Still?

Today the weather was so much like it was 16 years ago today: clear and crisp and full of promise. That feel of autumn just nodding its head, the school year starting, new beginnings. Still, I was tugged back to one of the hardest days ever, because that’s what painful anniversaries do. Three hundred and sixty-five days pass, completing the circle, and you’re back in that rough headspace, remembering — nothing you can do about it.

I thought about the day encroaching, as usual. The first few years, I took the day off from work because I simply couldn’t deal. Yesterday, and the day before, I wondered how I would feel, anticipating something I wasn’t sure of. Today, I went to work and tried to pretend it was any other day. Because it’s been sixteen years, after all, since my brother died suddenly. Sixteen years since he fell from the top of a spectacular mountain in Colorado, and my family got the worst, most impossible, news. But despite the passing years, September 3 will never, ever be just a day for me. In all the ways I’ve processed my grief, I’ll never stop missing David. And today, with all its natural beauty, reminds me of him, of having him and of losing him. It’s amazing and awful all at once, every single year.

In one of the bereavement writing groups I attended after his death, a woman introduced herself and explained why she had come. She was there to mourn her son, lost seven years prior. Seven years! I thought. Wow, that’s an awfully long time. How little I knew then. Thankfully, it didn’t occur to me to pathologize her, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has essentially decided to do since 2022 for anyone grieving past the one-year mark, diagnosing them with “prolonged grief disorder.” Apparently, one is supposed to flip the calendar, brush their hands together, and be done with that whole inconvenient death thing.

Just a couple of months after David’s fall, someone I knew well caught me crying and asked what was wrong. What was wrong? My beloved big brother was dead! My whole understanding of life as I knew it had irreparably changed. And they said to me, “Still?” As in, you’re still upset about that?

The DSM‘s text reads: “An individual with prolonged grief disorder may experience intense longing for the person who has died or preoccupation with thoughts of that person.” Surely, that can’t be special. But certainly, a psychiatrist would nail this label to the woman grieving her son for “too long,” and to me, holding a torch for my brother this long. But if no one holds the torch, who remembers? Who marks the day? Who tells the world about the width of his grin, his sweet way of talking, the way he gave the best hugs?

I wrote my book, Were You Close? about losing David, about it taking a very, very long time to find any consolation or clarity about what happened and how I could survive without him, and I published it expecting some form of criticism for openly admitting my ongoing brokenness. I anticipated someone would call me out for being an obsessive, dysfunctional, or at least a whiny baby. For not being “over it.” No one did that. (Maybe there were some haters who would have, but they couldn’t be bothered to read my story.)

What I actually found were readers who were grateful I gave voice to that abiding pain, who made them feel less alone with their own gnawing ache of loss, even grief that had haunted them most of their lives. Many generous people reached out to tell me about their siblings who had died, how very long it had been, how they had held their sadness alone, away from others who deemed it improper in duration. One extremely kind woman told me that it was the first time she felt seen in the more than 40 years since her brother died.

Today I felt the same great longing for my big bro and the same enormous sadness that he’s gone. It’s incredibly strange to be older than he ever was, and to continue to wish he’d be here with his wisdom and humor and arm around my shoulder. But I do. Still. Sixteen years later.