Dear Brooks

Dear Brooks,

One year ago, our morning started like this:

And ended like this:

It has been a year since you left us. I’m not sure how that’s true, since it feels like yesterday. I expected a year to feel like time has past, with some sort of significant healing or epiphany along the way, but I mostly just feel like I did a year ago, stuck in a place where I can’t grasp how this is real. The fact that it has been a year only adds to the grief. I want time to stop. But more than anything, I want to go back. I want more chances. I want a do over. I want the night you spent alone on your couch, a gun in your hand, to never have happened. I want a new beginning, not a day that marks a year since I had a brother on this earth.

Months ago, our therapist recommended that I start writing to you. I agreed with her, because writing is therapeutic for me – getting my thoughts out of my head, forming them into a coherent narrative, has always been a way of healing for me. But it also requires energy, space and time, which is not something I have a lot of. But a month ago, I bought this domain and committed to trying to get my words out on these virtual pages.

To say this year has been hard is an understatement. I spent the first few months after your death in a mixture of shock and depression, all the while dealing with life and demands that didn’t stop just because you were gone. Before you died, I was processing an ADHD diagnosis for both Livvie and me – a diagnosis that made everything click for me and was as healing as it was unsettling. I lived 42 years thinking I was the only one whose mind worked so differently from those around me – that it was just me and my own uniquely messed up brain that made life so much harder for me than others. And then I saw my daughter displaying all the characteristics I was so ashamed of. Intense shame and embarrassment, even when she’s received nothing but love. Uncontrollable anger and outbursts during which she becomes someone else – one who seeks to destroy objects and people around her. A mask of kindness and obedience in school, covering shyness and a mind that flits between five million thoughts instead of classwork. Fidgeting and eye twitches when anxious. It felt humiliating and devastating to see her struggle with the very things I’ve sought to hide my entire life. But then we had a name, a diagnosis, and a group of people who also struggled with every one of these things, many of them silently for years like me. It was a life-changing experience.

And it helped me understand you. Though we could talk for hours about the ways we were different, I realize now that we were both struggling to exist in a world with norms and expectations that felt foreign to us, wondering why it was so exhausting for us to simply exist, while others thrived with ease. I didn’t realize how deeply you felt this too until your death. Until I read the things you had written. Until I talked with and read about autistic people, particularly those with ADHD as well. It’s impossible to fully diagnose you without your input, and there are so many details I wish you could add to it for me. But learning about neurodivergence, spending time with a friend recently diagnosed with both autism and ADHD, has brought both clarity and agony. Because I think I get it now. Why you would retreat into a dark basement during family events. Why you hated small talk, but could talk for hours about the intricacies of Russian history. Why you struggled to show emotion or engage with us. Why you stopped going to work. Why you couldn’t do anything at the end but hide in your safe apartment with the dogs who loved you unconditionally. Why you couldn’t see another option when the money was gone, and with it, all your energy to keep trying.

It was why you couldn’t respond to my texts. Why you had pictures of the girls everywhere but didn’t know how to be an uncle to them. Why you hung back and hid, put on a mask in person, instead of telling us you were barely hanging on. As I learn about neurodivergence, I am learning about you. But while I’m working through it in therapy, with a diagnosis and medication and and resources on my side, you are stuck on a couch on June 19th, feeling like it was all your fault.

The reality is that we were both entering into a new stage of our life where it all just felt like too much. We had somehow hit 40, and that age holds all the expectations we had in our 20s and 30s. All the places we thought we’d be, the people we hoped we’d be. But it didn’t feel like we expected it would. Nothing felt easier. Everything felt too hard. While you were silently enduring the hardest year of your life, I was too, fighting for my own mental health in order to be the wife, mother and daughter I needed to be. But because of that, I neglected being a sister. Our arguments were fierce. Your mind was hyper-focused on topics I vehemently disagreed with, and those issues were all I could see. I fought against you and associated you with your opinions, convincing myself you were someone who had lost all sense of empathy and only cared about your ideas. But I was wrong about all of it. Most of the time, there is grace for that – there is time and reconnection points and the ability to apologize and find one another again. But one night and one gun took that all away from us.

There is nothing I can do to change that last year. No do-overs, no course corrections. No late nights hashing it out over drinks, remembering the past and envisioning the future. No apologies. No “I love you’s”.It’s all gone. All we are left with is the life you lived before you left us.

As my mind has wrestled with this grief, my body has reacted to it violently. In September, I mentioned to Tom that it felt like the grief was taking over my body. Every morning I would wake up with different joints swollen and painful. The pain moved to my hands, and I was spending each night in excruciating pain, unable to sleep, alternating between walking around the house and dunking my hands in ice water to attempt to alleviate the pain. After multiple trips to urgent care and the ER, the results finally came back positive for lupus/inflammatory arthritis. My immune system was wrecking havoc on my body as my mind wrecked havoc on my soul. And so rheumatology appointments have become as common as psychiatric, and my cocktail of meds has me cringing when the nurse reads them out at each appointment. No part of me was ready to handle another chronic diagnosis, and it has made this year feel excruciating. I can’t believe it has been a year, but I’m also not quite sure how I survived it. While I survived it, it broke me, over and over again. And it’s hard to envision not feeling this broken.

The hardest part has been admitting my need for help. And it’s that reality that catches me when I ask for the millionth time why you didn’t tell us, ask us, give us any indication of your suffering. I can stand outside my grief and logically see that of course I would need help to function this year – but there are still the voices telling me I should be able to do this on my own. That I shouldn’t need so many crutches in order to survive.

The wild thing about this year is that my career has been on the opposite trajectory of every other aspect of my life. In December, I was finally made an employee at Corteva, after 13 years of being a contractor, and that, along with ADHD meds, has set me on a path of creativity in my role that seems to have emerged from nowhere. Thirteen years of doing the same work every day gave me a base of knowledge, and coupling that with a better understanding of myself and the way my mind works has enabled me to trust my ideas and instincts. Instead of ignoring my own ideas, assuming someone else has also had them and decided against them, I’m trusting that maybe my ideas are unique. And shockingly, they usually are, and my solutions have been successful. My days fly by, hours spent working on spreadsheets, adding new excel skill to my repertoire as I figure out ways to streamline our processes. I oversaw the implementation of a digital adoption tool, and while I didn’t expect to the be the one actually building with the tool, I’ve fallen in love with creating new solutions for our team and our users. I’m participating in a leadership book club, and I’m actually getting the concepts that used to feel elusive to me. So despite all my brokenness, during my work days, I am flourishing. This wasn’t where I envisioned myself at 43, but I like where I’m at. And I wish I could talk to you about it. I wish I could show you my spreadsheets and ask for your advice, pick your brain about processes and learn from your brilliance. I wish I could hear you tell me you’re proud of me. You were always so proud of me, but I think you would be extra proud now.

You were always the ambitious one, the one with a brain I envied. Your brain absorbed details and information, and you barely had to work at it – it was all effortless to you. The world in front of you was full of endless possibilities. Your dreams were boundless. But reality brought unexpected pitfalls. You kept getting stuck, kept falling unexpectedly. But you would get back up, work like mad to get back into the grind. Then it would happen again. I have poured through our texts, studied your Linkedin, and my guess is that getting Covid in the fall of 2022 was the last time you couldn’t get back up. You lost your job because you stopped going to work. A few weeks off sick, all alone, already frustrated with the ways you were struggling in what you were sure was your dream job, set you back – and you just didn’t have any energy left to keep pushing. So you spent the next year and a half suffering in silence, draining the savings accounts you had spent years growing. You were so proud of your savings and investments – and when I found the stacks of bills detailing maxed out credit cards, I knew they must have felt like a knife in your soul.

I want you to know that I get it. I am surrounded by support, I am flourishing at work, and yet I keep hitting pitfalls that trip me up, and I feel certain I can’t get back up. I get up because of the girls, because of Tom, because of mom and dad. But you were so alone and isolated, and everything was skewed because of it. Everything was dark. Nothing was apparent, especially your immense value as a person. All you saw was the disparity between your hopes for your future and the place you ended up. You saw the failure, and you assumed we would be better without you.

We aren’t. There is nothing better on this side of your death. A year has done nothing to mute the pain. I miss my brother. My brilliant, hilarious, faithful, caring, devoted brother. The one who lived life in parallel to me, by my side, since I was 16 months old. You are gone, and it’s been a year, and I don’t grieve you any less, because I don’t love you any less. I love you more. I grieve you more. I ache for you more. I miss you, and I don’t want to watch the years go by without you. I don’t want you stuck at 41, on your couch, performing the final act that will always feel like a gut punch to my soul when I envision it.

But it has been a year. And I am still here. Mom and Dad are still here. We are still grieving and fighting and talking about you and stumbling through life without you together. And while it doesn’t feel like we’ve moved the needle a nanometer in understanding or processing your death, we have spent the year trying. I guess there is some growth in there to acknowledge, though it hurts to acknowledge growth when it is credited to grieving life without you. Because a life without you doesn’t feel fair.

I miss you. I miss you so much. And I love you, Brooks. I will love you forever.