as a sensory memory of my sister – the familiar soft, fruity smell of it making me feel close to her. I would use the shampoo sparingly, not wanting to deplete it; but when I did, I felt enveloped by her scent, as if she was sitting there next to me. One morning in late August, nearly nine months after Cathy had died, I was in the shower when I lifted the bottle of shampoo, only to find it completely empty. And something inside of me, some dam that held back a reservoir of emotion, completely broke. I was overcome with a wave of grief, crumbling in the shower, sitting on the floor of the tub with my knees pulled into my chest, sobbing as the water from the shower head rained on me from above. It was as if she had died all over again. Something about that small, seemingly insignificant moment – the last drop of something that had belonged to her, now gone, too – felt like such a finality, such an irreversible ending. I think it was then that I began to understand that my grief would have no finish line. There would be no such thing as “getting through the worst of it” as some had promised me would happen. How could I get through the worst when the path ahead of me was peppered with landmines I couldn’t begin to prepare myself for? How could I move forward when every step threatened to bring yet another small but searing reminder that she was gone and nothing would ever be the same?

I don’t think there’s any real way to prepare for these types of triggers. How can we imagine the myriad ways our loved one’s absence will suddenly become magnified, abruptly pushing us back into the crashing waves of our grief? As I continued to trip on those minor milestones in that first year, those small but painful reminders that Cathy was gone, I began to realize that when we lose someone, we don’t just lose them on the day they pass away. We lose them in a thousand different ways in all the days after that. And we feel those losses viscerally, separate from what intellect or logic or social norms tell us we should feel. Even as our culture has taught us that we should get through the worst of it and move on (usually in a fairly short, prescribed amount of time), those moments remind us that loss isn’t isolated to any singular moment, and our grief does not follow a linear path. For every step I felt I’d taken forward, there were just as many instances where I felt thrown backward, and I began to realize that this was just fine. 

I think I in recognizing this, in accepting that my path through grief would be uniquely my own, would look like me – complicated and messy and emotional – I was able to give myself some space, time, and grace to face the unforeseen moments and feel them all. And though it took me a long time to get there, this acceptance also allowed me to let go of some of my anger, both at myself and at others. I could let go of expectations that I had placed on myself, and I could forgive others for not being able to show up for me in the way I thought they should have. If I couldn’t anticipate all the ways my grief would pop up and blindside me, how could I fault anyone else for not understanding them? This forgiveness gave me another gift: peace. I now understand that my grief will always be a part of me, a part of the landscape of my life. And I am at peace with that. It is one more facet of who I am, who I will always be. 

While those unexpected milestones, those reminders of Cathy’s absence, have lessened over the years, they still appear from time to time. However, the scar tissue that has formed around the gaping hole inside of me, the hole that has existed since the day Cathy died, now provides the cushion that protects me from the most jagged, sharpest edges of my grief. The moments that once startled me and sent flashes of searing pain through me now feel more like gentle nudges, reminders from Cathy herself, that she is still with me, and she always will be.