I vaguely remember similar feelings after my dad died. The world feels out of touch and I wonder about the value of life. So often these days life is found in money, jobs, images, and things. I feel like Mark pushed me back out of those things. Like I'm on the outside looking at my life. Is this what life is about? What priorities could possibly matter more right now than my brother?
I've skipped out on a lot of things recently. Family things, friend things, and church things pushed aside. My last post talked a lot about people and how important they have been, but in the same breath it's incredibly hard to sit and talk about trivial things with my mind screaming in the background, "SHUT UP, CHERYL. NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PERFECT KALE SMOOTHIES.. NO ONE CARES ABOUT HOW EXPENSIVE DOCTOR'S BILLS ARE. MY BROTHER IS DEAD. HE SHOT HIMSELF AND YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT TRAFFIC?"
I get it. Life goes on and other people don't know or understand. My life feels stuck, like I've stumbled into a big wall and I can't get over it. So I look behind me and I see how ridiculous humanity can be. How ridiculous I can be. Our lives are not measured by the little things. They are measured in emotions and relationships. Can we build relationships with diets, bills, traffic, weather, or shopping trips? No way and to be honest, I'm tired of living that way. Life is too short to waste on the trivial and unimportant.
My brother was 28 years old. 344 months old. That is so tiny. He spent so much of it worried about money, success, careers, marriage, and mistakes. We talked a lot about all of them. These worries are human. They are stressors. His life was more than that. My life is more than that.
This week I miss him pretty bad. I haven't felt like cooking dinner. While making grocery store frozen pizza the other day, I felt like I should invite him for dinner. I reached for my phone before I remembered that the text would fall flat, lost in the circuits. I want desperately to hear his quirky sense of humor that put things into perspective and made the big things I fight seem small. He had this way with sarcasm. He vocalize things with this flat line montone voice and make it seem silly.
It hurts a lot this week because I always felt like Mark and I were similar. We got each other. We were imperfect people who knew both sides of the track. We may have picked different sides, but we got it. We struggled with our emotions, but coped in different ways. We shared blood and tears. It's so isolating and such a lonely feeling now without him.
His hugs were weak sauce. They were half-hearted feeling one arm limp across my shoulder like a fish while the other barely touched my shoulder blade. I would give anything for a hug today.
Grief comes and goes at weird times. Hopefully my soul finds a way to anchor back to life cause this is starting to feel really hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment