What I Miss Most

It's been a little over three weeks since I lost my brother. Most days I'm good..... I haven't had my extreme meltdown yet but it is coming. This I know. But as it was today, I had quite a few tears. They were good ones, healing ones, cleansing ones. They were not tears of sadness, just tears. Tears that had spent far too long trapped inside me.

This week especially, I had quite a few people reach out to me to say, "Hey, I'm making sure you're ok, so really how are you?" And I always reply that we are managing. We feel our way through the days because I don't think there's a blueprint to be followed. That by Day 22, you're supposed to (whatever). It's Day 23 and we are still figuring things out. We have until this Friday to file paperwork with probate as a "small estate." That will save a lot of headache and trouble - I think, anyway. This is such a different process from Mom's probate. Feeling our way through.

We've discovered that the grocery bill has gone down a good bit -- which is good because we're going to need the money for other expenses. The house is quieter on football Saturdays -- even though Dad and I can do quite a bit of yelling our (ahem) encouragement and (cough cough) love of the officiating crews. Mornings are minus the laughter coming from my brother's room where he would watch reruns of Married With Children while the rest of us were expanding our minds with the news and current events, and occasional breaks from that while watching reruns of Parking Wars. For 23 days, we haven't heard -- criminy, I don't even know the name of it, but it was a smooth jazz song that he would play over and over and over..... I almost used it as the backdrop for his memorial slideshow but I couldn't torture anyone else that way. And I couldn't stand to hear it for 3 hours on end. Years of it was enough.

But I also miss jumping up to share funny memes with my brother -- especially this time of year. He purely loved the whole Friday the 13th thing, and Friday I missed him most. So many cool jokes that I couldn't show him. So many other horror movie spoofs that he missed out on. So many funny things in general that he would get and no one else would, not in the same way. I miss teasing him about things. I miss Saturdays where we'd have one channel going, he'd have another, plus listening to a game via livestream.

I feel like a large part of me has been excised, like a limb that's been removed, and I'll have pains (not just phantom ones) for the rest of my days. I don't quite know how to manage. I just wake up and keep doing. One foot in front of the other. One hour, one minute, one whatever at a time. More tears will come, of that I am sure.