Today was my first day of tenth grade.
I thought the summer would give everyone time to forget what had happened, but I guess I was wrong. I got a few pitiful smiles from people I don’t know. One girl even ran up and hugged me, mumbling something about how strong I am. I tried keeping to myself for the most part, dodging the school counselors my mom was still insisting I meet with and rushing out of class before my teachers had a chance to speak with me. I knew they all recognized my last name as my brother’s, and I didn’t care for the same pitiful lecture they would all repeat to me.
I walked home through the cemetery after my last class was out. I usually walk in from the back entrance to avoid running into anyone, but I went in through the front this time. I lingered at the entryway for a while, staring at the tall, dark metal gates as their shadows loomed over me. Before last year, I had never walked through these gates, or even thought much about what lay behind them. I stood there for a moment, replaying a memory from two years ago when my brother and I were walking to school before the sun had fully risen. He knew I was afraid of walking by the cemetery when it was dark and insisted that there was nothing to be afraid of. He handed me his backpack and squeezed in behind the gates, hiding behind the tall brick pillars and making cawing noises to spook me out. The cawing only lasted a few seconds before he ran back out jittering — as though he had gotten scared himself. He grabbed his bag from me and shouted, “Race ya!” as he stumbled ahead of me, half-running, half-skipping down the sidewalk.
That was two years ago, and it has been one year since I stopped being afraid of the cemetery. I stood there in front of the gates and wondered what made him shrink with fear that day. And if I had not watched him as he was buried behind those very gates last year, would I still be afraid?
I walked in and sat near the grave of a woman who passed away on May 1, 1922. Beside her tombstone was what appeared to be her husband’s, who passed away a few days later, on the third of May. I sat there for a while, wondering if it was the difficulty of mourning his wife’s death that brought him to reunite with her only two days later. I don’t know the couple’s story, but I’m sure someone else does. There must have been a daughter, friend or sibling who came to their graves each day and trimmed the stems of the flowers they had brought by a few days earlier, replacing the dead with new.
But how long could they have gone making that a daily occurrence?
Every day would become once a week, and soon enough, the once well-kept flowers would start to wilt on their own: their remains crushed by the disheveled stones that no one came by to realign. The windswept soil of the grave would become engulfed in sheets of flaky snow, longing for the warm touch of the hands that once stroked through it with such wistful delicacy. And the names of the couple carved so intricately into the ashen stone would be uttered less with each passing day.
I wondered if my brother’s grave would suffer the same fate. I couldn’t picture myself going days without coming to see him. I would graduate high school, attend college and grow old in this city. I couldn’t live with myself if I knew he was here all alone, behind the gates that once left him horror-struck. I wondered if anyone had thought to do the same for this couple. Or if anyone was still honoring their lives and telling their stories. If there was a photo of them framed on a mantelpiece in a nearby home; or beneath layers of paint and primer, a corner of a wall with their initials engraved inside of a heart.
I gathered my things and left some of the lilies I had brought with me in between their graves. I started down the hilly gravel path toward my brother’s grave, where I saw my mom and little sister. As I watched them sitting there hunched over and helpless, embracing one another so tightly, I began to tear up.
Today was the first anniversary of my brother’s death, and it was the first time I had to navigate the first day of school without him. I thought about where I was last year and where I am today. I thought about what little I knew about grief then and how much I know now.
Death hits you very suddenly at first. Most people remember all the insignificant details surrounding the time that the news of their loved one’s death came about. A random Wednesday afternoon could have borne the same insignificance to a person for years, possibly decades, until suddenly, that day replays in their mind for what feels like an eternity.
I distinctly remember every detail of that Wednesday afternoon in September. In fact, I remember it so well, it’s as though I am still living through it. An entire calendar year has passed, but I still feel like it is 2:17 p.m. on the day I received news of his passing.
After he died, everyone told me that my pain would ease with time. I doubt any of those people had experienced the loss of someone that they held so dear, and I still can’t help but feel angry at them as time passes and the pain only worsens.
I have learned since that the appearance of grieving may grow subtle, and the hysterics may diminish, but the yearning only intensifies. As time passes, my memory of him grows more distant, and I worry I’ll forget him. I dread the day that I stop remembering how it felt to embrace him, or the way his eyes would glimmer when he smiled and how his cheeks would swell with the softest shade of pink when my grandma would tell him that he’d always be her favorite grandchild. It has only been a year, but I can’t picture it getting easier. The passage of time feels like a harsh reminder that the chasm between us is only growing wider. And each year on my birthday, I will be reminded that I am growing older and further away from the day that he died — while he remains there, trapped in time.
In a strange way, it feels like I have abandoned him in an impalpable realm. It’s almost like I didn’t leave him at a place but rather at a point in time.
This sensation has warped my perception of time in a way that is difficult for me to understand and even more difficult to articulate to the people around me. I envision it as an obliteration of a timeline, where things are happening all at once rather than chronologically. At the center is that grim Wednesday afternoon, and I exist concurrently at every point before and after that milestone. There is no past, present or future. I have started to feel all three at the same time, making the day he died exist less as a finite memory and more as an ongoing occurrence.
Through some sort of out-of-body experience, it’s as though I am moving forward with my life while watching myself still standing there when the news of his death first reached me — feeling as vulnerable and powerless as ever. The days that go by exist alongside that single day, where a part of me is frozen in time. And for each new day that comes, that one repeats itself over again, warping what I once understood of the past, present and future.
My brother was dead yesterday, he is dead today and he will be dead tomorrow. As follows, tomorrow becomes yesterday, and today never stops being that Wednesday in September.
The truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever become okay with the fact that he died. And I don’t think I’ll ever know life without him, even though I may learn to navigate it. It’s been one year, and the cycles of mourning have started to become commonplace. The paroxysmal grief, although just as turbulent as before, has grown familiar. I still can’t wrap my mind around the passage of time or ease the guilt I feel when I fail to present myself as the epitome of a grieving sister to the public eye.
My mother and little sister, sitting in front of the grave, leaning upon each other, couldn’t possibly be experiencing grief in the same way I was. I can’t imagine my mother’s pain, having had to watch the life she brought into this world be taken away. And I don’t think she’ll ever understand mine. As for my younger sister, she won’t remember ever having a brother. She’ll live her whole life well-acquainted with the complexity of grief and death, without having any memory of its source. I’ll never understand that feeling, but I owe it to her to keep him alive in her memory and tell her all the stories of their time together that he would remember, but she never will.
In keeping his memory alive, I can’t help but ask myself what things would be like if he was still around. I try to envision the distant picture of the person he was and grapple with the fleeting sensory memories of him to imagine a reality in which we still experience time together. If he was here today, I may have never walked through those cemetery gates. And I probably would have spent the remainder of my childhood fearing what lay beyond them. I wouldn’t have been standing there on that gravely path today, wiping the tears off my face and getting ready to walk up to my mom to tell her about my first day of school.
My first first day without him.
MiC Columnist Maryam Shafie-Khorassani can be reached at mshafie@umich.edu.