The Weight of Remembering

My brother and I celebrating his birthday at The Little School.

This week marked 4 years since my brother – my only sibling – left this world. What’s kind of crazy is that there are still some moments where I forget how incredibly sad that is. Then there are moments when that fact is all consuming. I try not to have too many moments when I feel the latter – I’m afraid of what allowing myself to feel those feelings will do to me and my mental health. Sometimes it feels better to pretend that we just haven’t caught up in a while. Remembering that there will be no further catch ups is excruciating.

This year, there were two specific incidents where I found myself feeling the latter.

First, at my company’s employee conference, where the guest speaker talked about a ritual he adopted with his siblings where they would share the things they were grateful for about their upbringing and every year share answers to specific questions that would help them connect as adult siblings. The realization that I would never be able to ask a single soul these questions gutted me. For the rest of my life, there will never be another person who will understand what it felt like to be raised by our parents – by the family we came from. It made me think about all the times that people would ask what they assumed was a harmless question “how many siblings do you have?” and I’d have to do the mental gymnastics of having to decide if I tell them I have a brother (and hope there are no more follow up questions) or be honest and tell them my brother died (and see the horror come across their face and brace myself for the apology that would come and my people-pleasing that would tell them it was ok). I wish we didn’t do this – apologize for the dead, instead of asking about them.

Second, watching the Netflix movie “Voicemails for Isabelle” where the main character leaves voicemails for her dead sister (on what she thinks is still her sister’s number – or at least not a number that has been put back in public circulation). The movie was definitely created to be a romantic comedy but the thread of a sister mourning the loss of her sibling struck a chord with me. Now, I am normally a crier, but I don’t think I have cried that much watching a movie in a long time – so much so that my husband had to do a double take and ensure I was alright (“I’M NOT OK” I remember saying to him through embarrassing sobs).

Yeah… trying not to let myself feel my feelings this year has been going great.

But if I’m honest, I think what these moments have shown me is that grief doesn’t disappear; it just waits. It waits for a takeaway at a conference, a scene in a movie, or a harmless question from a stranger. And when it arrives, it reminds me that I’m not just grieving the loss of my brother — I’m grieving the version of myself that only existed because he did. I’m grieving the shared language we had, the understanding of siblings who survived the same childhood. I’m grieving the future conversations we’ll never have, the ones I didn’t know I needed until the ability to have them became impossible.

What’s even more destabilizing is that I am actively working on trying to unlearn patterns of being the one who holds it all together – when I am now physically the only one left to.

God sure does have a sick sense of humour, doesn’t he?

My therapist keeps reminding me that I don’t have to carry everything. That I can let go, loosen my grip, trust that the world won’t fall apart if I stop being the responsible one for five minutes. And I want to believe that. I want to believe there’s a version of me who doesn’t have to be the person who remembers all the details so no one else has to.

But when it comes to my family, there is no one else. My brother is gone. My mom is aging. And I can feel that near future pressing in on me — a future where I am the only living witness to the childhood we survived, the only person who remembers the things that shaped us, the only one who can tell my daughter who our family was and where she comes from. It’s a responsibility no one asks for, and one I can’t hand off. There’s no delegation. No shared load. Just little old me.

And maybe that’s part of why I’ve been avoiding feeling my feelings. Not because I don’t feel the grief, but because I’m terrified of what will happen if I let myself feel it fully. I’m scared that if I crack open, I won’t be able to put the pieces back together.

But, if I’m honest with myself, I do know this: pretending I don’t feel any of it isn’t working. And maybe that’s the work I have ahead of me: figuring out how to hold our family story without holding the whole world. How to be the historian without being the hero. How to let myself grieve without believing that grief will undo me. If my life has taught me anything over these past 36 years, it’s that I am my mother’s daughter and I come from a line of extremely stubborn, determined women. We bend, we ache, we fall apart in small, private ways – but we keep going, even when the path ahead of us isn’t clear.

Maybe that is the lesson and what I need to remember now. Moving forward doesn’t mean forgetting him or leaving him behind. That telling Lina about her uncle isn’t just a responsibility, but a way of keeping his memory alive. That joy and grief can coexist and not overshadow each other.

The eternal optimist in me wants to find a neat ending for this disclosure – to let the person reading this know that it’ll all be ok. But right now, I don’t have a lesson tied up with a bow. Right now, all I have is the truth: I miss my brother. I am terrified of being the last one left (although the fear of not outliving my mother might scare me even more). And I’m still figuring out how to live a life that my brother never got to see, without losing the parts of myself that existed because he was here.

But I’m learning that moving forward doesn’t mean moving on. It means carrying him with me — in the way I parent, in the way I love, in the way I tell our story. It means letting myself feel the grief without letting it decide who I become. It means trusting that I can keep going, even when the path ahead isn’t clear.

And maybe that’s the part of our family story I was always meant to carry forward.