Why I Couldn’t Get Over My Brother’s Death
1. Loss
One cold, early spring morning, I waded out into Cayuga Lake at the edge of Ithaca, NY to drown myself. I stepped cautiously over the ice-slick slabs of shale, careful not to slip before I reached the water. As my rubber boots filled with icy slush, the shock of the cold made my heart jump. Was I really going to do this? I willed myself forward. I wanted to feel my limbs turn to frozen weights, like my brother’s had. I wanted to feel my lungs fill with liquid ice, like my brother’s had. I couldn’t stand thinking about his death anymore, over and over, day after day. I had questions and I was desperate for answers. I had to know, did the panic leave his body before his soul? I also wanted to see him, at the bottom of the lake. Was he perfectly preserved by the icy water, like my dad insisted, or already just a pile of bones?
I barely got waist deep before I turned back to the shore and flung myself into the snow. Ashamed of myself for, almost a year later, being completely unable to move past my brother’s death. Even when I wasn’t in the lake, I was in the lake. I was always in the lake. Frozen.
My brother drowned the week before he was to graduate from Cornell, in a freak accident. He’d taken a canoe out at dawn, and it had somehow capsized. We don’t know how. We don’t know why. But it was May, when the water temperatures are still freezing, so we suspect he got hypothermia before he could swim to shore. We searched for two weeks, the entire lake crawling with boats and buzzing with helicopters. Then we stopped the search and held a memorial. My entire world folded in on itself. Every day I woke up into a nightmare. A rollercoaster of nausea and horror. People told me to give it time. “Time heals all wounds,” the old saying goes. So I did. I gave it time.
During that first year, I tried everything I could to force the image of him sinking into the black ether, face blue, hair waving gently, eyes wide open, out of my mind. I made pottery and then smashed it. I patiently sat with jigsaw puzzles and coloring books. I went into the forest with a chainsaw, cut down invasive species and set them on fire. I devoted hundreds of hours to punching pads and round-housing bags at the local mixed martial arts gym. But time wasn’t going to resurrect my brother, and it didn’t resurrect my old sense of self. I did not magically start to feel better. The more time passed, the more I missed him. It was like holding my breath. The longer I did it, the more desperate I was for air.
