The Earliest Days

“There are certain people in your life you prepare yourself to lose” – Dave Grohl, Nirvana/The Foo Fighters, regarding the tragic death of bandmate Kurt Cobain.

A part of me always knew I would lose Mike early. I expected to. Yet, nothing quite prepares you for the tragedy of losing a sibling much too soon, even if a part of you always knew it was going to happen. My denial lived in me like a thick coating of ice over the frigid water of my debilitating fear that today would be the day I would get the call that he was gone. So, when the call finally came… I was shocked to find myself still completely and utterly unprepared and still falling apart at the seams.

I’ll start with the earliest days, when we didn’t have a care in the world, and tell stories until we reach now, when it often feels like all I seem to have left are cares.

I have 4 brothers, but because of age differences and gaps, I was only close with Mike growing up. Mike was born 3 years after our oldest brother. I was born less than 2 years after that. It took another 5 years before our next brother entered the scene, and then another 2 years after that when our last one came along. This means that I am 5 years younger than our oldest brother and also 5 years older than the next one after me, and 7 years older than the youngest. Mike was less than 2 years older than me, so we had the shortest age gap between us out of everyone. Many people asked us if we were twins at various times growing up, especially once puberty hit for me and we were close to the same height for a while. He was the first best friend I ever had.

My earliest memory involves Mike. I can remember being little enough to have been set to play in a “play pen” (now called “pack n’plays”) with a few toys, and Mike on the outside of it, pressing his face up against the mesh siding in the most grotesque formations to make me laugh. I remember laughing very hard and knowing that he was absolutely the funniest person in my small world. I also remember when he tried to climb up the side of the play pen and made the whole thing tumble over sideways. It scared me and I cried. He frantically hit himself in the face over and over again and made goofy noises to replace my cries with laughter as quickly as possible, so as not to alert the authorities (mom and dad). Of course, it worked. He was always quicker on his feet than I ever was, and than most other people I knew.

Mike and I had very similar personalities and flaws. Of course, we weren’t exactly the same in every way, but we had the same hot-headed temperaments as children, mixed with the same obnoxious tendencies, loudness, defiance, need to be right and have the last word, difficulties with focusing, and optimism to the point of delusion at times. We both loved to be bothersome, and we fixated on bothering each other relentlessly until we’d both explode in hot-headed anger at one another and fists would start to fly. Our dad would often joke that we were either connected at the hip or trying to kill each other, and there was no in-between. The worst punishment was being told we had to separate and no longer look at or speak to one another for a given period of time. Because, even in our moments of blinding fury towards each other, we still preferred to be together over being apart. I always immediately missed him, even if I still also really wanted to hurt him at the same time.

Mike and I both had ADHD/ADD (although because it tends to present differently in women/girls, mine wasn’t diagnosed until adulthood), which made both of us predisposed to issues with drug abuse and other addictions, such as addictions to food, video games, and anything that is stimulating and/or interesting to us. We just can’t stop as easily as most others once we get into doing something we enjoy, or we completely lose track of time and everything else outside of the thing we are fixating on. When people bring up the things that interest us, we also tend to talk about it for way too long, too loudly, overshare, interrupt and talk over others, and just get overall overly excited about it. If you know anyone in my family, this is pretty much all of us to be honest (and most of us have been formally diagnosed with ADHD/ADD).

His story could have very easily been mine as well. I do not believe myself to be any better of a person than he was, and I resent it when people treat me like I am. I believe myself to be lucky to have had many circumstances in my life be different than his. I believe a lot of factors contributed to his life ending up so drastically different than mine, and some of them began in the earliest days of our childhood. I do not believe he “failed” at life because he spent the majority of it battling a very serious and life-threatening substance abuse problem. I believe that it was life (the world) that failed him. I believe that the timing and circumstances of his birth, life, and environment, put him exactly into the path that was his own. It simply always was the way it would be for him. I also don’t think that many other people could have done any better than he did, given the exact same set of circumstances as his. To me, he wasn’t a criminal or an addict or a prison inmate. He was a humble man who selflessly kept giving and trying to help others around him at all times, who treated anyone as a genuine friend (especially the sad, lonely, lost, and broken, who he understood well), who optimistically kept trying and hoping he’d get better, dreaming and always talking of a future that involved helping others like himself someday, until the day he died at the hands of the state prison that repeatedly ignored his requests for medical attention until it was too late. I did, at some level, always expect to lose him much too early in life. However, I never expected to lose him as unjustly as that.

“You’re just out of my reach, oh, in the shadows. Still young but weathered grey. And the world got a little more dim tonight… Though you had to go, I won’t forget your light. I will protect your light.” -SYML