A Eulogy Revisited

grief, technology, and memory

Caution: this one is quite heavy (tw: suicide).

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

As the twelve-year anniversary of my brother’s death approaches, I’ve been thinking about how grief evolves, the intersection of technology and grief, and how we share memories and experiences. I wrote and rewrote this essay over the last year, and I’m grateful to share it with you now. Thank you, as always, for reading. <3

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Eleven years ago, my husband came to my office in downtown Washington, DC, to tell me that my brother–my only sibling–had died by suicide. In some respects, his death was not a surprise. And yet, nothing can soften the permanent edges of that message: your brother is dead.

In those first few days, I channeled my emotions into the eulogy. I was desperate to do my brother justice, to show people who he was aside from the particulars of his death. Seven years his junior, I viewed him with the reverence and curiosity reserved for the realm of much younger siblings. He was infinitely interesting and complicated and full of lofty goals and ideas. He pushed me, encouraged me, and once comforted me after a breakup by singing his a capella version of Van Halen’s Why Can’t This Be Love. 

My brother was also a witness, a repository for all our shared family trials and tribulations, the stories that could make only us laugh or nod in commiseration. Author Celeste Ng describes this perfectly with her sibling characters Lydia and Nath in Everything I Never Told You: “All their lives Nath had understood, better than anyone, the lexicon of their family, the things they could never truly explain to outsiders . . . .” When Lydia dies after jumping alone into a lake that she knows she can’t swim, Nath considers the future without his sister: “So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.” And this is how it is for me: I was eight weeks pregnant when my brother died, and I never got the chance to share the news with him. Since then, each new milestone–two more daughters, multiple moves, a career change, our own dad’s death–is accompanied by the reflexive urge to tell him all about it.

How to convey my brother to pews full of people, some of whom had never met him? In a sense this was a burden, but in the same breath it was a gift–a way to honor him, to let him know I loved him deeply. But probably most importantly, it allowed me a sense of control of the narrative. No melodramatic references to demons or sins or suffering here. I wanted to share his humor, his intellect, and his compassion–all the good stuff. I turned to the shoe boxes full of letters, cards, and photos I’d lugged around with me since high school. My brother sent me notes describing the books he was reading in class at St. John’s College, the inspiration he found in painting, the wishes he had to make middle and high school easier on me than they were on him: “As I told you during break, I began reading Leonardo’s On Painting. Excellent book. He begins a book on painting with a chapter on mathematics. Somehow that doesn’t seem so strange in light of my studies of Euclid.” I was lucky to have his words, because they did half my job for me. 

But my brother died fifteen years after he left college, and a lot happened in that time: graduate school, marriage, a law practice, and children. My brother and my sister-in-law had two gorgeous kids, ages four and three when they attended the funeral service. I couldn’t then contemplate how they’d remember him as they grew into adults. How could this profoundly painful ending and subsequent absence not overshadow everything that had come before? Worse, I feared, the ending and the absence might not just be the major memory; it could be the only one. My concern with the narrative always lingered, reared its head during holiday gatherings or family trips when we’d see my niece and nephew. I’d mollify my worries with a story about how my brother rescued a trapped bunny at crew practice or how he and a friend dressed as The Blues Brothers for Halloween.

My sister-in-law actively works to connect her children to their dad. She takes her kids to my brother’s gravesite, to our extended family events; she’s asked us to contribute to a spreadsheet documenting memories of my brother; she’s enrolled them in grief camps and taken them to therapists. And she’s honest about the challenges my brother faced and the difficulties they encountered together as things began to unravel.

But I’ve always struggled with that part–the honesty about how complicated things were. My conversations with my niece and nephew remained within the safety of topics like childhood memories and funny anecdotes. How we used to pretend to joust each other with pillows like we were in a home edition of Medieval Times. How I called him ‘Dido’ because I couldn’t pronounce ‘Michael’ when I first started talking. How he’d take me out for wings or raw bar. The way he always had a reading recommendation. 

We did not discuss the persistent worry I harbored that someday something might happen to him. We did not discuss how much my brother struggled.

  Now that I have my own children, and I’ve reached and exceeded the age my brother was at his passing, I can more easily see how children yearn for information, context, stories. They are constantly curious, trying to make sense of the world around them. I wish there was a way to upload the memories of my brother to my niece and nephew’s systems, to convey direct knowledge and experience. In this I often feel like a failure. Wasn’t I one of the people who knew him best?

Last May, my niece posted about her father’s passing, her words–raw and honest–captioned under a photo of my brother laughing on the beach: “i love you so much. in these eleven years since you’ve been gone, so much has happened. I used to be upset because you missed all my important events, but i forgive you. I know that you . . . couldn’t think properly. it wasn’t your fault.” 

My niece wasn’t wrong: he’d been unwell.

She graduated middle school a few weeks later. The school had reserved a chair in the first row of the auditorium with a strip of tape and a white rose in honor of her father. Later that week, my mom pulled out a box of photos and other items for my niece, all memories of her dad, my brother. And I watched with cautious wonder as she carefully sifted through each one–an id card for a swim club, a school evaluation, a picture of my brother and me at the piano after my first communion. She fawned over the items as if they were prized artifacts, more pieces to fashion together some answer to a historical puzzle. 

When I’d drafted his eulogy, I’d done something similar in combing through physical memories to gather my thoughts. It had been over a decade since I’d seen what I’d cobbled together through the trenches of fresh grief and early pregnancy hormones. A short email search brought the document to my fingertips, and immediately I was back in my aunt and uncle’s living room, practicing the words over and over in the hopes I could deliver them the next day without falling apart at the lectern. 

I printed out two copies–one for each of my brother’s children.

My niece and nephew–who were toddlers at the time of my brother’s death–are now in high school. I have no doubt they will work through their own interpretations and memories of their dad and what happened to him and their family. I understand there are limitations in how they can remember him, and there isn’t a right or wrong way. Afterall, we are not monoliths, or flesh and bone incarnations of a normative like good or bad, but rather complicated and messy palimpsests of all our actions. Even so, I hope my memories of my brother–the way he sang happy birthday like an opera star, how he pressed books into people’s hands, how he couldn’t wait to tell everyone he and his wife had children on the way–help them on that journey.

Loving my brother after his death doesn’t mean shaping a narrative of his life that I can cram down his kids’ throats. Loving my brother is offering his children my memories and observations without expectation. It’s loving them no matter how they remember their dad.