Birthdays, depression, and my little brother

I had a younger brother and he was my treasure. From the day he was brought home from the hospital, I felt responsible for his well-being. And if my parents had died and he had lived, I would have bent my life around to make things good for him. But that isn't the way it went.

My birthday falls in January, which is usually a dreadful month The month encircles the post-holiday letdown and gray, cold weather. In the places I've lived most, add "wet or damp" to that description. But the thought of my birthday generally cheers me up: it is the one day of the year that is about Me. It is the one day of the year when I feel I have the right to demand things go my way.

Unfortunately, while I look forward to my birthday, I always get depressed somewhere in the days preceding or following. And every year, after driving myself batty as I struggle with an unexplained blue mood, I remember again why. It's because my little brother killed himself four days before my twenty-second birthday. And while it has now been 27 years since this happened, I still experience this forgetting, then remembering.


You would think it would be gone by now. That's a long time to continue to feel grief or depression over the loss of a loved one. But I have also read and been told that getting over a loved one's suicide — completely — seldom occurs.

I admit that I do carry many things with me that I should get over: the fact that my parents wouldn't let me have music lessons, but as soon as my little brother asked at age 12 for guitar lessons — pouf! guitar and lessons; the fact that when my brother played a sport, our lives revolved around him and his practices and his games, but when I went out for softball one time (wanting the attention he received, I freely admit), the family did come to watch and saw their daughter and sister verbally abused and reviled by her teammates while the coach did nothing — their response? They decided it was too painful to watch and never returned to watch another game. So, yes, I do carry around some old crap. I'm working on letting it go. But this one, my brother's death, I do not purposefully or consciously carry around with me. It is simply like an oddly shaped freckle: it is attached to me and it only occasionally attracts my attention.

I was young enough, still forming in my early 20s, that it shaped me. First I lost my father when I was 17. Then my brother became distant when I was home before my senior year of college. A few months after I returned to college, just before my birthday, he killed himself. And not long after that, my mother remarried. All this left me feeling isolated.

I have been told I have difficulties with commitment, with forming emotionally intimate, give-and-take relationships. That I keep people at some distance from the "real" me. If so, I would have to put my brother's death as the keystone for this issue. Because of anything in my life that has been completely at odds with what I expected — didn't marry or have children, didn't begin writing novels in my 20s or 30s — not having my brother as my best friend for life has been that which most undercut the moorings I have to life, reality, and coping.

My brother's death so goes against everything I absolutely knew my life was to be that I still have dreams about him, a couple of times a year, in which he is there and I realize that his dying was just a dream. How could it real be when he and I are older and we are having such a real, tangible conversation and life?

Sometimes I begin to remember in the dream, but most of the time I wake up realizing that my brother was alive and I'd simply had a weird, bad dream that he had died. I feel good as I rise from unconsciousness. And THEN I remember that the good part was the dream and the bad part was reality and subsequently, one or two days of my life are colored by this dream and its aftermath. Just as my birthday is colored.

I don't try to hold on. I don't think of it often. But I think this death and its aftermath think of me.

If I could make a deal with myself or with that large, unfathomable Universe, I would say "I will keep the twice yearly dreams and the birthday depressions, if you will take away the rest of the baggage I carry. Just wipe me clean of it, help me to set it aside. Then I will allow myself a few tears every year and a few days of heaviness when the dream is not reality.

Because it's the rest of the baggage that causes my daily struggle with confidence and feeling good about myself and feeling lovable. The baggage and my til-now inability to discard it cause me to doubt that I can do the scary, difficult things while I look for work or meet strangers or write my novel.

I still feel guilt for somehow not being able to help my little brother; from talking to other people who lost someone in a similar way, I conclude that the guilt fades but doesn't entirely disappear. But I know that he believed in me, he believed that I could do anything. And if he were alive, he would help me if he could. After all, when our parents decided that watching me play softball was too painful to experience and that they would no longer do so, my little brother took time almost every day to play catch with me and to teach me to pitch and to catch. Almost four years my junior and he was caring for me.

The loss of this human being is a greater loss than everything else in my life combined. There is a hole inside me in just his shape and I don't know how I can fill it or make it smaller, or if I should. Or if I even want to. There should be some lasting resonance of his having been in this world, even if it is the loss I feel and the dreams I have and the blues around my birthday. Nothing in this life is free or easy. Not love. Not remembrance. And not birthdays.