the light between the shadows - a note for Alex

Alex, Your words are a tribute to your sister as well as to the indescribable pain. Like you, I
seem to have fallen into this daily grief routine. It - like my grief - has become a part of
me... absorbed and incorporated into everything I do, and everything I am.

Every morning, I wake up and my first first thought is "thank God I'm still here" and my second thought is "but Chris (my little brother) isn't." My whole being then free falls through that 1.2 seconds of utter dispair which I can only describe as black grief which, in turn, is broken by a white-hot flash of blinding rage before settling into a kind of pale mossy-green haze ready for whatever the rest of reality has in store.

I have found the grief sometimes debilitating, but more often empowering.
I take NOTHING for granted - because it can all end in an instant.
I rarely get angry because it's a waste of time and energy.
I laugh - many times when i shouldn't - because you CAN find humor in just about
anything... the mind-bending grief makes you now open to bending your mind to find humor as
often as possible.
And, finally, I cry with reckless abandon when I feel like it. I cry for all sorts of things and reasons - real and imagined, I guess - because beneath the tears is the grief, and within the grief there is a moment of peace, a kernel of strength.

Like you, the person I lost was genetically, mentally, spiritually and physically a part of me.
He was truly the "yin" to my "yang"... he was everything I wasn't, but would like to have been -
or at least been BETTER at. I have virtually no recollection of my own life without him -
unlike my mom who had a life before she became a mother, or his wife who had a life before she
met him. Until Aug 25, 2006, I had never had a life without my brother.

So, Alex, I think the journey of our lives - the siblings left - is forever altered. Our grief
becomes a part of us - like eye color - and strangely, maybe we become just a bit more a part of
something larger. And isn't that ironic - once again, our siblings have enriched us in a way we
never imagined.