When I was in my early 30s, I met a woman named Erin while trekking in the Himalayas. We spent two weeks exploring Nepal before she flew home to Australia.
Three years later, we were married.
She smiles a lot, my wife, and walks with a bounce in her step. But every now and then, a stickiness seems to cling to her. This invisible form hangs onto her shoulders and makes everything more difficult – even everyday things like shopping for groceries or going for a walk.
In those two weeks in Nepal, Erin and I were strolling along a winding road in a mountain town when a revelation shot out of her.
“My brother died when we were kids,” she said.
This wasn’t an invitation to a long discussion about her lingering grief. It was just an acknowledgment of something significant from her past, something we would talk about again if we became anything more than a travel romance.
I responded by admitting that I have no idea how it would feel to lose a brother.
A dozen years have passed and we now have two children, but I still don’t know a lot about David. I know that he died of leukaemia when he was 12 and Erin was 10. I know that he wasn’t quite the chatterbox that Erin is, that he always had to nag her to stop talking at night so he could get some sleep. In pictures, he looks like such a happy boy, with a bright smile, sunny blond hair and sparkly blue eyes. Erin looks happy in those pictures, too. I see in her young eyes the same fondness for David that our daughter has for her older brother.
One Saturday morning, while I’m playing with Lego alongside my primary school-aged son, I ask him about his uncle.
Erin and David as kids. Source: Supplied
“Does it feel sad that you’ll never get to meet Uncle David?”
“Yeah,” my son says, looking down at his Lego. He keeps playing, and then moments later, he looks up and says, “But Daddy, maybe I will meet him one day.”
“Not really, buddy,” I say. “Uncle David died. And when people die, they don’t come back.”
“Daddy, that’s sad.”
I nod and tell him that it’s okay if he feels sad. That if he ever wants to talk about David, to find out what he was like, well, maybe he could ask Mummy.
Sometimes I get the urge to tell Erin to let it all out. To speak to us about David. To acknowledge her loss and her grief, and to celebrate the 10 years she did have with him. I’ve never pushed her because I sense how much it hurts. I see it in the look on her face when she flicks through old photo albums and comes across a picture of David in hospital, his sparkly blue eyes now grey and downcast, his bright smile turned dull, his sunny blond hair fallen out.
One evening, while Erin and I are at a restaurant having dinner, she starts to talk about David. She tells me how silly she feels that his death is still affecting her, after so many years. She says it feels like people expect her to be over it by now, but that she still really misses him, not just on his birthday, when she posts a picture of him on Facebook, but at other times, too.
“Of course it still affects you,” I say. “I don’t think anybody expects you to forget.”
“It’s come back since we had kids. I think about them, what they’re missing out on.”
Things would be so different if he were here.
I picture the adult David in our backyard on a summer’s day, unfurling the hose, turning it on and guffawing as he chases his niece and nephew and soaks them wet as they giggle and squeal. I imagine me and David taking the kids fishing off an old wooden jetty, helping them to bait their hooks and reel in their first catches.
Source: Supplied
At the restaurant, Erin’s crying, and I tell her that I also feel sad for our children. And even though I’ll never know how it feels to lose a sibling at such a young age, I feel sad for her, too. Sometimes, I even feel sad for myself.
“If David was anything like you,” I say, “we’d have got along. We might have been really good friends.”
This makes her cry even more, and then I cry with her. Both of us, there in the restaurant, tears flowing down our cheeks as we hold each other’s hands across the table, waiters walking towards us and then awkwardly darting away.
I’m not sure if you can grieve for someone you never knew. But I do know that thinking about David dying, about the heartache it has caused Erin and her family, produces a dreadful tightness in my chest. I imagine multiplying that feeling by 10, or by a thousand, and I know that doesn’t come close to how Erin feels when the stickiness clings.
I never knew David, and I never will know him. But I do have a brother and a sister. I know that if I’d lost them when we were kids, or even if I lost them right now, the stickiness would cling to me, too.
