Everything that comes after

It’s been a little bit more than three years since my brother passed away.  So much has happened since he’s been away…big events in my life so far, such as getting my internships, studying abroad at Vienna, Austria,  moving to Seattle (miraculously especially because my niece and nephew are living there right now) to work at Amazon for the summer (and actually on Friday, I got a job offer to work there full time!), and almost graduating.  There are so many things he hasn’t witnessed and so many things I cannot tell him in person just yet.

So much life has happened since then: the kind of life you don’t notice while it’s happening. The kind of life you only realize later has changed you.

Actually, after my brother passed away, I joined a subreddit group for people grieving.  It was actually an interesting story to how I got there…my niece sent me a TikTok about something about grieving after a few years, and on someone’s profile, they had a link to a subreddit about people talking about their grieving processes, and more TikTok videos about people talking about their grief. Something I found that was frequently mentioned in these posts was:

Who did I become because of what happened? 

I learned that grief looks very different a few days in, a few months in, and a few years in it. 

At first, it felt like I was drowning.  Then it became an ache I carried everywhere. It was like an object in my pocket I didn’t know what to do with.

In the subreddit, in the TikToks, no one asked me to be strong. No one told me that “everything happens for a reason” because we all know that. They didn’t say anything philosophical. They just were. They just… understood.

People wrote things like, “I don’t know who I am without them,” and “I feel older than everyone around me,” and I remember thinking, yes. That's exactly it.

The year he died, I aged emotionally faster than everyone else I knew. While my friends were stressed about classes and sorority formals, what to wear to go to a party, I was navigating funeral arrangements, emotional heaviness, my family, and silence. I went from being a teenager to an adult in a day.

Moving out on my own didn’t help either. Living by myself made me realize how loud silence can be. No one prepares you for the moment you walk into your apartment and say, “Ya llegué a la casa,” and no one answers back.

I started noticing things about myself I didn’t like…insecurities I didn’t even know I had:

• how uncomfortable I felt in my own skin,

• how afraid I was of becoming irrelevant to the people I love

• how terrified I was of not having someone to come home to

• Not having a future I would love

• Not being satisfied or being myself

• ETC.

There were nights I went to bed proud because I cooked and did laundry. There were other nights I went to bed proud because I simply brushed my teeth. Healing sometimes looks like just existing.

And somewhere between internships, visas, leases, and airports, I realized something: I used to think grief was a single event, one moment in time. Now I know it’s a thread, weaving through every new version of my life.

Sometimes I still look for him in the places he’ll never be:

• at the airport arrivals gate,

• On the family chat messages

• in the back of my mind when I’m achieving one of my dreams

• On a phone call with my niece and nephews

When I got the full-time job offer from Amazon, the first person I wanted to call was him. And then I remembered and I couldn’t. And that’s the strange part of moving forward. You keep collecting milestones, but the person you want to share them with stays frozen in time. There are so many things he hasn’t witnessed. There are so many things I cannot tell him in person just yet.

But here’s what I can say now that I couldn’t say then:

Grief didn’t just change my life. It changed me.

I look back at the girl who lost her brother and think, “You survived. Somehow, you survived.”

I used to think grief was a shadow.

Now I think it’s proof that love was here.

It’s the presence of what’s to come.