Grief, it’s universal; from losing someone close to you whether they die or not, to even grieving over the loss of the person you were, it never stops. If you lose your house, your dog, even a precious item to you, the feeling of loss is the same every time but also immensely different from person to person. Time waits for no one and because of so heartbreak is inevitable, it’s a part of life and unfortunately one of the worst. Many things contribute to the bereavement people obtain, but what happens afterwards is the real question. Grief has its side effects, as does everything, but with the loss of someone or something you cared for five different stages usually come from it. These stages are denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Experiencing grief may change you into a completely different person, or it can even reveal you. When someone is grieving you can often observe who a person really is more truly when they have nothing rather when they have everything. An example of how it changes you is in the novel, Madam: A Novel of New Orleans by Cari Lynn and Kelly Martin the authors wrote, “Oh, Miss Echo," she sighed, fighting back another crying spell. "When will I get over this pain?" Eulalie gripped Mary’s shoulders. “You’ll never get over it, child.” Mary’s heart sank. She was hoping there would be some remedy, some concoction Eulalie could make that would ease her torment or at least lessen it enough that she could lay her head down and sleep without fitful, sweaty dreams. “Never?” asked Mary, her lip trembling. Eulalie stepped closer then, looking into Mary’s face. “But you will get through it. And then it will become part of you. It will make you who you are supposed to be.”

Almost everyone is affected by grief at least once in their lives, one of those people being myself. Grief is sharp, it’s instant. The second you hear whatever news it is that will rip apart your life you get this stab in your gut, your eyes go blank, and you can’t speak, you can’t speak a word. It’s because after hearing such news you get this rush of devastation and you feel as if there are no words that would mend you and your family’s lives again. Walter Mosely, an American novelist once wrote something that connects with my emotion and that shows a good representation of how I’ve felt for a long while. “But when someone dies everyone has deep feelings that come to the surface, wailing and screaming and feeling profound.” I was so angry; I was so incredibly infuriated because my self-concept is me believing that my brother’s death was my fault, it’s me that my family blames. As much as I would have loved to, at the time I just couldn’t ever truly take the subjective self-evaluation I had of myself back then. Though through my perspective, it happened like this. One day my mom, sisters and I had just walked inside Target, the store about to go shopping, and this was ironically the Target he’d worked at, at the time. We’d barely gotten past the dollar section near the front doors when my mom got a call, she froze and there was this flicker in her face, it looked like someone had slapped her and she just stood there and started bawling in the store and my sisters and I were so frightened, we didn't know what was going on and we’d never see our mom cry before. Seeing your mothers face so grief-stricken and seeing her be in such despair, it’s something you can’t ever forget. After about twenty seconds she stops crying and tells us that our brother Jeremy had been in an accident and had to go now immediately and she starts really running, I mean, she was sprinting to the car with my sisters and me trailing behind her fumbling over our short legs. We finally got to the car and I noticed that I had forgotten to close my car door after we’d first gotten there and I felt so terrible, the kind of terrible that flips your stomach over and felt such shame that I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. This is was a big part of how my self-concept was formed because I blamed and self-subjected myself to believing it was my entire fault. I was yelling and screaming at myself inside my head the entire ride to the hospital, which is where I found out the rest of what actually happened to Jeremy. A nurse pulled my mother aside while another grabbed my hand and gave me this hauntingly sad smile, that’s when I knew my brother was in some real trouble. I heard a wail, I turned and my mom had gone from standing there calmly to clutching the nurse who held my mom. When she had made herself decent enough, she wiped her face and walked over to us. She started talking slowly, her eyes refilling up with tears. Jeremy had been going to lunch with his best friend Ethan, who had lived only two minutes from my house. They met at this pizza place we’d been going to since we were kids and when they were done they both got in their cars and drove off, all the while Jeremy unknowing of his devastating future only moments away. Jeremy got out onto the road and there was the big truck right beside him before he knew it, either he had startled the truck driver or the truck driver startled him, my family and I never found out. It was one of those big sand trucks you know? A giant box of dirt on wheels, and it was fuller then it should've been. The truck driver swerved making the whole truck fall over sideways spilling out all of the dirt onto Jeremy's car. It literally buried his car completely; he sat there and slowly suffocated in his car till help got there. Finally a helicopter flew in and took him to the hospital where he was put on life support. He was in life support for a few days and it wasn't looking good and then the doctors gave my parents what I feel was the most difficult decisions of their lives. It was the worst interpersonal communication situation that could’ve happened, and it couldn’t have been improved because I was too young to fully fathom. “We can keep your son on life support, his chances aren't good though and he probably won't pull through but if he does he will be different. His brain was damaged and he will be paralyzed. Paralyzed and mentally retarded. Or, we can pull the plug,” the doctors told my sobbing parents. For the next few nights my mother slept there but they wouldn't let me because of my young age. That’s all I wanted and I probably threw the biggest tantrum, because I felt like that was something I needed to do, just be there with him the whole time and they couldn’t make me do anything. So that night my father had to take my sister’s and I home and he brought us back every morning or my aunt would take us home with her.
When eventually my parents decided that they didn’t think my brother wanted or deserved the kind of life where he’d never be able to function on his own, they decided to let him pass on, they didn’t want to prolong his suffering. In my personal experience of it, it’s become something I won’t forget. Especially the smell, there was this stench of Clorox all around me; it was as if they were trying to deafen the smell of the dying. I remember it perfectly, he was lying in his hospital bed and as I overheard that I couldn't breathe anymore, my breath stopped short. I was crying so hard, screaming the word no so many times that it didn’t even sound like a word anymore. How do I say goodbye to my big brother? How do they make a little girl do that? I thought. I didn't know what to say, I only had five minutes and that was it. My brother would be gone forever. I ended up not saying anything though, I crawled in that bed with him and hugged him as tight as I could because I knew, and that was that last time I would get one of my favorite bear hugs from my favorite boy. My last memory of him was him lying in the bed on life support and I was uncontrollably crying and I knew it was my last chance to see him which made it all worse. I was holding onto one of his hands squeezing it as hard as I could still kind of trying to wake him up but they told me there was no waking him up. So I told him I loved him so, so much and gave him a kiss on the cheek and that was the last time I smelled him, the last time I was able to see him breathing. My whole family was in the waiting room crying and my family's so immense, we took up the entire waiting room. They all kept trying to hug me which just made things twenty times worse, I just wanted to be alone. My brother broke my heart long before any other guy could, his death wrecked me. When the five minutes were up they tried to get me to leave and it didn't go well. I couldn’t leave his side, I wouldn’t and I held onto him as if his life really did depend on it, I sobbed and sobbed until my mom had no choice but to pick me up and carry me out of there.
I struggled really hard with my brother’s death, I was only seven and I just couldn’t understand. I thought it was this tremendous deal and just beat myself up way back about what happened at Target. For leaving my door open because I thought that the car could’ve gotten stolen while we were inside Target and if it had what if we hadn’t been able make it to the hospital in time. I just kept thinking that that's why it all happened. The second reason for me blaming myself also being that since I forgot to close the door and I’d been supposed to close it but I didn’t and that's why my mom got that call and that's why everything happened. To me then and now presently it was my fault. If I had just closed that door maybe everything would have been alright. I was in a fallacy of overgeneralization. It’s ridiculous but growing up, my whole life that's been this terrible, heart wrenching thought in the back of my head. It was my fault. All because of that door, how could I have been so stupid? It really tore me up, it was all I could think about and I was just so ashamed of myself. I was in 1st grade when it happened and all of elementary and middle school there was this everlasting guilt just cemented into my head. An endless replay of my fault, my fault, my fault; my brother, my fault was on a loop. The worst part was and still is that I pass that spot every single day. I drive where my brother’s life was stolen from my family and me every single day, multiple times every hour, and any thought of it would make me cringe. If only I could’ve comprehended this all in anything other than the mind of a seven year old at the time, because if I could have been able to do a perception check and realized that really and truly, it wasn’t my fault. I was judging myself too harshly, and I couldn’t do anything about it, I didn’t even know yet that eventually I could. If only I had found a way to move past this cognitive conservatism I had, because as its definition goes, it got only worse with time. My emotions were everywhere, I could barely get a full night’s sleep without my mother coming in and talking to me and holding me until I was soothed enough to finally drift into my dreams.
My life following my only brother’s death was so much, too much. As the steps went denial was something I liked, it was something in me that wouldn’t, something that I couldn’t believe. I denied it completely and absolutely for the few days that Jeremy was on life support. I was young and naïve and thought there was no way he wasn't going to pull through it, he was my brother and he had to be okay. I didn't understand why everyone was so upset about it all because I thought everything was going to end fine. I had this lack of communication and they thought it was because I was too young to hear it all, so this news being so difficult for me to comprehend just made me even more upset. I thought he would get surgery or there would be some miracle, because there had to be. We would have him back, I was sure of it, but in the end that wasn't the case. Though no matter what I still denied it, even after he passed it almost felt like he was still there because I denied it so much. I was in a fallacy of helplessness. It took me a long time to get used to that and I started becoming more and more frustrated. Then came the anger, I was so furious at the whole world. I blamed Jeremy's death on everything or anything but mostly the truck driver. I was so angry at that truck driver. Even today, this very moment I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him, even if it wasn’t his fault which none of us knew. I feel as is if even if I really did know what happened and how the accident was caused, a part of me will always blame him. The third step, being bargaining, I don’t think I ever had that step included in my grief being the child I was. Depression came next; it was really hard on not only me but also my whole family. It happened in May so right at the beginning of summer. My sisters and I had a really rough time and my mom basically shut down completely because of how hard it was on her. Jeremy was her first child, her baby you know. She wasn't really there for me when I was growing up because of all of this. She continually got more and more depressed and I trying to get accustomed to not only the loss of my brother, but the loss of my mom too was killing me. She was there physically, but emotionally it seemed as if all of her emotion, all of the person she was had been exhausted and this walking talking body was just left. Being so young, I really needed a mom. I needed someone take care of me and someone to break things down for me so I could really understand. All I craved was presence but all I received was absence. I don't blame her because I understand her loss because I knew how painful it was but she did lose my respect for a long time because of her not being there for me, it taught me to not talk about how I feel and put up walls. My heart became a cactus; if someone tried to help mend it they would just get stabbed. It all taught me how to avoid the situation, and to try thinking about something else, I learned new coping mechanisms, even if they weren’t really helping me. Being the youngest child during Jeremy’s death while everyone else was old enough to assimilate all this was really difficult. It was easier for them, and I envied that. The last step of grief is acceptance, but I don’t think I’ve ever really accepted his death, that his body was now six feet in the ground and I would never see his award winning grin again. The hardest part of losing someone doesn’t have to say goodbye –which believe me was one of the most strenuous moments in my life– but rather learning to live without them. Always trying to fill the void, the emptiness that’s left inside of you when they go, my anger became rage, my grief and my loss crippled me, it became too overwhelming. Acceptance is something that I feel I never truly came around to and that’s something I do still hope I’ll one day obtain. Eventually I did slowly start improving, along with everyone else but none of us could forget or talk about because you couldn’t expect anyone else to share their suffering, we all had to carry our desolation alone. It was a house infected with emotional contagion. I’ve improved from that seven year old, I finally realize what happened and really understand it, but that’s still never made it any easier to accept. I’m definitely going to being continuing working on bettering my communication skills because holding things in, that’s not how you should move on.
My brother’s death is always going to be something I’ll always wish didn’t occur, but it did and now that I’ve come to terms with that I’ve improved my self-concept. I understand now it wasn’t my fault, the car door was not something that could have changed my brother’s condition or even the accident. I think it was so hard on me was because I lost an irreplaceable interpersonal relationship, and the one I had with my brother is a relationship you only get a few times in a lifetime. I’m still developing better ways to cope and change the bad habits of mine that resulted from Jeremy’s death. It’s going to take a long time to recover from this, if I ever even fully recover. As one of my favorite authors, Tim O’Brien once said in his book The Things They Carried, “The thing about remembering is you don’t forget.” I wouldn’t want to forget, I treasure that I even got those last moments with my brother despite the dire, agonizing pain it caused. My relationship with my family and especially my mother has improved and we’re now all very supportive of each other. I’m so grateful I even had those seven years with Jeremy. I’m incredibly thankful to having been able to know my brother, and to experience many wonderful memories with him. I’ve improved because I finally know I’m going to be okay, life will go on, even if my brother’s didn’t.