Changing Seasons.

“It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.” - Nicholas Sparks

2 days to what would have been my brother's 29th birthday. I went out with Melanie today (my primary school friend who left when we were 9 and whom I recently reconnected with) and I ended up telling her about my brother's accident. It all felt so surreal, recounting his last moments on earth. I heard what I was telling her, but there was this hollow ache in my heart. I told her he died instantly, which was information I shared not because I felt essential, but  which I needed to say just to comfort myself. I often think about that fateful day, 13th April, and I often think of the moments leading up to his death.

I was 11 at that time, and to be fair, I didn't quite grasp the concept of death. I had been exposed to enough shows, movies and books to know it was unpleasant, unexpected and painful, but never in my wildest dreams did I ever think it would happen to me. It's funny, how we as humans are taught from young to be cautious, to take responsible risks, yet we always live with the mindset that bad things won't happen to us. Around the time of his accident, I was on my way home from school with my maid, choosing not to take the chartered bus my school provided for students who had to stay back for after-school activities. The weird thing is, if I had taken the bus, I would have passed by the accident scene because it was on the road home. The weirder thing is, around the time of his accident, I was filled with a sense of unease and the inexplicable urge to just cry. I attributed this to stress, because I had undertaken a lot of responsibilities in school.

Then the phone call came.

Everything after that was a blur, and yet it was acutely clear. The sight of my mother passing the phone wordlessly to my father, who broke the news to us, the way she collapsed on the stairs and screamed uncontrollably, it's a sight I never thought to see, but cannot erase for what I know will be the rest of my life. She cried hysterically, half-mumbling, half-shouting in all the languages she knew (three; English, Malay, Chinese) that he wasn't dead. Then, the first of the mourners arrived, my uncle.

My uncle.

He died last year of illness. (The memory of his ailing body, skeletal and wasting away, another thing I never wished to see, but did.) And when he did, the first thing my aunt said to me as she hugged me and cried was, "You lost your brother, now I've lost mine." That made me cry even harder, because it reminded me so badly of that night on 13th April 2005, a night I had buried in my attempt to focus better on my exams. I remember his sombre face as he tried to comfort my mother, my sister, my father. He asked if I was alright, and I had nodded, muted.

The truth is, I didn't cry, because I refused to believe he was dead. I thought that everything was a sick, sick joke. In retrospect, I think that I forced myself to cry because my house, in a mere hour, was full of people crying, and it seemed like the almost-natural thing to do. It all seemed strange to me, that so many people would call on us at 9pm at night, or later, to share our pain and grief. Family, friends, colleagues, all rushing out upon hearing the news and bearing upon my house despite the late hour to lay a comforting hand on our backs. 

I slept in my sister's room that night, although sleep eluded me for the most part. When I woke up, I remember not opening my eyes at first, desperately praying (because I had a stronger faith back then) that when I did open them, I would be in my parents' room, and not my sister's, because that would have meant that it was all a bad dream. But of course, when I opened it, I was on my sister's pull-out mattress, and my cousin's wife was sitting on another mattress, looking at me with what I can only express as sad eyes. Walking down the stairs to my living room seemed just as unreal as everything that was happening. All the furniture had been pushed aside, and mourners filled the room, their sadness hanging heavily in the air. My mother was sitting down, ashen-faced, rejecting all the food that was offered to her. The scene was depressing, and I left the house, though for the life of me, I cannot remember where I went.

When I returned, he was there. His body, shrouded in white. I took one look at him and walked away, but not before I cast curious glances at the girl who was kneeling in front of him, staring at him, her eyes red-rimmed, her cheeks glazed with tears. I later found out she was his girlfriend. And when I did, I hated myself, because I never knew. I never knew that my own brother, whom I loved and admired, was in love with a beautiful, strong lady. And I hated that there was so much more about him that I would never learn. 

The funeral was, and still is, the worst part of the entire memory. Growing up, I had a love-hate relationship with my father, who had always adopted a disciplinarian approach to raising us. But seeing him there, looking at his dead first-born, his only son, seeing him fall to his knees, seeing him cry, seeing him being helped up by relatives, that was when I realised he was just as vulnerable as everyone else. He was relatively calm, though, compared to my mother, who begged with the imam (or whatever the person is called, I don't know, to be honest) not to take her son away. I had to participate in a ritual, where I took flowers and scattered them in a circle around his head, but the moment I came closer to the body, the moment my eyes laid upon his scarred face, I was overcome by such an intense wave of grief that I didn't know what I was doing. I vaguely remember someone taking my hand and guiding me as I shook violently and screamed and tried to resist whoever was holding my hand. Then I kissed him on the forehead.

I can't describe what it's like to kiss your dead sibling. It was like laying your lips upon a marble floor, because it was cold and stiff, but at the same time, it was a lot more than that. And as I kissed him goodbye, I told him I love him. And then I hated myself even more than I already did because I had never told him that I love him when he was alive.

And yet, in some way, I knew he knew I did. 

He would have been 29 on 6th February. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about him, that I don't miss him, that I don't wish I will one day wake up and find out this part of my life was just a sad dream and he would tell me to stop being a stinky jabroni and exercise more. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't long to hear his familiar cough, his annoying laughter, to smell his overpowering cologne. But I will never experience any of those again. If anyone is reading this, a lot of you have family and friends who are still alive, who are still able to love you, care for you and annoy you. Appreciate them, because when they are gone, no amount of crying, no amount of regret, no amount of writing and blogging will make them come back.

I would know. I've done it. 

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” - Anne Lamott