20 Years

“She had imagined that, as time went by, the grief would shrink and become neatly encapsulated in her life, in a small and manageable way. But what happened was different. The grief stayed just as big, but her life grew around it.” 

– Lois Tonkin, Growing Around Grief, 1996

This December 3rd will mark 20 years since my sister, Cathy, died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 31. You might think, after 20 years, that I’d have the grief of it all figured out. You might think I’d know how to anticipate the pain, would be able to cut it off at the pass before it had a chance to sneak up on me and kick me in the ribs, knocking the wind out of me and leaving me gasping for air. You might assume that I’d have mastered my grief, successfully leaning into it, pushing through it, coming out the other side to some sort of peace and acceptance. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross once defined acceptance as the “final stage of grief” – the stage in which you begin to integrate your grief into your life and adjust to the new reality of life without the one you lost. If this is true, surely I’ve accepted Cathy’s death and moved forward by now. After 20 years, you might assume that the worst of it has passed. Sure, you might expect it to hurt every now and then, like the ache of an old injury that flares up from time to time as a dull, maybe distant, reminder of a pain that once felt all-consuming. But you’d assume the worst of the pain was nothing more than a memory. 

And you’d be mostly right. 

After 20 years, I feel like I have found ways to live with my loss and move forward with my life. The pain of Cathy’s death is certainly not as intense as it once was. I have made the deliberate choice to choose joy whenever possible and to embrace hope as a way forward. I have discovered that writing and talking about my grief openly and honestly has helped me to find some healing. Through therapy and self-reflection, I have found tools to help me cope with the overwhelming sadness, anxiety, and loneliness that have been with me since her death. All of these are mostly effective.

I say “mostly” because all of it – all of the perceived progress, all of the coping tools, all of the words I have to describe and explain and process my grief – flies out the window and means nothing in the weeks leading up to the anniversary of my sister’s death each year. None of the essays I’ve written, none of the insights I’ve discovered or meaning I’ve found or peace I’ve constructed in all of the other months can stop the wave of panic that seizes me on some random November afternoon. I’m still blindsided. As I sit at the dining room table, absent-mindedly working on a puzzle as I listen to my girls play Barbies in the other room, it suddenly feels like the bottom of my stomach has dropped, as if I’m on a roller coaster that has just begun its speeding descent from the highest drop on the track. The empty, whirling feeling in my gut quickly travels up to my chest, where I find it difficult to draw in a complete breath, and my heart beats an erratic rhythm. The panic rises to my throat and radiates out to my limbs, as my arms tingle and my palms sweat, my legs feel like jelly. I begin to feel light-headed, and small black spots begin to pepper my vision. I try my best to focus on my breath – I watch my chest rise with each slow, deliberate inhale through my nose, pausing before I exhale slowly through my mouth. One breath. Two breaths. Three. Five. Ten. It doesn’t work. My breathing quickens, becomes shallow. So I try to focus on the room around me, trying to center myself with my senses. I notice a blue chair. That bookshelf is black. The carpet beneath my feet is soft. The chair I am sitting in is firm. And still my heart races. I am still dropping from the top of the roller coaster. My mind is spinning and darkness feels like it’s closing in around me. I finally realize I can’t control this on my own, and I go to my husband, tell him I’m having a panic attack. He reminds me that I’m safe, urges me to notice what’s around me and say it all out loud. He breathes with me and, somehow, focusing on his breath helps me to slow down my own. 

Once the wave of panic has passed, once I no longer feel like I’m spinning and falling and gasping for air, I text a close friend. I tell her that I don’t know what’s going on, don’t know why I am suddenly wound tight with anxiety, always on the verge of screaming or crying or both, unsure why I’ve suddenly experienced a panic attack unlike any I’ve had in years. She is so empathetic, so understanding, and she acknowledges all of the things that could be giving me stress in my life. But none of them feel really true; none feel like the cause. Until she writes: 

“This is always about the time of year that all the hurt and anxiety over losing Cathy starts creeping in as well. I wonder if this time of year is just always going to feel hard.”

And as soon as I read those words, I feel a wave of grief wash over me, and I begin to sob, and the crying brings a kind of relief that feels like pouring cold water over a burn. Yes, this time of year will never not be completely marked by the loss of my sister. No matter how much joy I choose to cultivate or gratitude I choose to embrace or hope I choose to hold onto, the end of November and beginning of December will always bring with it the real, visceral pain of remembering the day we lost Cathy.

This year, the pain of that memory feels especially deep as I try to wrap my head around the fact that it’s been 20 years since I last saw my sister. Every milestone since Cathy died has felt poignant, significant. But 20 years feels like something different, something I can’t quite articulate. It’s the awareness of not only the sheer vastness of time, of two decades that have passed, but also of all that 20 years of life entails. It’s 20 Christmases that have felt a little hollow for our entire family, 20 birthdays that Cory has celebrated without her twin by her side, 20 years of grief, sometimes coupled with hope, sometimes coupled with panic, always mixed with a deep sense of missing and longing for the friend and sister I lost. It’s 1,043 weeks of not going over to her apartment to watch the latest episode of “The Real World” or to meet her for lunch at Hoff’s Hut. It’s 7,300 days of not calling her on the phone and hearing her voice on the other end, of not sitting by as she told a story like only she could or savoring that moment when her laugh turned into a cackle. It’s all of the major life events that have happened in our family that she hasn’t been there for: the births and the weddings, the graduations and retirement parties and family reunions. And time just continues marching on. In just 5 more years, I will have lived longer without Cathy than I did with her. I WILL HAVE LIVED MORE OF MY LIFE WITHOUT MY SISTER THAN I DID WITH HER. It’s that piece, I think – how so much time can pass so quickly, how life just carries on and we all somehow continue living – that causes the waves of panic to rise up in me from time to time. Because, in those moments, I’m reminded that my whole life can be pulled out from under me at any moment, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. 

That uncertainty – that deeply uncomfortable and frightening uncertainty – is the thing I have struggled most to learn to live with over these 20 years. And maybe that’s about as close as I can get to the “acceptance” that the stages of grief suggest. I started thinking about this a few months ago as I watched the HBO series Mare of Easttown. In it, Kate Winslet’s character, Mare, who has lost her son to suicide, is asked by a grieving widow if it ever gets any easier. “No,” she responds firmly, without hesitation. But then she adds, “after a while, you learn to live with the unacceptable.” I think living without my sister for 20 years, living with my grief and panic alongside my hope and gratitude, has taught me that Cathy’s death will never make sense to me. There will probably never be a November in which I do not experience waves of panic, of hurt and anxiety and deep, deep sadness as I relive the memory of her death. But I have also learned, after 20 years, that I will survive those waves. I will survive the uncertainty that her death taught me is part of life. My acceptance doesn’t come from some logical understanding of her death or a rational ability to set aside my pain and move forward. Instead, I think, 20 years has given me the perspective to see her death as something completely unacceptable that I have somehow learned to live with. 

With each passing year since that December day in 2001, my grief has refused to shrink. The grief remains, large and immovable, sometimes overwhelming, like those moments when I am overcome with panic. And while the pain and uncertainty and fear remain, somehow my ability to live with it grows. My life has grown – and continues to grow – around my grief, leaving so much more room for joy and peace and contentment and living than there ever was in those first months and years after Cathy’s death, when my grief seemed to fill every part of my life. But even as my life has grown, so has my acceptance that the grief will always be there, sometimes feeling like a small part of my life, other times feeling just as intense as it did 20 years ago. I think I will always feel my loss as the end of November rolls around, will feel it creep up on me and sometimes overtake me as it did on that that random afternoon as I sat listening to my girls play, sending me back into the dark intensity of my grief. But each time it does, I will try to remember that there is room outside of my grief, that there is space and light that I have grown outside of that darkness. I will remember that there is room for both the joy and the grief in this expansive life that is mine.