As I’ve grown older, I’ve become a little predictable in my behavior and decision making. However, I’d say my emotional instability is still very volatile. But one thing that has remained innately consistent is the loneliness I feel from time to time. It exists as a numbing agent but the degree of its inflammation varies from minute to minute. It’s been six years. And they say, with time, all will be healed. Wrong. You don’t heal, you don’t mend, you don’t accept. You tolerate. You tolerate the pain and the heartache. You tolerate the fact that you can’t change the inevitability of the loneliness after the loss. It’s an impairment that no physical or emotional therapy can remove or subdue.

“Here I am alone, broken by my ghosts. Will they always haunt me when I’m drowning?”

You can’t help but wonder “why?” even after six years. It’s definitely easier to ignore the loneliness rather than tolerate it. Unfortunately, the memories stoke the embers of loneliness into a full blow blaze on days like this. While six years in the physicality of our world is not the ruler of measurement where he is at, I’m governed by its structure and measure the days I miss him, weigh the gravity of the loss, and count the moments where I wish he was here.

But the memories are good. I have the memories and the pictures. Some days, I can convince myself through business that there is no loneliness. I can forget it for a short time. But I can’t, and won’t, forget the memories. So I guess after six years, and maybe even after a lifetime, you play the memories like an old slide show in your mind. And just like an old slide show, there is graininess to the quality of its projection. The visions aren’t perfect, they aren’t totally clear. They’re slightly discolored after the years. But the one thing that weathers the fading and the pale colors is the feeling of the moment. For some reason, the memories of the feelings are crystal clear.


It’s really the simple, obscure memories during the slide show that choke you up and make you want to pluck that person right off the screen. I can remember when we took cardboard boxes and taped colored construction paper to the sides. We used electrical tape to segment the colors on each side. The result? Rubik’s Cube costumes for Halloween. Also, there were two trees in my parents’ front yard. One his and one mine. With sheets and clothes pins, we built forts in each tree. And then there is Mossyrock, Washington and camping with our grandparents. I don’t know how many times I had him pedal his little bike behind me to find the next skate spot. Then, he’d sit by and take pictures of me practicing tricks on private property. Years later, I remember picking him up from junior high. We’d head back to our house and play pick up basketball against the neighborhood. Most of the memories involved very little dialogue. In fact, he said very little to me in regard to popular opinion. But it was so obvious to me when I damaged our relationship. He absolutely hated a chick I was dating at one point. He never said anything about it, but it was just so uncomfortable in the room. Not much for public speaking or the lime light, it was a step out of his comfort zone to be the best man in my wedding. The toast, while the context is blurry, the vision of him controlling the audience as he talked is strong. Seeing him, I had so much satisfaction that day. While simple and irrelevant, I can still see the vision of my little brother shoving a guy back into the mosh pit at a concert we attended. That memory is the last one I have where we were in the same place together while he was still alive. The last. But I knew I didn’t have to fight his battles or protect him from the world. At that moment, I knew he’d be all right. No matter what. While others don’t have the pale slides of memories or have forgotten him, I’ve remembered. And every time you cry, you are reminded that you are alive and you miss them so much.


“This is a request; crawl out from graves of regret. This is a request; don’t waste your time tonight.”

The other day, I was listing to the typical return-home-commute programming, Jason Ellis. Interestingly, his tone was incredibly somber. He was discussing his family and its collapse after his little brother died years ago. His rough Australian tone and rugged vocabulary started to crack. I couldn’t help to begin to relate to what he had to say. Not so much in the collapse of the family structure, all though you could feel the tension between us all. Communication was very strange, almost like I wasn’t even their child anymore. It’s tough to say how it got there. Maybe it was because I was an adult now and my relationship with my parents had become more peer-like. With the loss of my little brother, I so wanted to go back to being their little boy, sheltered from the pot holes of life. Now, I was now an only child. Something I had never been before.

I really related to the bludgeoning effect of the personal loss Ellis had. The pain and heartache after the loss were real. He talked about his other brother, his father and his mother and how it affected them each individually from his own unique perspective. But what I found the most poignant is how he looked at himself after the loss. The main point was that he believed his brother would have wanted him to be happy and successful. We all talk this concept when we lose someone valuable in our life. Of course our loved ones would want us to move on and be happy. But it’s far easier to write those lines here in text than to actually live out those words.

He continued on that it’s not disrespectful to be happier now than you’ve ever been in your life after someone has passed. He spoke about his professional successes, his sobriety, and more importantly, his love for his wife and his little girl. He’s tolerated the loss in a rough-Outback-like way. And while the articulation of this feeling was profanity-laced with an Aussie accent, he conceded that he’s in pain with the loss but knows deeply that it has changed him in to something stronger and happier. His brother wanted these changes for him. The lost want that for you. They don’t want you to regret and stand still. They want you to push harder and succeed more and be happier.

The affect of the broadcast is something that cannot be perfectly explained in this context but it’s about living life with no sense of regret because your lost loved ones want that for you. It’s not disrespectful to be happy in your life despite them not being physically present other than in a picture. It stops here, he said. Today is the day where you take charge and make yourself happy and won’t live in the heartache. He wants me to move forward and succeed and create something beautiful for me and my family.