Saturday, August 29, 2020

Aaron

It's hard to explain an entire person in words. In fact, I'm sure it's impossible. My brother Aaron was a complex person...but I want to do my best to memorialize who he was to ME, because he was such an integral part of my life and my being. Despite our age difference of nine years, we were very close. I now look back at my falling ill at twenty-two as a blessing and nothing else, because it was what allowed us to grow close as a teenager and young adult and stay close into adulthood. And now that the unthinkable has passed and he's gone, I am so happy that I fell ill and it was serious, because without that, we may not have ever gotten to really know each other, and we would never have been as close as we were. Everything I suffered in illness and with my surgeries is worth it to me now, for what I gained in familial bonding. I am so grateful for it.

From the time Aaron was a baby, I took care of him quite a bit. The age difference between us allowed me to really feel like a helpful "big kid"; I got up and helped him go back to sleep when he woke up at night. I loved carrying him around on my hip and playing made up games with him. He was whip-smart, had these giant blue/green eyes and this kind of stern little voice that was seriously adorable. He was kind of a little ray of sunshine for my family during a difficult time with Bekah's diagnosis with autism. I remember trying to teach him to read when he was three years old and being amazed at how quickly he learned. Me and Jenn loved putting him in our little home movies because he'd say his lines with such attitude. I was his "second mama".

I remember Aaron learning to play the piano while still a kid, and the instructor at a music school told my mom that Aaron was the kind of talent you see maybe once or twice in a lifetime. He played piano with a natural, graceful ease and never really understood how cool it was. 

Fast-forward a bit to when I fell ill with Ulcerative Colitis, got divorced, and had to move back home with my parents. Their house was pretty full, my old room no longer mine. The only room they had for me that made sense was the double room above the garage...which was currently Aaron's room. I remember thinking, "Uh oh...I don't think any thirteen year old, even Aaron, wants to be stuck sharing space with his older sister."  Especially given the nature of my illness. It was the kind of thing that made most people feel awkward and uncomfortable to talk about.

Despite our age difference, we learned as we shared space that we ended up being kindred spirits. We had so many similarities: our sense of humor, sarcasm. We both had tough shells that hid sensitive hearts. We both chose anger as a go-to reaction over sadness or fear, because it made us feel less helpless. We loved animals, and animals loved us. Especially him.

The differences we did have were funny to us and we joked about them often. He is one of neatest people I've ever known, his part of the room was always meticulously organized, whereas I was (at the time) kind of a slob. Being sick really compounded that. Also, I wore shoes until they were literally falling apart on my feet. I'd wear the same few shirts all the time for years on end with no heed to if they were trendy or not, it only mattered to me that I liked them. Aaron had way more of a sense of style than I ever had, and he took perfect care of his shoes and clothes, I wore mine until they were in tatters.

We used to quote lines from movies and songs back and forth, could do a whole scene without breaking character. We were both introverts, and when one of us came into our room angry, we didn't say anything to each other for sometimes an hour, because we knew that the other needed space. Then, a certain amount of time would go by, and one of us would quote some Joker line from The Dark Knight, and we'd laugh and everything was good.

Another of the movies we loved quoting was The Social Network. The line, "And you're not a hugger" while hugging each other. Neither of us were really "huggers", and maybe that's why I remember so well the hug Aaron gave me when I got home from having my first surgery to have my large intestine removed. I was trying to be brave before I went to the hospital. He was trying to be, too. But he hugged me so fiercely, and we both cried. I still remember how that hug felt, and I think I always will.

At some point in his teen years, Aaron started using drugs. Heroin became his drug of choice, and I watched my brother slip away from me. I used to dream about him using, while I stood there screaming at him and he couldn't hear me. I told him he was playing russian roulette, you couldn't safely use heroin. He went to a rehab program in Salt Lake for a few months, but he relapsed eventually. I began dreading getting a call that he had OD'd and died daily.

And then my parents found out about John Volken Academy; but it was Aaron who decided he wanted to go there. It would be out of state, with a minimum of two years. It would be hard, hard work. But he was sick of the russian roulette, and he went. And it was miraculous what happened there. It wasn't right away, and it took hard work for him, but...I got my brother back.

The first couple of months, we didn't have any communication except hand-written letters. You could tell he wrote letters with the same care that he had with anything that was his, his handwriting precise and perfectly-sized. That handwriting was like a smile, when I hadn't seen his face for months. Then, he was able to make calls and finally Skype almost weekly as he progressed through the program. 

I remember the first time we Skyped and I finally did see his face, I recognized him again. The REAL him, the one I knew so well. He was back. And we had that real him for two years at the JVA. My parents were able to go visit him for weekends every few months, and they were there right after I had my daughter and he got to facetime with me from my hospital bed. He was so happy he was sober for those moments, he said it again and again. We talked like we used to when I'd been afraid I was going to die, and he was just a teenager. I watched my brother grow into a man I was proud of, and he was proud to be.

Several months later, he came home after two years sober and within a few weeks, he relapsed and OD'd. We were supposed to hang out a couple of times, but with the coronavirus keeping me isolated and some unseasonable weather, we had had to reschedule twice. The day he was supposed to come over was sunny. I noticed he hadn't answered my text from the night before. I called him. I kept calling him. He didn't answer, and a pit opened in my stomach that hasn't since gone away. I just had this feeling, like he was unreachable. And he was.

John and I went to his apartment and John went inside. I stayed in the car with our baby, but I just knew. I told myself, no. But I was overcome with this feeling that he wasn't here anymore. A bone-deep feeling that I couldn't shake. I'll never forget the look on John's face when he came out of the building. He knew the news would devastate me. He'd told Aaron not long before he went into the JVA, "If your sister lost you to that stuff, if she had to find you...she'd be devastated. You know that, right?" And honestly, if it weren't for me being in isolation due to being high-risk, I WOULD have been the one who went in there and broke into his room and found him. And I don't think I could have ever gotten that moment out of my head.

John took our daughter as I collapsed. I had one of those moments where you see yourself from outside your body, and I watched myself slam my hands into the sidewalk outside his apartment, howling like a wild animal. I never knew devastation and horror like I knew in that moment. He was in that building, but I couldn't go in. He was right there, but not really. All I could hear myself saying was, "I didn't even get to see him! I didn't get to see him in person!" I actually thought I might be sick from the knowledge that I hadn't seen my beloved little brother, hugged him, one last time. I hadn't hugged him or seen him in person for two years. And now I never would.

I don't want Aaron's death to overshadow his life. He was and IS so important to me. He worked so hard to be sober, and in a way I'm grateful that he didn't suffer a slow slide back into addiction, because the Jeckyll and Hyde part of addiction is devastating to people who love the addict. My brother had a moment of relapse and that was it. It doesn't erase all the hard work he put in, and the strides he made as a person. If there is anything after this, which I have told myself in the midst of this loss there HAS to be, I want to believe that he is free from his addiction there and that his soul is able to continue to grow without that shackle. Aaron and I were so similar in the things we suffered. My body reacts to the emotional and mental duress with autoimmune flare ups, and his fell back into addiction.

Aaron loved Harry Potter. We both read it every year in the Fall and Winter. We loved The Hunger Games, which we would read AFTER Harry Potter. We read a lot in the Winter because we both didn't like Winter, it helped pass the dreary, short days and long nights when we both suffered from insomnia.

I plan to read both series with my daughter and tell her all about how much her Uncle Aaron loved them. How we laughed at things in the movies that were lame compared to the books, like everybody's hair in Goblet of Fire, or the annoying metal "modern art" Cornucopia in the first Hunger Games that was nothing like the golden one in the book. I want to raise Avery listening to the Scott Joplin piano rags he played tirelessly until he could ask to play at Disneyland just for fun and because he loved it there, and the pianist would watch him, impressed, worrying for his job a little. I want her to listen to The Doors with me, and I'll sing the crazy parts of songs in my best Jim Morrison voice like Aaron and I always did. I want to keep my brother alive in every way I can, because he will always be alive to me.

Right now, I'm in some kind of denial where my brain keeps trying to think that he's still at the JVA in Washington, and if I just write him enough, he'll eventually answer back. I wear his shirts almost every day and every night. I kept a box he'd written his name on, that he had his toothbrush and razor and hairbrush in. I just want to see his name, see that he wrote it. He was here.

And maybe, eventually, I'll get one of those signs people talk about. Those signs that our loved ones are still alive, just somewhere else. I lay in bed at night, and I picture what that sunny day would have been if he'd come over and we'd sat in lawn chairs in my front yard and talked, and he'd met Avery. I think about it over and over so maybe I'll have a dream that seems so real, I'll have to wonder if somehow, it is. 

And if I don't, I'll think about that sunny day so often it will almost seem like a memory. The memory of my healthy, happy brother coming home to me.




Wednesday, May 20, 2020

true loss

i haven't written on this blog in SO. LONG.

in fact, i had started to truly wonder if writing was lost to me. for most of my life, i've been a writer. then things occur that smother your voice somehow, or take it away temporarily. life changes and shifts and gets the kind of busy that doesn't allow for quiet moments of reflection or creativity to be written down.

and then something massive happens. something that affects you at a core level. looking at my last written blogs was bittersweet because i'm reminded everytime i look at something i haven't seen for awhile, that i'm not the same person i was when i saw it last. these blogs were written by a different me. a me that had all kinds of problems, it's true; but that me wasn't missing an integral piece of my being. i thought i knew pain, and i thought i understood loss. after all, i've lost so many things that regular people take for granted because of my health. that kind of loss affected me...but it didn't leave a chasm behind.

losing my brother did. losing my brother has left a chasm so deep, i get lost trying to find the bottom of it. the magnitude of his loss and what it's taken from my core being, is something too immense for me to measure or even understand. i have questioned absolutely everything about existence - mine and everybody else's. i have looked at each person i love and imagined the horror of losing them. i have cried so constantly that i have a permanent, dull headache behind my left eye and the only makeup i trust myself to bother with is waterproof mascara.

most of all, though, his name floats around in my head 24/7. sometimes i find myself whispering it. sometimes i start saying "why" out loud, over and over. i have a hard time getting out of bed, even with taking care of an eight month old. i wear his shirts every day and every night, and i have a bracelet he made me in high school that i'm scared to wear because it's made of yarn, and what if it wears down and breaks and i lose it somehow? things that were his or things he gave me are more precious to me than i can put into words at this point. they're my tangible reminders, my comforters.

i don't quite know who this new me is. i am raw, like i was just burned severely and am standing in sunlight. i am so overtaken by grief, and i'm not the same mama to my eight month old baby that i was 21 days ago. i see who i was, and how i'll never be that person again. and it's not just hard.

it's unbearable.

but we bear the unbearable in life, don't we? growing up seems to me learning hard lessons like that one. you think it's unbearable, but you are still here.


every morning i wake up in a world where my brother isn't, anymore. i don't know how, but i do.
i don't think that our souls die with our bodies. i believe he's still somewhere else. that we'll see each other one day again. until then, i'll use an analogy from a series both me and Aaron loved: it's said that after fred's death, george could never cast a patronus again.

that sums up the bottomless emptiness losing my brother has left behind.



Thursday, May 14, 2020

all my tears

When I go don't cry for me
In my father's arms I'll be
The wounds this world left on my soul
Will all be healed and I'll be whole
Sun and moon will be replaced
With the light of Jesus face
And I will not be ashamed
For my savior knows my name
It don't matter where you bury me
I'll be home and I'll be free
It don't matter where I lay
All my tears be washed away
Gold and silver blind the eye
Temporary riches lie
Come and eat from heaven's store
Come and drink and thirst no more
So weep not for me my friend
When my time below does end
For my life belongs to him
Who will raise the dead again
It don't matter where you bury me
I'll be home and I'll be free
It don't matter where I lay
All my tears be washed away
All my tears be washed away

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

A tale of Opression (that dastardly fellow! )


Opression had a big comeback in 2016, proving how it hangs back, but never really goes away. Opression is a master at hanging back and waiting for its chance, and its chance came in the form of a loudmouthed orange lummox with the mentality of a thirteen year old in the insecure and uncomfortable beginnings of puberty.

This ''man" gave Opression a megaphone, and hey- Oppression isn't picky. The orange lummox was simply a mouthpiece, loud and uncouth but very effective. All of Opression's favorite pupils and old friends and budding protégés heard the call and eagerly began crawling out of their holes to heed it.

Nevermind that Opression's latest poster boy was a figure of much derision and little respect. Beggars can't be choosers, and his pupils and old buddies are restless. They want to go mainstream, feel safe coming out of the woodwork and taking off their white hoods- (okay, let's not get carried away...Opression encourages cowardice, the white hoods are staying on).

Oppression's new mouthpiece promises many new victims in his speeches. He is willing to throw around money and power with his itty bitty hands, to support the Followers he amasses to his cause. And he knows all about Following-he spends more time on Twitter than your average high school student.

And so- Twitter is a hive-minded haven for youth no longer! All of the older people who denounced it a year ago find themselves Following now as well, to read their leader's latest invaluable spatters of word vomit, in 160 characters or less. After all, they have to keep up with their Overlord's Alternative Facts, and bombard their brains with the message he is constantly tweeting about, and Twitter is the best place to do so.

The message of course, is Opression, blanketed with clumsy phrasing or sometimes a dollar store mustache and glasses type of disguise. It need not be hidden too carefully or well, because those it's meant for will never lift the blanket or notice the mustache is crooked, and all the rest see it for exactly what it is no matter how it's disguised.

Opression is largely obvious. Subtlety has never really been its thing. This is why every now and then, Opression gets kicked in the shins and run offstage...but all it does is get very quiet and hide. It doesn't really go away, or stay gone. It hides its face and bides its time, waiting for its next megaphone or disguise. It waits and mutates like a virus, so that next time it won't be chased away so easily. Opression only has the means it's given, but there's always someone to invite it back in and give it a voice. After so long, Opression knows its game, and it especially knows human beings. It knows them well.

See, Opression understands something that mankind in general never really seems to grasp:
Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it. And humanity has a very poor memory.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

not yours

mountains and valleys
gulches and rivers and plains

Friday, February 6, 2015

what the....

lately has been crazy.

and given the kind of life i've had the past few years (soon i'll be saying several. oy vey! i'm getting old...) i don't say that lightly.

here's the thing i've come to understand....even though i've made progress as a person, and my joys are sweeter and life is better over-all, i still experience what feel to be the lowest of lows. my challenges sometimes seem like a round of shots fired, paused for the reload and then fired again. i'm a better person now than i was a year ago. i'm happier and stabler and gentler and more free. but when challenges come i feel like they hurt exactly the same, maybe even more sometimes. and i'm still meaner than i want to be and still unforgiving of people and myself.

i'm just trying to get into a more sustainable rhythm in life. i don't expect anything to be easy. i know that i'm an intense person. it's what gives my creativity its life and its edge and so i'll embrace it. but i want to be able to ride the intensity like a wave, not get swallowed up in the undertow. does that make any sense?

do i ever?

hmm.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

raze&rebuild

razed
i break like the glass castle
i fight so hard not to be

broken
so many times by you
broken bones, broken spirit

breaking even
either way you go
what you do and wont

even when i think
i couldn't possibly
break any more.