It was a cloudy day.
A Sunday.
A normal Sunday.
I remember Jason checking the caller ID and his surprise at the 913 area code.
Weird, I thought, How do my parent’s even know Jason’s number?
I remember Jason’s face tightening as he listened to the voice on the other end. He wouldn’t look at me. He handed me the phone and said, “It’s your mom. I don’t think it’s good.”
I remember my hand trembling as I took hold of that stupid black phone.
My growing dread nearly lifting my feet off the ground.
I don’t remember any words before or after, “Ryan is gone. He passed away early this morning.” She tried to say them gently. In some ways, I hated the gentleness of those death-filled words.
I hate those words. I hated them instantly and I hate them still.
My brain literally could.not.comprehend.
Gone? Gone where? On a vacation? Missing?
Passed away? I must have misheard you because you couldn’t mean my twenty-three year old brother.
Passed away is what happens when you come to the end of a full and beautiful life, surrounded by the people who love you – knowing you are loved – and you sort of slip away from this life into the next. To me, that is passing away.
Suffocating because you are unconscious – that is not passing away.
It feels violent and lonely. Ripped away maybe, but not passed away.
An involuntary guttural cry spilled out of me. It was such a strange sound I didn’t even recognize it as my own except I knew my body had released it.
I remember the intensity with which I suppressed that grunt.
I remember how I shamed my heart for losing control.
Anger. It came swiftly. It came fiercely.
Anger at the world.
Anger at myself.
Anger at Ryan.
I felt my heart hemorrhaging and I just wanted to stop the bleeding.
I fought for control. All of my life I had fought for control; wielded it like a weapon against my own heart. Become a robot for all I care just stop this pain. I didn’t want to hurt. Anger was a buffer against shattering.
My whole world stopped on a dime; came crashing down. It’s a strange feeling. Everyone stops with you for a few weeks; cards and letters, food, plants and flowers, phone calls, tender looks and embraces. Then the whole world starts spinning again, expecting you to move along with it. People just picked up where they left off and our shattered pieces were scattered all around us. I wanted everyone else to keep standing still too. As people picked up the pace of their lives, I felt angry and sad because I thought it diminished him, dismissed him. It’s the difficulty and the reality of living and dying and grieving but in the aftermath of losing Ryan, it felt like an affront that separated me from the rest of the world.
On the other hand, I just wanted time to fast forward to the point everyone talked about where the pain lessened. The time when I would not stutter and divert my eyes when someone asked me how many siblings I have. I wanted to race past the pain to the days when if someone asked me how my brother died, I could look them in the eyes and answer gently that he died of a drug overdose. And when they said, “I’m sorry.” I could sincerely say thank you and let it rest there. Sometimes, I still feel compelled to say “accidental drug overdose”. At some deep place wanting people to understand all of the pain and broken innocence (his and mine) that is held in those words Accidental. Drug. Overdose.
There was an autopsy. It was a formality. We already knew. But maybe we hoped.
Maybe we hoped there was a purer explanation – an aneurysm or some weird heart rhythm we never knew about.
The body was shipped to Kansas from California.
I was away at university in Calgary.
I learned airlines offer a bereavement fare.
There is a catch. You need proof of death.
It makes sense – to a normal person. But to a grieving person it’s hard to appreciate the airline's policy. Couldn’t they just take one look at me and know? Who would pretend this pain for a couple hundred bucks?
The proof of death on the Newton Bracewell funeral home letterhead caught me off guard and took my breath away. It drove it home, straight through my soul.
“This is to inform you that we are handling the arrangements of deceasedRyan Sullivan who passed away on Sunday April 7, 2002 in Chico, California. Mr. Sullivan is being shipped to Kansas City, Kansas for funeral services and burial and his sister, Shanna Sullivan, would like to travel from Calgary, Alberta, Canada to attend the funeral services.”
I remember standing, staring wild-eyed at that paper, time suspended. I read it over and over. I couldn’t catch my breath. The trauma that was shattering me could not have been captured more succinctly or more matter-of-factly. And I had been fighting hard against fact – denying it, wishing it to not be so.
There are only a few real moments I remember.
Falling asleep holding Jason’s hand that first night, knowing my heart could not handle being alone and knowing my world would never be the same. Feeling comforted and completely alone all at once.
Hugging my cousin Brad at the funeral home. A few months apart, they grew up as brothers. Brad was practically my brother too. It was a Hollywood movie moment where we ran toward each other and held tight. It was fierce. It was comfort.
Falling asleep with my brother’s wife, my friend, the night before the funeral. Both of us laying in my bed. Her telling me what it was like to find Ryan dead. I remember peach satin pajamas that were too big for me. Holding on to each other. Crying a little. Never releasing the sobs of anguish that lived right at the surface but letting tears slip down my cheeks as we held each other in the dark. It was wrenching but it was real.
At the time, I didn’t allow myself to be human. I finished assignments. I gave a very fine class presentation on NORAD to fifty fellow students on the same day I flew out for the funeral even though my prof said she would just give me the full marks. I drove around with Julia the entire day before the funeral going from apartment to apartment searching for a couple of Ryan’s basketball buddies so they could have a chance to know he was dead and to come grieve. Ironic and appropriate; controlling and denying my own pain while making space for others to grieve. I wrote and read a little letter to Ryan at the funeral (still so glad I did that and that my mom thought to offer it to me). I comforted others and listened to their stories of Ryan with a wistful smile and a “God has called him home” mantra all the while enraged at those very words. I returned to Calgary a week after the funeral and completed all of my final exams with great marks. I looked pretty together. But it was not real. Maybe it was necessary. I can’t say. Sometimes I wish it had been different yet I believe what Julian of Norwich is famous for saying, All will be well and all manner of things will be well. I am mostly able to feel gentle with myself for the way I managed the mess of my grief then. Mostly, I feel compassion and sadness for that young girl who only knew one way to manage pain: control and caretaking. In many ways, I split myself then. I jumped on to the moving merry go round of life to avoid the pain and left something important behind in that broken, unbearable and pain-filled world-stopping place.
I was back home in Kansas City for the summer of that heart-shattering year.
Home.
What a strange word after 2002.
I would go into Ryan’s room and sit in his old closet where he had practiced his artistic skills by spray-painting graffiti. He was everywhere in that house for me that summer. Haunted. I guess it’s no wonder I worked 60 hours a week.
I had no idea what to do with my grief.
I had secretly started counselling the summer before.
The summer of Ryan’s death, I went to see my counselor.
She asked how my school year had been.
I announced, “My brother died in April but I don’t need to talk about that.”
And I didn’t.
Not with her and not with any therapist I had after her – until two years ago.
 |
I remember getting the mail.
A large manila envelope with the return address of Butte County Sheriff.
My heart was instantly in my throat.
What was this?
Police and autopsy results? Police and autopsy results!
My parents could not see this! They were fractured and hanging by a thread already.
To this day, I’m not actually sure if my parents did see it. I remember making a photocopy for myself. I think I put it back. I poured over those eleven pages like they were the holy grail that would explain everything. I poured over it as if the clinical and medical language would heal my fractured heart.
Do not read the autopsy of someone you love. Just don’t.
It read:
“Date of Birth: 01-04-78”
His birthday: 10-04-78
And I thought, If these idiots cannot even get his birthday right, maybe they didn’t get other things right. Maybe they overlooked things.
It’s straightforward. When you mix cocaine and morphine and xanax …
But I looked for a conspiracy.
Seriously! I looked for a conspiracy.
I was twenty-one and my mind looked for a conspiracy I could figure out.
Raw, primal grief makes a person irrational - Clearly.
The need for certainty, for answers was unbearable.
The need for hope that my beautiful brother had not lost his life in a pill bottle…
Something to help put this explosion of my heart into a box.
I wanted to stop bleeding out.
That summer I went to the cemetery a lot.
The bare patch of earth where he is buried repulsed me and drew me.
A freshly dug grave beside weedy and disregarded headstones of generations past whom I had never met. I think it might have been comforting for my parents to know he was buried with “family” but not for me.
I hated the idea of him there with all of those old rotting bones.
I would lay down, stretched out, on top of the fresh dirt and sob.
I would talk to him.
It was as close to him as I could possibly get laying there.
I dialed his disconnected phone number a lot that summer. Probably some subconscious way of reminding my shell-shocked heart that it was real. Cutting down those last threads of denial and hope that one day he would walk back through the door smiling and laughing at us for falling for the cruel joke.
There are things I think about often. Kicking his butt in spelling bees and always feeling bad about it. Doing his chores for him. Running up to Los Amigos together and ordering a nacho works. Mmm. Keeping score together at the inner-city gym near our house. Getting my feelings hurt by his tell-it-like-it-is style. Sharing a room in our teens for awhile. I don’t remember why we did that. On the surface it seems kind of odd but to me that time is beautiful. It holds some of my fondest memories, laying in bed in the dark and talking about life and our dreams. He’s the only person I told my dreams to back then. He was a safe place for me. Writing English papers for him in high school and college. Making sure he never got busted for being drunk. Funny, I was as straight-laced as they come...for myself... but for Ryan I would have done pretty much anything. I remember always feeling that I wanted to protect him from being hurt. He was my best friend. He was witty and conniving and loyal. He always disregarded my labelled (Property of Shanna: Do Not Eat) treats. He was generous which is probably why he found it so annoying that I was stingy. He cheered me on and sometimes tortured me in that he knew me too well and knew exactly when to use it. I shagged balls for hours while he attempted dunk after dunk in our back yard. He wore those funny shoes and dedicated hours, weeks and months to improving his vertical. He had Keep the Dream tattooed on his arm. He was desperately fighting to keep the dream while doing his best to run away from his demons.
When Ryan was 19 and I was 17, he told me how he had been repeatedly raped by our neighbor when he was 12 and 13. He screamed it with rage in my face. He didn’t know any other way to tell me. Even in the moment, I knew it was the only way he could get it out of his locked up heart. I knew the rage was not intended for me.
There are other things I try not to think about.
Harder things.
Things for which I have only just started forgiving myself, accepting I cannot change them. Things like not getting on a plane when I heard the despair and despondency in his voice a couple of months before he died. I was twenty and $400 seemed like a lot of money that I didn’t have. Now I think, what’s $400 bucks, but then…
Words spoken in my pious judgmental attempt to order his pain within my own life.
Words that went straight into his heart and turned like a knife. Back then, at seventeen, I had no idea wrong words were a dangerous weapon you could unwittingly re-victimize someone who has been sexually abused. If I could take back any single sentence in my life, it would be that one. I have literally felt my heart break over that. I’ve often wished I could have a conversation with Ryan – now, as my 31 year old therapist self – and respond with the wisdom and compassion I knew nothing about then.
I remember a poignant moment at the start of my career. My client was an 11 year old, dark-haired smart, creative and witty boy who was being abused and stripped of his personhood. At one point, I finally had to step back and examine what was driving me in that case because I felt desperate to save the little boy. It was an AHA moment. It’s likely my career path was first driven by the desire to save other kids in the same way I couldn’t save Ryan. Thankfully, God is in the business of redeeming all things. And my work with my clients and their families has become more than a self-centered need to right wrongs that are irretrievable in my own life.
The raw grief I write about here does not change any of the things I have written before about grieving Ryan. They all hold. This is the complexity and gift of grief. All of those things can live together. There is disguised grace in grief. I know this in every part of me. I still know that God joins us in our suffering and in some mysterious and miraculous way can bring beauty from ashes. I know that grief wounds do heal. They don’t always throb with intense pain. I know that God has transformed the canvas of my grief. Instead of angry, ugly splotches He has taught me to add other things to that canvas. There are dark places and there are light places and together they are beautiful.
We don’t want to see suffering. We don’t want to see grief. We want to see people getting better because it makes us feel better. We give good lip service to grief work but often it is just that. Really, grief and loss have a shelf life. On the whole we take a linear approach to grief. It should improve. But the truth is that grief, losing someone you love is something like losing a limb and there are phantom pains from time to time. The phantom pains don’t mean there is something wrong with your grieving. It means you’re alive.
In some ways, the phantom pains in my grief open my heart to more grace. God meets us in our suffering. Since He is close to the brokenhearted, why do we run so hard from our own broken hearts? And I know I’m not the only person who does this. I sometimes wonder if the heart of God aches as we strive, control and guard our broken places – blocking us from being met by Gentle Comfort.
I recently listened to a podcast from On Being with Krista Tippett. It was an interview of Father Greg Boyle who works with gang members in LA. I will keep on listening to that podcast. It is changing me, re-shaping me toward love and Love.
Father Boyle shared the profound wisdom of one of his ‘homies’ whose life is marked with trauma and pain I can barely imagine. After a childhood few of us could survive, addictions, prison and recovery he says, My wounds are my friends. I welcome my wounds…How can I help the wounded if I don’t welcome my own wounds?
This blog post is part of me welcoming my wounds.
Something I’ve struggled with for a long time is figuring out what is my story to tell, what is Ryan’s story, what belongs to others, what belongs in the silence. The silence is always a tricky thing. On the surface it looks trustworthy and careful. But I am learning that shame thrives on silence. It finds its power there. Shame has shackled my heart for too long when it comes to Ryan’s death. I don’t pretend writing on this blog is not self-serving. It is. It serves my journey out of shame and pretending and the false ways I have ordered my life to avoid what hurts to the very core. This journey also makes me alive and authentic. In acknowledging and welcoming my wounds, I sense a deepening ability to accept and be with others in their wounds - Kinship in our wounded and beautiful places.
So I’ve been listening to Who You’d Be Today lately. And snapping at my kids when I feel the pain rising in my throat. It hasn't been graceful. That song and Puff Daddy’s I’ll Be Missing You about Notorious B.I.G. – because, let’s be honest, that was more Ryan’s style – resonate with my heart these days.
So in this 11th year of missing my brother, I am letting myself be unraveled and brokenhearted.
