It's Extra

Content Disclosure: This story contains themes or mentions of grief, suicide or self harm, mental health struggles, and religious struggles.

What is it like to live a life where the grief of losing a person has had more effect on life than the person themselves? I’ll try to explain, though I have never been particularly eloquent or sufficiently understandable. 

I grew up taking family photos in a cemetery. Not the sort you print on Christmas cards. Not the kind you hang on the mantel. No. Every year on my younger brother’s birthday, we visited his grave, and we took photos. My parents would buy flowers, and we would put them in the little bouquet-holder in the ground. My dad always did this part, because my mom is afraid of spiders. Me and my siblings would gather around the gravestone and say cheese. We’d take a couple photos, all of the kids, and then we’d just be there. At the cemetery. This was when the fun began. 

As young children, me and my siblings would the climb trees there, irreverent as we were. There was one really wonderful climbing tree. Its trunk separated into three parts, and if you braced your back against one part, and your feet against the other two, you could climb quite a ways, shuffling against the rough bark that still irritated your skin through your shirt. I was able to climb higher as I got older. 

We would play tag sometimes. Or hide and seek. We even used the shaker pods that fell from the trees as subjects of photographs for an art competition. They weren’t the only things that fell from trees. 

Weren’t even the most important things. No, the most important things that fell from these trees were the spruce cones that fell so near my brother’s grave. My siblings and I would collect them, outlining my brother’s headstone in nature. If we had enough time and cones, we would outline my great grandfather’s grave as well. My mom never liked this tradition, but it felt wrong to leave a ring unfinished. I never grew out of the habit. Instead it was cut out of me. Cut out of the cemetery, that is. 

Shortly after I turned fifteen, we made our yearly visit to the cemetery. We took our photos. We pretended to be centaurs. As the sun set, casting the graves in rosy light, I realized that the tree was gone, replaced by graves. As I searched the rest of the cemetery, I realized that there were no other spruce trees. It was an awful day when life was discarded to make room for death. It felt like every day for me.

So, I settled for pine cones, hurdling graves so as not to step on headstones, which felt like greater disrespect. And I outlined the grave. We left. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. 

This wasn’t unusual for me, to be preoccupied with death for weeks at a time. I’d had a healthy relationship with is at first. Sure, I cried sometimes, but that was normal for a little kid with a dead brother. At least I wasn’t suicidal. And then, I was suicidal. And I got over it. And I forgot about it. When I was twelve, I remembered, and it wrecked me. My healthy relationship had become an obsession. 

And schist, it screwed with everything. My perfect grades dropped by a whole tenth of a point in one class. People started worrying about me. I could hardly remember my lines–not the ones for the musical I was in, no, the ones that tell people that you’re alright. That you’re not hurting. That you have nothing to explain.

Because I had no idea how to make people understand something I didn’t understand fully myself. Something I still don’t understand. 

Is it still grief if you lost nothing? 

When people speak of grief, they tell you to remember the happy memories. They tell you to dispel shadows by stitching together the sunshine your loved ones left scattered behind when they died. That you’ll find them in a reverse silhouette of their identity, if only for a moment. 

But, for me, there is no sunlight to stitch. Not from a person. I look for these memories but there is nothing there. I look for any shred of an identity past a name, but there’s no one there. There is nothing missing from my life. Only things added. 

Like fear. Not my own. No. I do not fear death any more than the next person. She is an old acquaintance to me. But my mom’s fear. The way it morphed into anger when I ran in front of a truck playing tag. When I told her about my suicidal thoughts, telling her I’d gotten over them years ago when in reality they’d continued forward. The way she’d sat us down when a friend of mine had died in a car accident, and the advice she’d given me about not being a smartmouth with police officers. Her voice when my other younger brother had almost died because he’d thrown a fit about candy and fell off a chair, screaming at me, because I’d wanted him to share. 

All the times I’d thought she was angry, when she was really just afraid. 

It also added a kind of love. The sort that grows in your heart, and, before you have time to gift it to someone, they’re gone. You could throw it away. You could kill it. But the pesticides that kill that love risk killing all emotion. So, you give it to all around you. It’s extra. You have some to spare for everyone. And it seems to brighten the world.

My mom had that too. 

It was that love that led her to tell me that she would not disown me for marrying a man outside the religion. Now, at the time, I hadn’t even realized that this was a possibility. But it was comforting to know. 

Why do I speak of love? Why do I love at all? I know this isn’t the question you asked just now, Em, but it’s one you asked before. And I didn’t have an answer that satisfied me. Now, I have one. 

I love because I am afraid. And if God’s perfect love casts out all fear, then maybe my imperfect love, made in that image, can cast out an almost imperceptible fraction of that fear. I’ve hoped it might ease some of yours. 

And if you think God disagrees with me on that, I will not hate you for that. I will still love you. 

That is to say, I love you.