You Cannot Schedule Familiar Grief

Making sense of a four-year-anniversary

red sky in the morning sailors take warning

You cannot schedule familiar grief. Today is the fourth anniversary of my brother Oscar’s death and for the past several weeks I’ve felt the psychic pull of a number on the calendar, my mind turning complicated equations marking how much time has passed. If the last time I saw him was Christmas Eve in 2019 and the last time we spoke was a call on New Year’s Eve, is it really four years in marking or four years and three days, four years and ten days? My mind twists, but there are no tears.

In the aftermath of his accident (what a weird way to avoid saying: after Oscar died), I realized that his favorite color was red. Red is my favorite color, and it also turned out to be Lee’s, Oscar’s twin, my brother. Favorite colors have always been a big deal to me. For the longest time I wanted you to tell me yours before mine so that I could make sure you’d like mine. Owning red for myself was part of deep emotional excavation, practicing being me. So, how could I have not know Oscar’s favorite was mine as well? How could I have not known we were three united in love of crimson, cherry, rhubarb stalk and lobster claw snap?

These are my thoughts on January 3, 2024 at 7:17 am. There are no tears, instead the abstract chasing of facts and feelings. I will drive to New Jersey today and visit the site of Oscar’s accident and place flowers for him at his ghost bike on congested Route 27, for him and the truck drivers and the people for whom those truck drivers are driving their trucks (I’m sure I’ll have a stack of truck-delivered packages at my door when I get home, I am not immune). 

Maybe I’ll cry then, but not yet this morning, where I’m sitting in bed writing this on my Notes app while watching the crimson sky streak into silver, the day only just getting its start. Four years into this experience of grief I am learning the grief is itself a living being, an appendage like a big toe. Try to focus your attention on one. It’s hard to force it, but bang it into a wall and it’s all you can feel. 

I was going to write something like, does that make sense?, but none of this makes sense, which is the point. None of this will ever make sense and the biggest gift I can give myself is to let go of the attempt to find the right mathematical equation or scientific explanation for the grieving process and let it be, like the magical truth that Oscar, Lee and Carla love the color red. These three strange quasi-triplets united in a red January sky through eternity. Truth and love and beauty. That is sense. That is grief.