Grieving My Brother's Death Three Weeks Later

I think if my dog had died I would receive more sympathy. That isn't a snarky comment. It's a factual observation. 

I'm still crying every day, though not, of course, all day. I've never had that luxury. 

I am overwhelmed. I face medical crises of my own. Financial. Legal. It never rains but it pours. 

Behind all that what was once my natal family appears and disappears in my every waking hour. And there is no one there here in the land of the living to share any of this with me. Folks who had talked to me when I was not this grieving person are now ignoring me. Given that they are ignoring me, I see no reason to talk to them, thus divorcing me further from the land of the living. 

I wonder if I'll have any friends, even in the denatured Facebook sense of the word, when this is all over. I wonder when this will all be over. 

Google has changed solitude. You can google what you are feeling and you soon discover that you don't hold a patent on anything. 

I googled "sibling loss" and found "The Loss of a Lifetime: When an Adult Brother or Sister Dies" by Lynn Shattuck. She is saying many of the things I am feeling and experiencing. 

Shattuck writes, "There were more books on losing a pet than losing a brother or sister. "

The rest of her article is equally good and applicable. 

There's a fact I think about a lot: if brothers and sisters are adopted separately and raised apart, and they meet as adults, they sometimes fall in love. That is because we tend to fall in love with people who are like ourselves, and who look like us. There's a safe, sterile name for it. Genetic sexual attraction. 

Somehow Mother Nature, usually, prevents that misfortune if you are raised together. A wall of familiarity and annoyance is raised that protects you from the love. Your live-in sibling is the one who plays music loud and prevents you from sleeping, or who picks his nose, or who leaves his dirty clothes on the floor, or who makes fun of you and punches you, or whom mommy or daddy likes better than you. 

But that connection, based on similarity, is there, beneath the surface. 

Losing a sibling, even one to whom you are not close, is not easy. 

Losing almost all your siblings, before they live out what we think of as normal lifespans, is a bitch.