“Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?” 
― James Joyce, (The Dead)

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises it’s head from the crowd of the world to say ‘It is I you have been looking for,’ and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

-Naomi Shihab Nye (Kindness)

My brother, Kelly Blaine Joseph Jude Lewis or KBJJ, as he signed all our written correspondence, was 90 percent angel and only 10 percent human…always…not just in death like some knighted memory where all our flaws are conveniently forgotten. Even as a child, the middle child to be exact, he was everyone’s favourite, a good son, a sweet man, a comic, a sage, a poet, a most excellent companion, a loyal and honest friend, and a beloved brother. He was a quiet, thinking man…he noticed the little things…he was careful with other people’s hearts.

A fit, 58 year old vegan, my brother died of a massive hemorrhagic stroke on a beautiful summer day, three and half years ago now, and the sense of loss and grief I have held every day since his parting is still so close I can barely breathe when I remember him. My days are laced with little daggers that keep him alive and I am grateful for every one…the rough cut decal fore-edge of a new book, cinnamon raison toast and earl grey tea, bookstores, and coffee shops, an Irish lilt or a Scottish burr, nature walks, and the sea…always the sea, or the tang of the sea scented streets of this dirty old town he so loved, never more so than on a crisp autumn afternoon. He was all of my favourite things … “my talk, my song,” and “everywhere he walked was holy ground” to me.

My brother lived alone, a singleton, and it was only the kindness of a concerned co-worker that alerted us to what was to be the last day of his life. He was rushed by ambulance to hospital where neuro-surgeons explained that there was nothing to be done. So, we sat in shocky silence by his deathbed and held his still warm hands. When death came close, I lay my head on his chest and listened while his heart stopped beating and his lungs swelled with his last breath. To the woman who gave our family those last few hours with my brother, to sit with him as he left this world, to say our last goodbyes, I will forever, be in your debt.

The physical sensation of such a loss is acutely painful … a panicky breathlessness takes hold of you, the ground is swept away, and the sky goes out. There is no place to run away to, no safe space, no comfort, no medicine to alleviate the crushing weight that comes to rest squarely on the center of your chest and refuses to shift. It makes a home inside you, and though you pray for the blanket of unconsciousness, the horror and ache is still there when you wake. You wonder how your own heart can hold out… it remains a mystery to me.

As a nurse you can imagine the cornucopia of magic beans and pharmacotherapy that arrived at my door in the days directly following my brother’s death. Although I was desperate to forget for a few hours that he was was gone, I was afraid to venture into uncharted terrain… “what dreams may come.” I settled on a steady diet of day drinking which made it possible for me to breathe in the first few months after he left us. “Grief felt four dimensional”, weighted, surreal, and still faintly familiar… I was always cold. People bring things. I remember food arriving, food I could not eat …and friends and family saying things I could not really fathom. I nodded, I let people hold me, but I couldn’t feel their warmth. I absented myself, I learned to cry quietly. I was adrift in the dark, night swimming far from shore, unreachable, inviolate… unspeakably sad. Still, I was grateful on some unconscious level…for the people…and their words…and their offerings …distant reminders that I was still here, that my own heart still beat it’s unwanted song. I let the mourners come, and my brother’s friends, such beauties, brought some solace with their stories.

There is no medicine that I know of, no antidote, no cure for grief. No sutures to close the gaping hole in your chest. It does not heal …you bleed out slowly …you die a death as well. Our dead take a bloody big chunk of us with them, the part that only they could see, the part that they loved best, and you don’t get that part back. You learn to carry the cavity inside you, and after a time if you are very brave, you can repurpose the space as a kind of light catcher.

Of course, the immediate shock of such a loss is nothing to what follows … the deep hollowing out, the exquisite loneliness, a yearning for everything you saw reflected in their eyes, and all you held dear in them, the staggering loss of what you thought you could keep forever. C.S Lewis in his book, A Grief Observed, originally published under the penname Dimidus (Latin meaning cut in half), writes in his opening line, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

After 6 weeks of staying as numb as I could manage on cheap pinot grigio, it stopped working altogether. Deep into my cups I was still stony cold, and I was terrified. I felt abandoned, alone, and inconsolable. Eventually I was desperate enough to attempt the unthinkable. I put down the bottle opener and stopped trying to hide from the full flare of the pain…I leaned into it, I stared at it’s sun. I stopped trying to outrun it, I stood my ground, and braced as the pain unfurled inside me, it intensified and it was eviscerating. Could I stand it…would it kill me, could I actually give it it’s head and let it run free inside me… was I strong enough? I’m still not sure.

Today when it comes for me, the sadness, the memories, his voice, his heart, his poetry, his beautiful mind, I stay with him for as long as I can, I nod to the pain, like some old friend that crosses my path. I soften, I approach slowly…carefully now… I ask myself in a gentle voice, a voice I might use if speaking to a 4-year-old child…I ask where it hurts, what I’m most afraid of… and then I ask what might help a little, and the answer is always kindness.

What is unbearable becomes bearable in time. Not because the grief goes away or gets smaller, but because we grow stronger around it, by holding space for a loved one who lives within us still. The transition is deeply unpleasant, like walking a “razor’s edge”, but befriending the pain and discovering the gift inside the grief, the gift of empathy and kindness, invokes an evolution of the spirit, a parting gift from the ghost of your lost loved one.

Grief and all its jagged little teeth is the price for the privilege of being loved and having loved.  I know too that the size and shape and depth of grief is in direct proportion to the quality and breadth of that love. People ask if I’m better now. I always say ‘yes’ because it’s easier than explaining that the ache never leaves you…it’s only that I made friends with it.

How do I keep him with me… the man called Parker Stephenson in my phone contacts, named after a tv sleuth of our youth, because he looked at life like a great mystery and always smiled like a boy pretending to be a detective, in the moment before he solves the case. I sit by the sea, I haunt the poetry section, I practice silence until I get a sense of his nearness and hear his voice, my own personal guardian angel. I look for every opportunity to practice kindness towards myself and all those I meet. Kindness ideally unobserved and undisclosed. I acknowledge daily what a grand thing it is to live a life and to know such love.

If I could tell him one last secret, boil the kettle for tea just once more, or read a single line of poetry to him, I’d whisper

” …here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;

which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that keeps the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)” (Cummings)