The Unwanted Anniversary

The first week in January has always been a portentous week for me. I started my first ministry, as the Minister of Evangelism at Metropolitan Community Church, Long Beach, CA on January 1, 1989 and left five years later to begin my ministry at Pikes Peak MCC on January 2, 1994. Twelve years later this week, I bid farewell to that congregation to finish my Doctorate of ministry and try my hand at non-profit work.

In 1995, I conceived my son on January 5^th. Trust me, when you’re using alternative insemination and have fertility issues you know exactly when these things occur.

This year, January 5^th marks another major milestone, though darker than the others. On that day I will be as old as my older brother will ever be.

Erik was the second youngest of us five siblings; the only boy in a sea of girls, the second step of our stair step progression, so close in age that when I was born, the youngest, my siblings were five, four, three, and 18 months.

In some regard, I got along better with my brother than with my sisters. I was the perennial tomboy, not given to playing with dolls; dresses were anathema to me. Erik and I would pretend to be cowboys, riding the roughhewn pallet lean-to that held our lawnmower, scrambling on top of the roof, sneaking through my bedroom window at midnight to go for walks. He was the first person in my family I came out to as a lesbian, writing to him with all the angst of my 16-year-old heart.

We weren’t particularly close as we grew older, although in our overlapping military service years, he would drive up from San Diego, CA to Castle Air Force base where I was stationed. We shared Thanksgiving dinners more than once and he even made it to the Base Airman of the Month banquet where I was awarded that honor. He looked so dashing in his meticulously kept Navy whites; everyone thought he was my date, which gave my girlfriend and me a chuckle.

My brother, Erik, completed suicide over four years ago at the age of 55 years, 203 days.  I will be that age on January 5th this year.

I always considered myself a "grief expert." My father died of cancer when I was just shy days of my 23rd birthday; the following year, my only nephew died of SIDS. Add to that the scores of deaths I witnessed, and the memorial services I did during the US AIDS years and you get the point. From 1981-1995 I lost 33 friends to AIDS, not to mention the countless memorial services I led as a queer minister in a queer church. 

But dealing with the grief over my brother's suicide is singularly piercing and in its own category. In those early days following his death, someone told me about a page on Facebook: Sibling Survivors of Suicide. That page became my grounding in those early months and years. It was the only place where I could be with people who understood what I was going through. On July 3, 2014, not quite a year after my brother's death, I made this entry:  color: #1d2129; font-size: 14px;">For some reason, this week has been really hard for me. No anniversaries or triggers-- just one second away from crying, every second of the day. I feel like this page is a parallel universe for me. "Out there" in the "real" facebook world, everything is bright and sunny, and my posts are political or funny; then I sneak away and enter here-- it is a darkened room, or cave-- and am drawn to the circle of this group, where there are candles lit and our voices murmur words of anguish and comfort and hope. This is a universe no one knows, except for those of us who live in these shadowlands, and I hope there will be no one else who has to discover it, though I take comfort in knowing we will be there for them, when they stumble through this portal for the first time.

The grief that accompanies suicide is unlike any other and leads to its own unique accounting system. I remember telling a friend that it was the 8^th month anniversary of my brother’s death. She said she wouldn’t keep track of the dates like that, as it makes it more painful. But I feel differently. 

It’s like parents keeping track of their baby's life by months. There's no way you could pass the date of the month and not exclaim, "This is my baby's 6^th month birthday!" Grief is like that; an unwelcome new family member, whose early days and months are ticked off in exacting measure. And then grief turns a year old and, beyond that annual anniversary, has its own assortment of personalized holidays; the birthday of the own who died, the first holiday without him, the first birthday of your own without him there. And now this new one, this date that I surpass my brother in age, this stepping off point into a future age he will never know.  I would say that, really, grief needs its own calendar, but the heart manages to keep track of it just fine.

]If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, there’s help. Call 1-800-273-8255 or text 741741. Never give up your place in the order of life.