Long views and loss:

Ten years after losing Ben

Photo by Markos Mant on Unsplash

I sit here searching for words while I sip a maple spiced latte made by a kind barista that I ordered for pure comfort. Ten years ago, I lost my brother Ben.

Ten years hurts. The pain is less, and that hurts. The memories fade, and that hurts. No—fade isn’t the word. The memories condense. Time is like a crucible. What is left about the people we love are tight images and the feelings that come with them.

Here’s what I mean: When I think of Ben now, I feel the squeeze of his hand on my shoulder as he stood beside me. The worst can happen, at any time, that squeeze says, and we can still stand beside each other.

Loss is loss is loss. I’ve been grieving this past week and a half too, and clamoring for hope and okayness to come again, and telling myself that hope and okayness is an inside job, and asking myself where I can use my feelings to do something. But I am not quite there yet.

I remember an afternoon my mom and I spent after Ben died laying on the carpet with feather dusters. We thought we wanted to keep our hands busy, but we didn’t really want to clean at all, so we laid down and sobbed sloppy tears instead. We will say to one another now, sometimes, I’m going to the floor with my feather duster. Or, it’s a feather duster kind of day.

Feather duster days help. So does distance. I can’t always keep the perspective of the grand sweep of history. Of how our time is only a sliver of all time. Of all the time before any life on earth existed, and of all the life on earth before humans existed. Not to mention the trillions of other planets orbiting trillions of suns.

I couldn’t have the perspective just when I lost Ben that I have now. It wasn’t possible. This is true for all forms of grief, I think.

But even when perspective is hard to come by, I can always find a place to look far into the distance. And when I do, my heart rate slows. Ten years ago after losing Ben, this meant curling into a ball on the corner of the couch in my Chicago condo, tracing the streetlights lining Roosevelt Avenue into the horizon, and remembering that even past where I could see, the street continued.

Now, it means getting outside. The dry Colorado plains are rich with horizon sightings; it’s what I missed most about the state in my years away. Perspective is here for the taking. You can find it on any small hill and on most roads.

I finish my latte and my hour of typing. The sun hugs my shoulders as I make my way home. After a block spent looking at the ground, I move to the other side of the street, where the sight lines are longer.