Year 3: When a loss is also an escape

Trigger warning: suicide, emotional abuse, loss, death, grief

YEAR 3

My older brother rented a room in a house a few streets over from me for a year or so until just a few months before he died. By then we were estranged outside of very occasional overlap at our parents’ house. So it wasn’t exactly logical that within days of learning his new address, I started having near-weekly recurring nightmares about him invading my home in the middle of the night to harm me, and then himself. But fear isn’t always rational.

After years of a comfortable enough distance, emotionally and otherwise, his physical proximity unnerved me. The persistent feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop returned, creating a low level anxiety that could almost hum along unnoticed if I let it. But I refused to alter my well-worn paths to avoid him, and so as I drove by I would often see his big blue truck out front and glimpse his tattooed arm hanging out its window, cigarette in hand.

I should have taken the long way to avoid that hand and the nightmares seeing it brought, but I didn’t want to give him that power. I’d seen that hand clenched and barely restrained (or not) so many times in my life. To me, his grin, which charmed so many, was more often seething and sinister. At times it felt like it must be a game to him — glaring at me during otherwise civil family affairs to see if he could put me on edge. He could. Of course, no one knew I was teetering and so during the times I would let myself fall over it, it would appear as though I was the antagonist. That Harmony, always so sensitive. Ha. As if I were simply delicate and not easily reinjured after years of damage.

It’s almost the anniversary of his death, and it’s likely the first one I will spend in the company of my parents and sister. My grief never feels like it belongs with theirs.

I had feared for so long that he may take others with him that in the end, when he directed his hatred and despair only at himself, it was a relief. He spared others his physical violence but the emotional shrapnel reaches far and wide. That’s why I think you’re not supposed to say these things out loud. You’re supposed to keep these kind of feelings to yourself out of shame and guilt. Out of respect for the dead and those who mourn them in less complicated ways.

But grief IS complicated and it occurs to me that if I share the ugly and messy parts of mine, there is a chance someone else can navigate theirs without feeling as lonely.

His suicide was three years ago.

So was my last nightmare.

Rest In Peace, brother. I finally do.