Deathiversary

I started writing a book about my middle brother in July of 2020. The idea had been steeping for a while, then a friend was killed in an ATV accident. And one of my favorite people on the planet lost her seemingly healthy middle-aged husband to a heart attack. Finally, a woman I’d known since high school, whom I admired and even loved, also died- all in that month.

I’d always wanted to be a writer, as I’d always wanted to be a teacher. Except I’d never done anything about it other than settle my brain by writing poetry. Poems worked because pulling words out and organizing them brought order to a chaotic mind and required little commitment. I could open a note on my phone and gradually construct a poem while also moving through a typical day.

But there was a nagging, a persistent longing, that became especially troublesome when stuck at home- because it was July of 2020, after all. So I started writing for real. The following is the prologue of the book I’ve been working on since then. It might turn into something real, or it might not. But it needed to be written regardless.

Deathiversary

On the twenty-fourth anniversary of my brother’s accident, I searched his name on Google. I don’t know what I thought I would find. He died in December of 1995 when the internet we know today was still cutting its teeth. I was in college then, and we wrote entire research papers with only print sources from the campus library. I try to explain this to my students now, and they can’t even imagine. 

I typed “Joshua William LeBlanc” into the search bar and found a man in New Brunswick with the same name. There were a few other random name matches, but nothing about my brother. It was like he’d never existed. I closed the tab, opened a new one, and tried again because he had to be mentioned somewhere. Still nothing. I shut my laptop and sat at the end of the bed, legs crossed, for several minutes. Then I pulled his black LA Kings sweatshirt out of its hiding place, put it on, wrapped my arms around myself, and tried to summon him. He felt so far away.

I was twenty-two when Josh died. He was twenty-one, and our little brother, Ben, was seventeen. Twenty-two years on the planet, and the worst loss I’d ever experienced was when my dog, Sid, went missing and turned up dead in a ditch after getting hit by a car on a highway a few miles from our farm. I hadn’t even lost a grandparent yet. But there wasn’t anything that could have prepared me for the acute pain when I was told that my brother had been killed in a snowmobile accident. I heard the words, the air left my lungs, and then came the physical pain.

When I’d heard references to “the pain of grief” in the years leading up to losing Josh, I assumed it was figurative. Now, if I let myself go back to those first few hours, days, and weeks, the memory is mostly of pain. Literal pain. It felt so real that sometimes an “ow” would escape under my breath. It turns out that emotional pain registers in the same part of the brain as physical pain, explaining this phenomenon. I’d thought it was my imagination.

Although it’s important, even essential, to make time to process feelings, I don’t allow myself to visit that long-ago place very often anymore. It used to be that I couldn’t help it. Now, I let my mind go there on his birthday and the anniversary of his death, but that’s about it. Because when I do, it’s like no time has passed, like he just left us. That same pain is as real now as it was then and feels like it could suck the life right out of me.