Today I decided to go for a walk in the woods. It's the fourth of July and that means a lot of different things to different people. For me it's the day I found out that my brother, Dylan, died. It wasn't the day Dylan died though. He had decided to hang himself and he died three days earlier. It was also the first day of my new job, after finishing my degree. It was a watershed in my life and even though it happened nine years ago I still a day off from the rest of my life every year to myself space to grieve, to look at the past, and think about the future.
I've been living without Dylan for nine years now. If I'm lucky I'll be around for another fifty years. Each year that passes gets easier, but it's still daunting to look ahead at all that time in front of me, to try to find some kind of plan and find an identity for myself. This is something that doesn't get talked about much. When you lose someone close you lose a part of yourself and when you lose a sibling you lose not just a strong connection to your past, but a connection to your future. You lose a sense of security and permanence. It affects the other people who were close as well, so my immediate family, which was already in the process of falling apart, collapsed forever. I've always wanted to be independent and strong enough to find my own way through life, but it's terrifying when it's forced upon you. My reaction to the grief was to leave the country for a few years and give myself distance from everything back home. This helped a lot and by doing this I also demonstrated to myself that I can survive alone and that ultimately I don't need someone by my side. The pain of the loss has faded, and so has the sense of injustice. I try not to be self-indulgent with the grief, but there are times when it is very cathartic to say to myself that it's not fair to have to lose Dylan. Thankfully those moments have become more and more rare as time passes. These days I'm mostly concerned about where the decisions I've made in the light of all this have left me.
Since 2006 I've chosen to move from place to place and follow the physics experiments of the day (I wouldn't say I followed a career, that's the wrong way to think about it) and traveled to new places in the process. It's been a very formative collection of experiences for me and helped me to grow a lot. There are still things I need to improve, but I am generally a better informed, more tolerant, more resilient, more experienced person than I would have been if I had chosen to stay in the UK. In a way, the loss of Dylan is one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it taught me that I can succeed in spite of the pain, and that life is too short to spend all day indoors in front of a textbook. (Life is also too short to never do those things. Recently I had some free time so I opened up a maths book for the pure pleasure of learning something new.)
In the course of this travel I've gone to great lengths to find time for myself. I have a habit of letting work take over my life, but when I make the effort to block out enough time for other activities I find that I get a rush of old memories. Memories from my childhood that I hadn't even realised I'd forgotten about. The holidays we went on in North Wales, how Dylan and I would spend hours playing with Lego (only for Dylan to find it more fun to destroy what we'd created) and the stupid word games we'd play when we were lying in our bunk beds avoiding sleep. (When we were about 10 and 12 years old we used to listen to a radio show called the Late Night Funster Show that was broadcast from 10:00pm to 1:00am. That was the start of my lifelong problem with insomnia.) We also found that we could tune our radio to pick up police radio transmissions. Occasionally they would announce that it was illegal to listen in, but once I realised it was impossible for them to work out if we were listening or not I was fascinated. Dylan used to love making his own radio shows as well, and I keep hoping that maybe one day we'll find the old cassettes we made and be able to play them back. I won't be able to relive those moments with Dylan again, of course, but it would be nice to hear them. All I remember was his impression of Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid. I would love to be able to show Dylan the videos I'd made about the LHC, and ask him if he ever thought the radio show we made as kids would lead to something like that.
Well I wrote this post during a pit stop to charge my phone and get something to eat. I'll return to walking through the woods, thinking things over and working out if I'm brave enough to keep going for another year without falling apart. The answer will be yes, of course, but the next question is "How?", and there's no simple answer to that. It used to be the case that traveling the world and working as a scientist was enough to keep me motivated, but these days I find myself wanting to be more grounded, consider a long term relationship, and investigate other professions. For the past week I've felt an emptiness growing inside of me, in anticipation of this day off. It's not just grief over the loss of Dylan, it's also grief over the loss of something that once brought me so much joy that it consumed my entire life for a few years. At least I can do something about that though, and find the strength and motivation to keep on going into the unknown.
No comments:
Post a Comment