Grief Goes On!
Marking my brother's birthday, without my brother.
“I think he knew me better than anyone else,” writes Deborah Levy of her younger brother in Real Estate. This makes my heart hurt, like physically, like a pinch in a vice. I miss my brother, who would be 34 this week. Isn’t it banal to say? Of course I miss him. It hurts me when I’m reminded other people have brothers who didn’t die when they were 26. This is irrational; this is grief.
It’s good training—literary training, even—to have to remind myself of this. To be able to watch people, read people, experience a reality I’ll never know, of getting older with one’s brother also getting older. This is one reason I am baffled by people who want art to conform to their own moral and aesthetic notions: Has your life conformed to your notions, your desires? If so, you’re lucky, and also you should grow the fuck up when it comes to other people’s art. Learn how to do criticism and not just have feelings! I’m not so nice. I know.
A weird thing I’ve noticed by being an eldest child is that the younger siblings are always studying you without you noticing. When Levy wrote that sentence, it was in reference to overhearing her brother describe to another person, in one perfect distillation, the origin of a particular habit of hers. I’m also the eldest grandchild among my cousins on my mother’s side and long estranged from the only cousin I have on my dad’s, who is older than me and whom I did study.
But there wasn’t enough time to really understand what it’s like to have someone older yet not quite grown up around. Neighborhood kids, yes. Girls in the dance school. I observed these people but couldn’t relate—social life has always felt like a grueling performance to me, except in the rare cases that it doesn’t, and I try to never let go of the few people who let me be mask off. The last time I tried to fit in, I was 7 or 8 and took a drag on a 14-year-old’s cigarette. She’d been tasked as babysitter. It didn’t suit me.
So I lost my brother’s observations, his lifelong study of my quirks and behaviors. I lost my brother’s particular humor. He called me once on my birthday and I was surprised he’d remembered; he said, exasperated with my shallow misunderstandings of him, “Of course I remember.”
“Your voice is different,” I told him, standing at my desk in my Bushwick apartment. “Maybe that’s because I’ve been incarcerated,” he replied, with his specific tendency to emphasize an especially baroque word choice to underline my stupidity, my endless naïveté that’s a product of living in books and my head rather than the world itself. Once, I asked if he knew where he was going while driving, and he said, “I am using the global positioning system.” My sister has the same tic, and I feel my heart grow whenever it comes out: There’s Brian. Also: There’s Cameron.
One of the many unfair aspects of losing a sibling is that their habits get solidified as theirs: No longer a shared quirk but a remnant, a haunting. I fight a losing battle, because I can laugh when my sister does this, but it’s followed up by the same pinch in my heart of grief as I had while reading Levy. Sometimes the pinch isn’t grief; it’s rage. I want both of my siblings, both of them giving me shit, both of them making sure I never sit in the front seat of the car, both of them on either side of me on the couch putting their heads on my shoulders in some brief, inexplicable détente. I want them both to be around to make fun of me for casually using words like “détente.”
July is always hard for me since he passed, and this one has been harder. I might say that for the rest of my life; I think they’ll only get harder as he gets farther away from me. I start to slowly self-destruct without realizing why, without fully acknowledging the hollow space in my chest where grief has taken on the role of love and begun to secrete its specific poison. Then I remember why I feel so bad, and I stop. But grief goes on anyway.
This afternoon, at 2 p.m. EST, we will have the Monday writer’s salon for paid subscribers in the newsletter chat. I’m bumping it up today to see whether some folks farther afield in the world, time-zone-wise, might be able to join us. This is a new part of the newsletter so some trial and error is needed!
This Friday, I’ll be sending out the 2025 Desk Book Club reading schedule. Next year, we’ll read more books (up to 6 from 4!) and fiction is in the mix—I’m hoping this allows and invites more folks to take part in the discussions.
Visit The Desk Cookbook for cooking inspiration—all vegan recipes.
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News
My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.
Reading
The forthcoming I Will Do Better: A Father's Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love by Charles Bock, appropriately a memoir of grief
The pinch of grief, when it used to be a punch, which is its own, different problem. Thank you. Sending love to you and your family Alicia.
smirked when i read the bit about people’s need for art to conform to their aesthetics - that was so very well observed. sending love always always but especially so for july ❤️