You Are Not Your Worst Day

I was seventeen years old when my older brother died, and Julia, my little sister, was fourteen. We were young and our parents did the best they could to walk with us through the loss of him—they wanted to protect us, they wanted the pain to be less difficult to carry. So, they told us a narrative, one I think they really wanted to believe too, because the questions that lay in the wake of Bruce’s death were scary and big, and sometimes it’s easier to pretend that we don’t know.

I had Bruce’s story (or at least the story I’d been told) so beautifully packaged that it rolled off my tongue without effort whenever someone would say, “do you mind me asking how he died?” But the words always tasted a little false on my lips—they weren’t quite right, they were sprinkled with mendacity and they didn’t leave enough room for the truth.

There were several nights in the years right after Bruce’s death, where I would be overcome by what I now recognize as deep agony, completely overwhelmed by the idea that he had taken his life in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 21, 2008. And I would weep hard because I didn’t know how to reconcile this possible truth with the hideous fact that I had been told suicide was a direct line to hell.

So, I kept telling the story I’d been told—the story of Bruce going to rehab and coming back changed. The story of Bruce spending the last week of his life in Minnesota and crying as he sang the words to How Great Thou Art, and asking to stay up late to do bible study with his friends. The story that left out the part about him getting kicked out of rehab early, or how he got drunk at a party the night before he left for Minnesota, and nearly died when he attempted to drive himself home, or that he had been drinking the night he died.

The story that left out the many times I lay awake at boarding school the weeks before he went to rehab, knowing the phone would ring and I’d have to talk Bruce off a sometimes literal, sometimes figurative ledge. Or the story that left out the panic I felt two days before Bruce died, when I awoke to several missed phone calls from him and a text that read, “I’m done.”

I don’t know if Bruce took his own life, but I think it’s likely or at the very least, possible. At seventeen, this wasn’t something I knew how to resolve or integrate because of the cultural and religious stigmas surrounding suicide. But as I’ve worked through processing the loss of Bruce over the last thirteen years, I’ve been able to unlearn these harmful imputations and replace them with compassion and grace. And, in the midst of that, I’ve been able truly understand that we are not our worst day—that Bruce was not his worst day.

Will I know the truth about Bruce’s death this side of heaven? Probably not, and I’m okay with that. But I do want Bruce to know that his story matters and I want to leave space for the mystery and the unknown in his narrative.

I want Bruce to be free from the expectations I had for him, to be whoever it is that he yearned to be, and to know that no matter what—no matter how he left this earth—that he is seen, and known, and deeply loved.

Rest in peace, Bruce, you are loved just as you are.