The closer you
get to me the more you learn about an informative experience I had when I was
twenty. I was traveling through Europe on a dream-come-true study abroad with
BYU-Idaho. We had just arrived at our hostel in Innsbruck, Austria, and I was
unpacking and getting ready for a much anticipated folk performance at a nearby
theater. Someone knocked on the door and informed me that I needed to call my
parents at some random number. Up to this point I had called my parents a few
times a week, so if they were trying to reach me it meant something was really wrong.
I was nervous, but I tried not to work myself up too much. I called the number,
and my mom answered.
Mom was in a
hospital. I learned that my little brother, eighteen-year-old Eric Robert, had
overdosed on drugs and was in a coma. He had extensive brain damage, his organs
were shutting down, and he was unlikely to pull through.
Do you know that
feeling when you’re walking up a set of stairs and either you can’t see where
you’re going or you haven’t been paying attention, and you think there’s one
more step? Your breath catches, your heart skips a beat, and your stomach rolls
over as your foot falls through the air. The moment is quick, and it usually
ends when you cling to a railing and your foot lands awkwardly on the floor,
and though you may stumble a bit, you usually stay upright and move on. Hearing
about my brother’s coma and his soon-to-be death was like missing that step and
not having a railing to cling to. My foot never landed on anything and the fear
of falling never subsided.
My mom and I
cried on the phone together. I asked what they were planning on doing. Were
they going to fly me home early? I would gladly skip the rest of my trip to be
with my family, to see Eric before the last of his life slipped away. No. They
didn’t have the money. They had a funeral to pay for. My trip would be over in
about a week and the funeral would take place after I got home.
That night I
went into my room in Innsbruck. I lay on my bed and prayed harder and more
fervently than I had prayed in my life. I prayed for a miracle. I prayed my
little brother was having an Alma-the-younger or Saul-Paul experience and that
he would soon wake up and reform his life. I begged and bargained. I asked to
take his place—Eric needed life more than I did. Even as I prayed for these
things I knew they would not come true. I knew I was praying for the wrong
thing. I moved from sad to angry. What good was prayer if my most fervent
pleadings were ignored?
While I prayed, I
felt the injustice of the situation. My family was gathered by Eric’s bedside.
He wasn’t interacting with them, but they could feel his heartbeat, see him
breathing. They could give him a hug before saying goodbye. And they could
comfort each other. I was in a foreign country. I was alone in an unfamiliar
room. I was curled up in a ball on a hostel mattress, weeping uncontrollably. I
kept thinking and hoping I would black out at some point; my head hurt so from
the crying. My whole life seemed, at that moment, to consist of solitude and heartache.
(I should add that I do not believe my suffering was greater than that of my
siblings. Each of us had a unique relationship with Eric, and so each of us
experienced unique pain. The common denominator among us was that none of us
was prepared to deal with his death.)
I can’t say that
I didn’t find some comfort that night. I read my scriptures, and I stumbled
upon Mosiah 4:19. The verse didn’t take away my sadness, but it did open my
mind and heart to the possibility that God was aware of me and that I could
trust Him. As I cried myself to sleep that first night after hearing the news,
lying on top of my covers, something like a warm blanket enveloped my body, and
I imagined hugging my big younger brother. He was thousands of miles way—his
body and his brain were broken and dying. But I felt him there with me in
Innsbruck, Austria.
My study abroad group
eventually moved on to France. I had dreamed of traveling to France. It was at
the top of my bucket list. Now I was in Paris, but the Eiffel Tower, the Notre
Dame, all of it was underwhelming. I just wanted to be home with my family. When
my group arrived in Paris late one evening I immediately found a phone booth on
the streets by our hostel to call home. My dad answered. His voice trembled as
he told me that my brother had passed away. My reaction to this news was
different from what I had expected. I cried, of course. That was a given (I
hadn’t stopped crying). But I felt an overwhelming sense of peace as I listened
to his experience of watching my brother die, how he and my mom were in the
room alone with Eric when his spirit left his body.
Eric’s funeral
was a whirlwind of feeling sorrow and feeling the spirit. At the viewing the
night before, I waited to enter the room. I was afraid of what I would see when
I looked in his casket. After gaining composure in the hallway I entered the
room and looked at my little brother. I realized that while this was my little
brother’s body, it wasn’t really him. It wasn’t Eric. It was just the shell
that had temporarily housed Eric. At that moment I knew that life exists beyond
death. In my brother’s case, I knew that so much life, so much spirit, could
not simply disappear.
The truly
painful part of Eric’s funeral was watching my parents say goodbye to him
before the casket closed. I remember watching my mother bend over my brother,
whispering to him and running her fingers through his fluffy blond hair. She
later told me that his hair was the only part of him that still felt like him.
I remember watching the total heartbreak in my dad’s face and watching him weep
as only a parent could weep. And I remember clinging to my siblings as we said
a final goodbye to my brother and closed the casket.
I don’t know why
this is the first I’ve written about this experience. I guess I assumed it
would be too difficult or that I wasn’t far enough removed from the situation
to be able to write about it without an overload of sentimentality and without
breaking down in the end. Give me a year
or two and then I will process my feelings and thoughts through writing.
But here’s what I have been learning (and what has been reinforced by the
recent passing of my grandma): I’ll never be far enough removed from the
situation. The reality is that after nearly seven years without my brother I
feel like I’ll never be able to let go of the pain or the emptiness that tore
through my heart when he died. Though his death is in my past, it still impacts
(in a very real way) both my present and my future. And even on the days that I
only think of Eric once or twice, I’m always reminded that I once had a living younger
brother, and now I don’t. I don’t just deal with the absence of him—I deal with
the loss of him.
After his death
I learned to cope with this loss. At first the coping felt like a façade—I put
on a smile and went to work or to school or to church, and I felt fake.
Everything inside of me begged to be with my brother or to see him one more
time or to hear his voice for just a minute more. Even after the ability to cry
was gone (at some point the tears just ran out), coping with my grief was
agony. I confided in my dad and told him that I didn’t think I could go back to
work or school. I didn’t know how I was going to move on from this. My dad told
me that we had to fake like we were getting over his death. We would never
really get over it, but if we could force ourselves into a normal routine and
go back to our daily activities, then coping with our grief would get easier. The
routine itself would become a coping mechanism, and soon it would become the
norm.
As time went on,
as I put the everyday smile on my face, I got better at coping, and it wasn’t
as difficult. Life slipped into a new routine, and coping became the norm. But
coping doesn’t mean the pain can’t seep through. A few months after Eric’s
funeral my mom was sorting through laundry and found one of his socks. Just
when life had been getting back to (a kind of) normal, something as simple and
insignificant as a sock unraveled the strength she had been building. She’d
folded Eric’s socks for eighteen years and never realized, until that moment, how
much of a privilege it had been to do that for him.
Even now, occasionally
I watch or read or hear something (or experience something, as with the recent
passing of my sweet grandma) that dredges up all the pain that I thought would
go away completely at some point, and the grief washes over me afresh. I’ve
seen this happen with my family as well. The truth is that seven years is
nothing, really. Seven years is yesterday. I have come to accept that the grief
and pain may never go away completely. But God blessed my family with the
ability to cope, and that is how we were able to go back to normal life—not
because the pain was gone or because our grief had subsided, but because we had
learned to cope and because we were open to the idea of letting our lives and
hearts heal. Coping became a way of life.
Here’s a true
statement about me (and, I would wager, many of you): even with my firm belief
in the afterlife, I’m very uncomfortable and even afraid of death. I want to
feel sure about and at peace with the idea of death. But most of the time,
though I think of my brother’s death quite often, I try to forget about death
as a natural part of life. But it’s impossible to forget about something so
prevalent, as I was reminded when my world was shaken again (albeit not quite
as forcefully) when my grandma passed away. As I have tried to come to terms
with the terms of death (that is, that
everybody must and will die), one image keeps playing in my mind.
After my brother
had passed away and before I left on my mission, I was serving in the temple
one random afternoon. In the quiet, peaceful setting somewhere in the temple, I
randomly turned a corner and (almost literally) ran into my grandma. She was a
temple worker at the time, but I had no idea she would be there. I was relieved
to see her, and she was delighted to see me. Being a new temple-goer, I still
felt awkward and nervous, and running into my grandma helped me feel more
comfortable in a different setting and with a strange but beautiful new work.
When I think of
death, I think of this experience with my grandma. Death is like being in a
quiet, peaceful place. It’s new, and maybe a little strange, but then you turn
a corner and run into a loved one. I don’t know that this assuages all my
fears, but the idea of being greeted by Eric and Grandma Fullmer (and Grandpa
O’Driscoll and many other loved ones) on the other side is one of the best
motivations to keep on hoping and to keep “fighting the good fight.”
For me, the best
way I’ve found to confront mortality is to cope
with mortality. I believe coping is about the little day-to-day victories over
sorrow. I believe coping is about making meaningful connections in this life so
that the next life seems less intimidating. And I believe coping is about
living life while at the same time honoring the memories of people who have
passed on.
I found that one
of the burdens attached to losing my brother to something like a drug overdose was
the fear that people would forget about Eric and the good that was in him, even
when he was at his worst. I knew most people wouldn’t forget Eric completely; he
made that impossible on many levels. But I worried that people would remember
only the angry, drug-addicted Eric. I worried they would forget about the
sensitive, kind-hearted boy—the cute, chubby kid with the coke-bottle glasses. I
worried people would criminalize him and think the world a better place without
him.
Sometime around
the two-year anniversary of his death we made a routine visit to his grave. On arriving
at the headstone we saw something resting on it: a single cigarette. At first I
was angry. It seemed like the ultimate display of disrespect to discard a
cigarette on a grave. But my dad bent over and picked up the cigarette. It was
whole. It had not been lit. Then I remembered when my brother had tried to get
clean he had taken up cigarette smoking to help with the more overwhelming (and
scarier) illegal drug addiction.
“This was Eric’s
favorite kind,” my dad said, his voice shaking. He replaced the cigarette and
backed up to look at the grave marker. My dad looked genuinely happy, if a
little teary-eyed. Someone out there (an anonymous friend) was thinking about
my brother, and they wanted to share a cigarette with him. They honored him the
only way they knew how.
I smiled, and I
knew that somewhere my brother was smiling too.
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