Since My Brother Died

This is just going to be an archive of all the things I've tweeted and felt since my brother died four months ago. From Twitter and Instagram. I'm afraid to forget things and to move on or my accounts will disappear and I'll lose everything, so I'm going to post them here so I'll never forget.

March 17, 2018

Image Today was a horrible day. I woke up and found out that my oldest brother died in the early morning. This is so unreal that I don't even have words for it. It's crazy to think that I've lived a day in the world that my older brother hasn't. I don't know how to process this.

March 18, 2018

My big brother died today. What a weird sensation it is - a mix between disbelief and grief; it’s hard to contemplate a future that doesn’t have Jorden in it.

I can’t believe how many of my high school friends interacted with my brother & I never even knew it.

All I want to do is sleep, but all I can think about is how I had to listen to my mom scream and gag on the phone when I told her my brother was dead. Then how she cried in my arms and stared at his pictures and told me about all the times he’d been alive.

None of us can think about what comes next. How two parents have to bury their child & 4 siblings becomes 3 & the whole life that he’ll never live with us. I’m going to be sick the rest of my life thinking about how someday I’ll be older than my big brother.

I’m so scared that death begets death. Like my brother’s dad asking someone to take all the guns from his house so he won’t kill himself in response. And his best friend’s text to me that he felt like “joining him” so that neither of them would be alone.

These are things I want to remember from the day my oldest brother died:

my stoic younger older brother hunting for Jorden’s dad to tell him his only son was dead. Him answering all my texts except the ones asking if he was okay.

My sister bawling her eyes out. My stupid joke to coax her out of the house (“I’ll buy you something if you come.”) Her reply, in tears, “I don’t want anything. I want my brother.”

My best friend’s mom taking the phone when I was bawling so hard I couldn’t breathe. Telling me that Dana was coming for me, she loved me, & that I needed to try my hardest to make a parent’s worst nightmare a little less devastating.

Dana dropping everything and coming for me.

My best friend’s mom calling my mom on her own. The gratefulness in my mom’s tone when she recalled it later.

My mom crying before I could even get the words out over the phone. Her scream when she finally understood my brother’s name between the sobs. How it only got worse when I had to say “no he isn’t hurt, Mom, he’s dead.”

The one lone Snapchat from my other favorite person as I sat alone in my apartment, unable to digest my brother’s death. “I love you.”

My brother’s dad’s text: “Just so everyone can worry just a touch less.. I had someone take all my guns out of the house.”

Having to tell my brother’s best friend because my mom just couldn’t get the words out.

My mom’s notebook entry:
“March 17, 2018.
My son died today.”

The best part is my friends who knew my brother. There’s just something about it that helps so much. Idk why.

Sometimes I just really wish I could shut everything off and everyone out. I can’t do this anymore.

Last night we googled my brother & found images of tattoos he’d done. Mine, Dana’s. My mom said “mine’s probably not up there.” And when I found it, she started crying and said “I just wanted to be up there” as though she thought it was silly but was still desperate to be part.

Image This is what Jorden loved to do. So many people loved him & are walking around with his art on their bodies. Me, my mom, his dad, my sister, my best friend, and so many others. I don’t know how to grieve for him. I don’t know how to move forward without my brother.

March 20, 2018

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I’d never seen this picture before in my life. Don’t even remember the day it was taken. But I do remember how my older brothers used to play wrestle constantly. How I always wanted to play with them but was too little and got hurt too easy. A few years after this, they were wrestling in the bedroom and I went in to play too. Jor picked me up and flipped me. I started crying cause I jammed my thumb. Without a word, Dylan picked me up, carried me to the living room, and set me on the floor by our mom. He and Jor went back to wrestling between themselves. It’s nice to see that they always did try to let me wrestle too. I didn’t seem to mind at all. I always wanted to be like my big brothers. // 18 March 1997.

March 27, 2018

This has been one of the strangest, most difficult weeks of my life. A weird mix between laughing/crying at the memories and not being able to comprehend or accept what the future is going to look like. For as much as all of this hurts, I don’t want it to end, because once it does I’ll have to start coping with the fact that this is, in fact, real life. Once that surrealism fades away, I’ll have to continue in world where my older brother isn’t. That’s the worst part.

The eulogy I wrote for Jorden's funeral (held March 28th, 2018)
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March 28, 2018

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It was an exhausting day but amazing to see all the people who love my brother.

March 31, 2018

“That we once enjoyed and deeply loved, we can never lose. For all that we love deeply becomes part of us.” These have been the most nightmarish two weeks of my life. And it’s unfathomable to think that it’s something I can’t wake up from. My brother only got 31 years, and I only got 22 with him. When you’re born with an older brother, it seems implied that you’ll get so much longer in the world together. That there’ll always be a future waiting for the both of you. I miss him so much. I keep rethinking all the experiences we had, and I can’t comprehend the fact that past-me never knew this was coming. With every memory, I can’t help but think “he’ll be gone in only 9 more years, 4 more years...” and there’s so much pain and regret and love. And I’ll never stop missing him and grieving for the life he was supposed to have.

April 3, 2018

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My mom, holding Reagan, Dylan (the blonde), me looking up, & Jor looking stylish. my family.

April 7, 2018

ImageI feel like my worlds have collided in all the worst ways. Got my brother’s books on the shelf, his picture mixed with school stuff, the dang flowers dying more everyday. & damn if his Nightmare trinket box didn’t smell just like him when I opened it. I feel like I’m getting sicker everyday. Just filing him away in all the right places.

April 18, 2018

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A whole month later and it still hurts as much as ever. It’s overwhelming how physical grief is. I can’t tell you what this sickness feels like, but I’m both hoping that it’ll go away and scared that it’ll fade.

So far, the “returning back to ‘normal’” part of this has felt impossible. It’s hard to focus on anything, hard to sleep and stay asleep, and hard to celebrate and plan for a future where he won’t be there. Mostly everything seems a lot more trivial and a lot more serious, and I feel like I’m balancing everyone’s expectations of me with everything else, and nothing feels right. Like our mom said, “nothing will ever be normal again.” I just guess I didn’t realize that it was me who’d changed so much.
And the change is hard too, because now everything is caught up in this “before and after” binary that centers around the end of my brother’s life. Jorden’s life.

There’s no endgame for grief. I won’t suddenly stop missing him and wishing for the future he should’ve had. Won’t stop randomly crying over him halfway through Act I of my assigned Shakespeare reading, and won’t for a minute stop imagining my whole family together at my graduation - happy for me, but fucking dying more than anything because Jorden is not alive. It’s terrifying how much you feel like YOU are dying when your kid, grandson, cousin, nephew - brother - dies. And yet somehow it feels like the worst part is that I’m still alive and he is not, and I’m living all these days that I never should’ve seen without him.

April 27, 2018

I feel hella broken, and it needs to stop. I’m dealing with so many destructive emotions and trying my best to get that shit under wraps but the littlest thing sets me off

Really, when everything slows down, I just have this overwhelming desire to sleep until I forget that the world is a real place.

April 29, 2018

Campground days with my brother, sister, & nephew *heart emoji* (and the rest of the fam). It’s hard that it’s just the three of us siblings, but it was a nice day

Today was nice, but crazy hard. It hurts a lot when I’m around my brother and sister and realize that it’s only the three of us now, not four. And that I only have a brother and sister and somehow I’m the middle child out of four. It’s painful.

Honestly it just doesn’t compute in my head that my brother is dead. It’s like I try to think of a world without him and just can’t. Like today, realizing that it’s just Dylan, me, and Reagan, my brain feels like it has a glitch - like it literally CAN’T comprehend this.

May 8, 2018

Don’t even know when I switched from feeling too much to feeling nothing at all. Yay major depression.

May 13, 2018

"What is left of my family"
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May 14, 2018

In my last semester of college, the semester in which my brother died unexpectedly, somehow I still pulled off a 4.0 after missing weeks of school and struggling to refocus once I returned. I miss him. The good things make the bad things harder.

May 17, 2018

Two months since my brother died. I wish time would stop passing so quickly. People seem to think there’s an expiration date of grief, & it scares me that the more I stop talking about him, the more it feels like he was never here at all.

I don’t know if I’m happy that I somehow survived my brother dying or angry at myself for letting my world continue without him.

My brother always said he would never live past 30. And it still pisses me off that he had just made it to 31 and was beginning to want to live when something pulled him right out of our lives. Somehow he must’ve spoke those words into the universe. It’s not fair.

May 19, 2018

Going to a family party tonight. The last time I was there, I saw and spoke to my brother.

May 20, 2018

You lose yourself, you reappear / You suddenly find you got nothing to fear / Alone you stand with nobody near.” Life is so weird y’all. The highs are high and the lows are lower. My head is all over the place, but there are moments of “okay.” Like tonight, where a cute outfit, clean eyebrows, & good friends got me through my return to the last place I ever saw my brother. The place where he grew up.

This is the first time I’ve been able to write about my brother like this. These are my memories of who he was, what he taught me, & what he meant to me. It might not make sense to anyone else, but there was beauty and magic and kindness in my brother. I want to remember it all.
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May 24, 2018

So you know how there's been a ton of talk and activism about gun violence? I wish there was something like that for my brother, who was at the hospital the day before and with the paramedics 4 hours before he died of an undiagnosed, highly dangerous and TREATABLE disease.

& the thing is, my family has been trying so hard to just survive this that we haven't moved forward with figuring out HOW this happened. I need to know how a healthy 31 year old died within 24 hours of being with two groups of medical professionals.

I use "disease" lightly, because it wasn't something he had very long. He got it and died within a week, within three days most likely. And within those three days was at the hospital then with paramedics when he got so bad he couldn't stand or speak coherently. They did nothing.

My brother died ALONE in his bedroom because nobody bothered to really figure out what was killing him. They tossed him a general antibiotic & sent him home. When he couldn't stand or remember his birthday, the paramedics told him NOT to go back. He died 4 hours later. Alone.

"I been waiting wide awake for the waves to come and take / Take me right to you / One hundred bottles of the good shit couldn't even bring you back / What am I to do? / Feel like I'm circlin' a drain / All I see is the remains of an ugly truth" - Otherside

Well apparently it's National Brother Day
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Today has just been a painful day for me
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June 11, 2018
ow, my heart
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June 12, 2018

I’ve been thinking about my brother a lot lately (we’re coming up on 3 months), and there’s just this hollow, sick feeling low in my chest. He deserved a future. He loved babies and he deserved the chance to have a family someday. I feel so sick. It’s such a constant pain.

June 13, 2018

I can't believe I've lived 88 entire days without my big brother.

There’s so much fear now: of holidays without him, of death jokes around our parents, of letting my mom see my sadness in fear making hers worse, of having to explain my brother to future family who will never know him, of not being able to keep him part of my life.

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." - CS Lewis

June 21, 2018

I miss my brother more than anything

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June 27, 2018

I wish we would've done something with these ideas
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June 28, 2018

My mom keeps telling everybody about the dream she had about my brother. He was happy & smiling, and she thinks it’s a sign. I hope it was.

But it’s so hard to hear someone talk about Jorden. We’re in the phase right now where it hurts so much and kick-starts everyone else’s pain that we just don’t speak about him out loud until someone starts randomly crying.

July 1, 2018

This year has been the one of the worst. Depression hit hard early on, then grief compounded it, and it’s just been a battle to do more than float along. I’m disconnected from friends I was really close with, unable to focus long enough to write, & just struggling against apathy.

The worst part is that I want to reach out to people, but just can’t. I’d rather be alone than the friend who’s an after thought.

July 4, 2018

My brother, Dylan, invited me and Reagan out for dinner and fireworks tonight, and I don’t know, but every time the 3 of us are together, it hurts a little more that Jorden isn’t here.

July 7, 2018

“‘In the east, there is a tradition called ‘kintsukuroi’. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I ask.
‘Because I want you to know,’ she says, ‘that there is live after survival’.”
- The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, Mackenzie Lee. Page 185.

July 8, 2018

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Found this tucked away in my mom’s room today with a couple other pictures of Jorden. I wish I could remember him when I was this young. The boys look so much like our mom at this age, & so much like Dylan’s son. It’s hard to see myself with them like this and know that there are all these years we had together that I don’t even remember. It’s hard because I know that we’ll never get another one.

The other day, I said how I used to follow Dylan & Jorden around cause I wanted to play too & they’d climb up on the shed without me. Dylan goes, “yeah, we used to duck & run across the street cause you weren’t allowed to cross the road." Such a small thing I’m scared I’ll forget.

July 20, 2018

I miss my friends, I miss my apartment, I miss my brother being alive, I miss my life.

July 24, 2018

We finally were allowed to get my brother’s medical records from the hospital. When he went, they wrote that he was “improving.” He died less than 48 hours later. How the hell could they think that.

July 28, 2018

In the next chapter of my novel, the main character's brother dies, and I've been putting off writing about my brother's death for so long that I'm not sure if I can pull this off.

July 29, 2018

Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day of being around family who dropped outta my life for 3 years then being around family that (will always be) devastated because Jorden died. I’m already drained and sad. I’d rather just skip the first part and let the whole day be about my brother.

August 5, 2018

I really wish I could see my brother.

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August 15, 2018

Found one of my brother’s oversized shirts from a concert we went to together. It’s sad that it’s mine now and not his, but I’m happy to have it & the memories that come with it.

August 19, 2018

God every time I see a fucking toothbrush I’m reminded that my brother is dead. When he died, I was so out of it that I couldn’t even be normal. I didn’t even brush my teeth for 3 days. Didn’t even realize I hadn’t. This is what it means to be changed by death. Everything hurts.

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I posted a photo of my front shelf already, but I’m very happy to have my brother’s favorite books front & center in my new place. Right next to a photo of us. Even though he isn’t here anymore & I have to keep living without him, at least I have a part of him here in this new part of my life. Losing my brother changed everything, changed me, and now here I am trying to figure out how life is going to be, without him. But I’m happy to have even the smallest piece of him here too. (4 months & 2 days)

August 20, 2018

I met a lot of new people today, and for some reason, it’s hard to be around people who don’t know that my brother died recently. I can’t explain it, but it just feels like I’m moving on without him when I’m around new people.

Don’t mind me just choking cause I can’t breathe cause my life is moving forward and my brother’s isn’t. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be here without him. I can’t do this

I want so bad just to go to bed and be sad but I can’t even do that because I have homework and need to take a shower and have to clean my living room, and it’s all just trivial BS and I just want my brother

When you’re trying so hard to be an adult and keep it together and do the first readings for your masters program and the first one is about a family member dying and ends: “this is it. The last thing he would teach me was how to live without him.” I’m just so angry at the world

the second one was also about death so the universe must be trying to hurt me. Like my brother dying wasn't bad enough, I've got to relive it every fucking day

August 22, 2018

My mom’s been buying life insurance and health insurance. And keeps talking about getting more.
Me: “mom, why do you need more life insurance??”
Mom: “because when I die then you kids are gonna get some money.”
My brother’s death has messed this family up.

August 23, 2018

The grief is so bad that sometimes I feel literally sick.

I can't even brush my teeth at night anymore because if I crawl into bed with grief that heavy, I lay there all night remembering that my brother is not alive anymore. And I don't what to do with that information except choke on it.

August 28, 2018
“I was so broken over you
Life it goes on, what can you do?”

August 31, 2018

“Hello there, the angel from my nightmare. The shadow in the background of the morgue. ... We can live like Jack & Sally if we want. Where you can always find me. And we’ll have Halloween on Christmas. & in the night we’ll wish this never ends.”

I think some part of me is broken. And always will be because we’re never getting him back & I didn’t realize how much of my life my brother helped shape. My favorite movies. My taste in music. My aesthetic. I miss him like I’ve never missed anything before.

September 1, 2018

I can’t wait for this tattoo. When I told my family what it’s going to be, they immediately knew it was for my brother.

September 5, 2018

“All the stars are closer now than
they have ever been. If you
were still beside me you’d reach up
on tiptoes, fingers spread to touch the brightest one.
But you’re not here,
gone deep below for far too long to
ever let me think you’re coming back.”

September 8, 2018

PSA: if anyone’s waiting for me to “get over” or “calm down” from my brother dying before you deal with me again, you can go fuck yourself. :)

September is 6 months, and that's so much worse.

September 11, 2018

“Death has a terrible habit of cutting straight through every line you’ve ever drawn between your present and your future.” - Warcross

September 12, 2018

Today was the best day I've had in awhile. Had a study group with some friends, hungout in the commons with some different friends, & ran into some friends I hadn't seen in awhile. I definitely appreciate the little things more now.

-Retweet-
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September 13, 2018

I woke up with a weird headache today & my mom just happened to call, and when I mentioned it to her, she got quiet and responded “don’t say things like that.” It’s crazy how much my brother’s death affected us. Scared of headaches & picturing the disease in my brother’s brain.

Monday is 6 months to the day that my brother died. It doesn’t seem real, and it’s still feels like I’m going to die too. I don’t know I’m going to do. Every month is supposed to get “easier” but it doesn’t. The farther we get from him being alive, the harder it is to keep going.

September 15, 2018

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Whenever I have a good day, it’s hard at the same time. Like today. My cousin’s wedding. My entire family together. Except not really. My brother’s not there-instead his name is carved into a little shared memorial. And his dad, who barely spoke. And just the big hole that’s always more obvious when we’re together and he’s not there. I spent the drive home listening to songs that reminded me of Jorden, and cried a little bit because I miss him and driving in the dark reminds me of him, and I’m tired of being sad and alone. Monday is 9/17. Six months since he died. I don’t know what to do with that information, except be hurt by it. It feels like my heart is trying to turn itself inside out in my chest, and I can’t breath. Tuesday, I get the first of a series of tattoos that are either his actual sketches or versions of his own tattoos. It helps in some ways, but really I just wish we could have him back. People keep telling me that I’ll “get better,” but I don’t want to “heal” and move on, because my brother is never going to be alive again, and I am never going to be okay with that.
“Where are you?
And I'm so sorry
I cannot sleep
I cannot dream tonight
I need somebody and always
This sick, strange darkness
Comes creeping on so haunting
every time.”

September 17th, 2018

I can’t believe it’s been 6 months since my brother died. Most days, it feels like he’s still out there somewhere, living his life. And on the other days, it’s a pain that makes me question whether being alive without him is worth it.

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We miss you, Jor. Six months without our big brother hasn’t made it any easier.

September 18, 2018

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Session 1 (check) “If you don't mind... I'd like to join you by your side. Where we can gaze into the stars...” miss you, Jor. So glad to have this piece of your personality on me forever.

September 19, 2018

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I’m terrified of hitting a year without my brother. We’re over halfway there, and I wish time would stop.

September 20, 2018

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I love the sense of wonder in my new tattoo. Like maybe there’s more to the world than any of us know. I’ll post a color photo after my second session when it’s all done, but this really shows how the shadows (and light source) will look from the Christmas lights when it’s all done. I already love it. Nightmare was always something my brother loved, something he had tattooed on him, and something we watched together. I might not have my brother anymore, but I have Jack, the Pumpkin King, who is just as soft and kind underneath the exterior as my brother was (and as skinny and tall lol). It’s a piece of Jorden’s personality on me. And I can’t wait to finish it (the color, some detail, and the face).

September 21, 2018

Today I:
•made it through another (rough) week
•cried in front of my cohort about my brother when it finally hit me that we’re past 6 months
•somehow managed to clean my apartment after a week of not being motivated to do anything
•feel somewhat “okay” rn

I don’t think people really understand what it feels like to lose a sibling. I want to say “imagine if X was just gone!” but I don’t want to put that on anyone or speak it into the world. But my brother was part of my life from the second I was born, and now he’s dead.
September 22nd, 2018 at 01:22am