My Brother's Birthday

How my little brother's birthday is just as painful as his death anniversary

March 6 of this year was what would have been my little brother’s twenty-third birthday. 

It’s true what they say about grief: that it doesn’t get any easier with time. You just learn to adjust to your “new normal,” one without a sibling whom you loved unconditionally and helped raise for nearly eight years.

One of my fondest memories of my brother takes place on June 19, 2009—the night before my wedding. The only vacant bed left in my family home was the second twin in my brother’s bedroom. As I waited for him to fall asleep, I began ruminating on what the next day meant for my future and for my family. I, the oldest of five kids, was voluntarily leaving my first loves, my siblings, to start a new life with the love of my life, my soon-to-be husband. I was decidedly conflicted. I didn’t want them to feel as though I were abandoning them; it would have broken my heart if they had felt that way. 

And so, I began to cry quietly, while pondering the painful possibility. I suppose my cries were audible because my brother Preston turned over and, in his sweet, squeaky eight-year-old voice, inquired: “Are you crying? What’s the matter?” I told him that I was “fine” and to “just go back to sleep.” But, he persisted: “Trina, I can hear you crying.” And so I told him the truth. I told him how I didn’t want him to think I was abandoning him or my sisters, that I loved them so much that it hurt, and that I couldn’t bear the thought of them feeling sad or helpless after my breakaway. 

He quickly replied in that matter-of-fact way of his that is so him: “Trina, we know how much you love us, and we know you aren’t leaving us forever. Besides, I get a new brother, too! That’s awesome!” And then he paused and said in a lower, more contemplative voice: “Just don’t be sad about it anymore, okay?” 

“Okay, I won’t be. Thank you, Preston,” I said, as I dried my tears, got out of bed, and gave him a hug and a kiss on his forehead. I then told him that it was time to go to sleep “for real” in my maternal tone.

The next day, he proudly served as ring bearer in our wedding ceremony, charming all those who came to watch Erik and I exchange vows. I was so proud of him—so proud of the person he was becoming: a mature, caring, and dutiful individual.

Every year since his passing, I can’t help but wonder on his birthday: What happened to him in his fourteenth year of life?

In particular, I find that birthdays can be just as, or more, challenging than death anniversaries. Birthdays broach entirely different emotions that are achingly similar in force to that of the person’s day of passing.

On birthdays, you remember their brightness. You remember the joy that was alive when celebrating them. You remember various milestones and rites of passages that the person achieved. You remember their smile, bookended by their dimples. You remember the light in their dark brown eyes, and then you also wonder what exactly it was that extinguished that light.

My brother didn’t make it to adulthood, although he did make a very “adult” decision in the end: he chose to terminate his life at the tender age of 14. 

He didn’t get to experience the milestones that come with becoming an adult: first driver’s license, first date, prom, graduation, “flying the nest,” first job, marriage, kids.

Fortunately/unfortunately, he left us, his family, a letter. Its contents meander—a direct reflection of his mental state at the time. The investigative psychiatrist who read it, along with two of his personal journals that were hidden in plain sight in his room, believed that he was in a psychosis and that he was not only struggling with anxiety and depression but also suffered with borderline personality disorder. 

We did not see any signs because he was a master at masking them.

Sometime in the late morning of his birthday this year, I shut myself in our bedroom to give myself a moment of reflection, a practice that has now become tradition. I thought about what he would have been like at 23 and asked myself questions that only fed my grief: Would he have enlisted? Would he have gone to community college or a four-year university? Would he have had a “serious” girlfriend by then? Would he have been planning a proposal? Would his silliness have captivated my daughters’ attention? Surely. Would he have taught them valuable skills, like knot-tying? And then my stomach ties itself into a knot, and I feel queasy just by the use of the words “tie” or “knot.” If he gave himself more time, how much longer would he have made it? 23? Until “natural” death? Would any of my hypothetical words or actions have diverted his ultimate decision if I had known the depth of his pain? 

I begin to moan as a tidal wave of tears surges and finds its way out through my hazel green eyes. I cry loudly, hoping that my daughters do not hear me. I do not want them to be worried or alarmed. I give myself a few minutes to grieve and then begin to pull myself together. I know that at any minute, I will need to meet their needs, and I struggle with whether to allow my own needs to trump theirs. 

Grief in motherhood is such a different experience than grief without children. Before kids, I could afford as much time as I wanted to allow my emotions to spill out and all over the place. 

Now, I have to make choices of when and how I grieve because unquestionably, my daughters will show concern, and my eldest, who is almost four-years-old, will begin to investigate my sorrow. She’s quite the detective now and has the vocabulary to boot. Admittedly, I do not look forward to her future interrogation of my brother’s death.

I make a quick exit out of the bedroom, recognizing the warning signs of an imminent panic attack. I bolt across the living area to the front door, peering over the couch where my daughters are watching TV. Cue the mom guilt associated with screen time on top of the mom guilt of giving myself more time to emote. I nod to myself and decide that since they are happily preoccupied, I can go sit outside on my covered front porch to orient—a practice that I have learned in psychosomatic therapy.

I quietly shut the front door, sit, close my eyes, and allow myself to immerse in my environment. The smell of fresh green invades my nostrils and calms me. Soft, steady rain showers my front yard, our quaint neighborhood, and the surrounding Appalachian mountains. I open my eyes and see fog rolling over the peaks in the distance. Songbirds sing with such glee around me, and their cheerful calls contrast my own choked-up cries so much so that I cry even harder at the fucking beauty and pain that is this life. The chill in the air makes my body shiver at double-speed because I am already shivering from the deep emotion rattling and building and forcing its way out of my body.

After all, it must. 

Nature’s mirroring of my feelings both alleviates and sears my heart wound. Why did he have to leave? He’s missing it all; he’s even missing this: a most mundane yet beautiful moment in the solitude of God’s green, LIVING Earth. I weep for a moment longer in isolation but as predicted, in rapid succession, I am called back indoors to mom-duty.

My daughters are hungry and require an early lunch. I go inside and groan at the emptiness of our refrigerator. We had just gotten in from a trip to coastal South Carolina late the night before, and we only had a hodgepodge of random food items lingering. I sigh and remember that I’m the adult, that I’m the caretaker, and that I have to go grocery shopping today, which means I need to meal-plan today, too. And then the dominoes begin to fall as they do incessantly in motherhood: I also need to unpack our bags, start laundry, clean out the van, take out the trash from the van, organize the basement because holiday items are in a heaping mess down there, and that means that I also probably need to buy the next size up in spring/summer clothes for my oldest, which means that I need to go through her dresser and her closet and organize those clothes for storage for my youngest’s future wardrobe, and my youngest also needs to go up a size, so I also need to pull out my oldest’s size 2T clothes from storage. Insert spiral eyes emoji here.

I take a deep breath in and exhale out. 

The duties of a SAHM are never-ending and, at times, crushing. It’s messy and raw and also precious and blissful. The highs are the highest of highs, and the lows are the lowest. I equate the experience to that of someone who suffers with bipolar personality disorder—only because I have firsthand experience: my father is bipolar, and I can attest to the unpredictable mountains and valleys that accompany the condition.

I begin to prioritize what has to be done right now and what can be tabled. My most important task is to feed my family, so I make a snack-board of fresh-cut fruit and warm up a glass container of barbecue, baked beans, and potato buns—leftovers from my mom’s wedding reception that was earlier in the week, another celebration without my brother’s physical presence. I feel a twinge of guilt because the food isn’t the healthiest, but it overrides the guilt of throwing out perfectly good food. And so, I serve to my two little suns.

And then I think of my brother’s last meal, my mom’s homemade Chinese fried rice, and I wonder if he thought about how that meal would be his last meal, and if he had given himself more time, would he have chosen something else for his “last supper”?

And then I wonder if my mother wrestled with the same guilt regarding food and nutrition as I do as a mother. I cerebrate “mom-guilt” and its evolution from generation to generation, and I can’t help but also brood over the behemoth of guilt that my mom must feel as the mother of a son who ended his own life. I marvel at how she has survived and has given herself grace, time, and space to move forward and find love again. 

I’m overwhelmed (again), and I begin to shed silent tears as I place my daughters’ meal on the dining table. They enthusiastically and hangrily busy themselves with eating; I join them and dissociate.

I’m almost four-years-old in “mom” years and almost nine-years-old in “sibling suicide survivor” years, and I still struggle. I thought time would make things easier, but it doesn’t. Yes, I’m learning to cope, prioritize, and balance it all, but it's not an easy task and not one that I believe will ever be. 

I miss my brother. I miss Preston. I wish—oh, how I wish—that he would have given himself more time to experience a life that can be hopeful and fulfilling—joyful even.

I wish that he could have experienced the two joys of my life right now: my children.  Certainly, they would have adored him, and he—their Uncle—would have loved them wholeheartedly. Without a doubt in my mind, they would have become his joys, too.

I suppose that’s what makes the birthdays of our lost loved ones so agonizing. 

We grieve the what-could-have-beens with each passing year that they’re not with us. We grieve the versions of themselves, the versions chiseled and transformed by Time, that we do not get to know because the Sculptor was commanded to voluntarily or involuntarily lay down his tool.

The grief is real, fervent, and true—one that is experienced behind closed doors, or sometimes in a public place while wearing sunglasses, or “off-line,” or perhaps scheduled into one’s workweek, or maybe, ever-so-clumsily in the middle of a SAHM’s workday.