This March 1st (2026) marks 5 years now since my brother Mike died. In my last post I talked about the last time I saw him alive, as he died right near the end of the prison sentence determined at that court hearing.
If you haven’t listened to the podcast episodes linked in the prior posting, now is the time to go back and listen to those before proceeding because they tell a lot of details that I will now assume are already known moving forward. Now we should be all caught up on what they accused him of at the prison in order have a scapegoat so a correctional officer wouldn’t get into trouble and how we learned that there is legally no protection against that because, as the lawyer my parents contacted to try and fight their claim or get anyone to investigate it said: they didn’t infringe on any of his civil rights as a prisoner by revoking “privileges.” Or in other words, putting a big ticket on his account to block his access to the commissary wasn’t considered to be infringing on his legal rights as a prisoner because access to the commissary is considered a “privilege,” not a “right.” The commissary, by the way, is their only access to basic hygiene items like toothbrushes, deodorant, soap, etc. These basic hygiene items are not provided by the prison and must be bought at jacked up prices that slave wages or help from loved ones on the outside can pay for. So essentially, they cut off his access to basic hygiene items/care and called this “revoking privileges” because hygiene is apparently not considered a basic human right for prisoners, and nothing in the law can really stop this from happening. They can just kind of do it all they want. Then he got sick with pneumonia, a bacterial infection in his lungs that turned into sepsis, requested to see a doctor, and they delayed/denied him medical care until it was too late.
If you go back to listen to the podcast episodes, I also read out the letters he wrote to me from prison, his own words and his own thoughts on things at that time of his life. His voice is important. His words are important. They are his.
Now, I am prepared to tell about the aftermath: everything that has occurred since his death almost 5 years ago until now. I have sat in the silence with my grief a lot over the past 5 years and over that span of time I have let it transform me into a softer, more aware person. I started to see what I couldn’t before. Grief has a way of doing that if you let it. Sometimes, grief is a tool the universe uses to teach a person empathy or to soften a heart that needs some softening, some humbling. Just as it is for many people, my grief became my wake up call.
Something about Mike’s death feels intentional, fated if you will. These days I lean into the belief that I came here to this life to learn this specific lesson, and then help save others from similar pain by being willing to self-reflect, learn, forgive, and heal out loud for everyone to see. If it saves anyone else, great. I guess the hardest part is knowing what I now know and trying to save others from the same pain but they don’t want to hear it or see it. They want to keep their hardened heart and their tendency to de-humanize other people because it feels so much easier than facing the truth and the pain. I know that some people just won’t, not until death or some other tragedy comes to knock on their own door, claiming someone they personally know and love. The thing about pain is that it eventually will demand to be felt, seen, witnessed. So you can avoid trying to face it or feel it or see it, but eventually it will always come up to the surface and it will hurt even worse the longer it was avoided, plus potentially hurt more people in the process once it finally bubbles up. For anyone who is open to learning from my life lessons, I will gladly lay them all out here. I genuinely hope it helps someone else avoid some pain and soften their heart the easier way. However, if not one soul wants to take anything I have to say seriously I know at the very least that getting it all out of me in written form is beneficial for my own healing. So, heed my warnings or don’t. That is your own call to make.
I returned back into an old notebook I had been using around the time of Mike’s death where I know I wrote out a lot of how I was feeling and what I was experiencing at the time, at the request of the grief counselor I had been seeing then. I honestly haven’t even looked at this notebook since that first year. It truly feels like a time capsule, like I am traveling back to another place in time, to a completely different version of myself altogether. I cringed a lot, as I do when I read my earliest posts from this very blog, which I commit to not going back and rewriting now. I believe in being authentic and at that time, that was exactly who I was, even if she no longer is even by just 5 years later. Not that I would change anything major, just mostly my own storytelling choices, some of my word usage and tone of voice and even some perspective. But I remind myself of the quote “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough” by Alain de Botton.
The woman who started this blog 4ish years ago was not ready to write much of what I am now ready to write. But 5 years ago… that was fully on the other side of the coin than I am now. It’s wild how grief can cause an ego death just as thoroughly as any drug-induced state possibly could. Yes, here we are 5ish years down the road and I cringe and cry and cringe some more, and then cry some more, as I re-read all the little details that I have since forgotten; brought back to me now, back from the dead to soothe… or to haunt? Probably both.
I acknowledged my issue with avoidance that I struggle with still —as we can all see by how long it has taken for me to write out just a few blog posts— the day that I wrote out all the details of what happened to Mike: 4/08/21. I talked about how shortly before Mike died I had been having a conversation with our oldest brother admitting that I had been avoiding/procrastinating responding to Mike’s letters every time they came. I avoided checking to see if I had any new emails from him and I avoided responding to the ones I had read. Weeks would go by between times he would hear from me, sometimes months. I know he communicated with our oldest brother almost daily. How deeply grateful I am to him for always being there for Mike and being the only one in Mike’s life who consistently was. I love him so much for that.
In the conversation I had with our oldest brother I had confessed to him that I thought perhaps I tended to avoid answering Mike’s letters because I didn’t like being reminded of how sad I was that he was in there, that he was wasting away in a cage like he was. I didn’t like being reminded of his pain. I didn’t like it, so I didn’t look. I couldn’t handle it. Or I chose not to handle it.
I vowed to do better. But soon after this, he died.
He died as everyone looked away from him but our oldest brother. My intuition, and a QHHT hypnotherapy session I once did, tell me that part of his role (although not his entire life purpose) was to go through it all with Mike so he wouldn’t have to do it alone. That he didn’t want Mike to be completely alone and that he also volunteered to be firstborn to shoulder the brunt of young inexperienced emotionally avoidant parents and try to shield the ones who came after him from as much of the generational pain and trauma as possible. If that’s real, I love him so much for that too.
The day that shifted everything:
I was on my way back from a girl’s weekend in Vegas with my sister-in-law, the one married to my younger brother just younger than me, when she got a call from my brother, her husband. Her face turned dead serious as she spoke quietly in Portuguese to him, and I felt like a bowling ball dropped deep into my gut. She put him on speakerphone and he said “Hey, so we’re actually heading out the door right now to… to Tucson.”
I was confused and surprised, “What? Why???”
Then in a very shaky voice he said, “Mike is in the hospital apparently. It’s… it’s really bad. They don’t think he’s going to make it.” His voice cracked as he said it.
“What happened?!?! A drug overdose?” I replied.
“I don’t know, something to do with drugs I guess.” This was incorrect, as those of you who listened to the podcast episode know. You would also know that I constantly feared that any money I gave him would be used to get drugs that would end his life. This was another reason I avoided him. I couldn’t look as he withered away but I also feared making it worse. So, I stayed frozen in my fear and pain most of the time. Doing nothing to help. Doing nothing to hurt. Not knowing what exactly to do. Whenever I could snap myself out of it, I helped here and there. Then I would wait in worry and fear… wait for the call that I accidentally sent him to his grave. I let fear keep me from reaching out, from connecting, from helping.
So when the moment really did come, the first thing I felt was panic. I started racking my brain trying to remember if I had sent the money that I told him just days ago I would send. It was really complicated trying to send him money now because they put that ticket on his account so we couldn’t just send money to his account or he wouldn’t actually get it. He would give me the cash app handle of some friend’s girlfriend on the outside and have it put on his account instead and then his buddy would buy things for him from the commissary. This didn’t always work and it was complicated so it wasn’t something he was having anyone do for him too often, but he had been very sick lately and just wanted something to eat that he wouldn’t have to get out of bed and go to the food hall to go get. “Did I ever end up sending that money through?” I frantically thought to myself. I actually tried but was having trouble with the site the prison system uses for emailing inmates. It seemed to be down. So, I resolved to do it once I got home from this trip. I exhaled, but it did not dispel the fear in me.
I told him we would head straight to Tucson as well and meet them there. I worked on calming myself enough to be able to get the words out and then called my husband to let him know. I had a strong feeling that this was it: the moment I knew I didn’t want to see. The one I had been avoiding thinking about ever coming. Some part of me deep down knew from the moment my younger brother’s voice cracked. And I knew he knew too. A Pisces like him recognizes. That crack was truth speaking out “This is it.”
The happy chatter my sister-in-law and I shared at the start of the drive turned into a heavy silence, and a steady stream of silent tears became the woebegone rivers forging their paths down the stony terrain of my face. This was our state for the entire rest of the 4 hours we still had left until Tucson. She comforted but she also let the silence be, and sometimes that is just what is best. A Scorpio like her understands: Sometimes, we just gotta let things be silent and still.
When we finally got to Tucson I got an update from my parents and younger brother who had been there. They had let my parents through but were not wanting to let my brother and I back to see him because we were “not on the approved list.” There was a whole long back and forth, including a call made to the warden of the prison, and hours later we were finally let back.
We were not allowed to bring back our phones or anything else to the ICU where he was, so there are no photos, which is fine with me. He didn’t even look like himself anyway. I mean, he did. There was the same crab tattoo to signify his sun sign, cancer, the same letters to spell out his daughter’s name tattooed right over his heart; but what lie there on that bed in the ICU being made to breathe by violent machines was just a vacant body and I knew it. I felt it before I even talked to the doctor. I remember it being the first thing I felt. I know my younger brother felt this too because he said so later on. Like I said, a Pisces knows. They feel/sense these things at a deeper level than words or logic can express. I think all people with major water sign placements do, as the water element is highly intuitive.
I asked the doctor what was going on, why this happened, and how drugs came into play.
“What? Drugs? No, this was sepsis from an infection that looks like it started in his lungs and then spread to his bloodstream.” He seemed perplexed by the fact that drugs kept being brought up at all. I asked him the direct question no one else seemed to want to ask: if he thought he was going to even make it through the night.
“No, I don’t think so unfortunately. I hate to say never, because you know miracles do happen as I have seen with my own eyes, but at this point that’s what it would take: a miracle.” I felt a strong sense of finality with his words and a confirmation was sent to my heart in that moment: “this is it.”
I told my parents when we went outside because I wanted them to emotionally prepare themselves. My dad, unsurprisingly, did not want to hear it. My mom, as usual, looked somber but said nothing. We got the call just past midnight that night.
The drive home was a 2 hour one for me, after a long day filled with hours of driving already. My younger brother and his wife called and asked if I was okay to drive myself home or if I would prefer to have them take me and then come get my car tomorrow when I come back to the hospital again (assuming we all will come every day we can, to see him and sit with him for as long as we were allowed to), but I knew there was no going back to that hospital. I also knew Mike was joining me for my drive home and I welcomed his haunting company. I wanted to allow silence to let me feel his presence nearby. More silent tears the whole way home… but I felt him there the whole way home too, making sure I made it safely, making sure I wasn’t alone. Just as clearly as if he really had physically been right there in my passenger seat keeping me company. I kept expecting to look over and see him there because of how clearly it felt that he was.
It hits me now how much wisdom lies within grief when we can quiet ourselves enough to listen to it, and when we can allow it to soften us rather than harden us. My brother died at the hands of a very faulty justice system and at the fault of people who couldn’t see beyond the prison jumpsuit and the exterior, who assumed all kinds of things about the person he was because dehumanizing him made it easier to justify putting him in a cage and treating him as sub-human.
Few people beyond my husband know this, but within the last year I myself ended up in the emergency room for pneumonia. I was treated and healed, but there were moments in the thick of it where I couldn’t breathe at all without severe pain and I was scared. The difference between me and Mike was simply access to healthcare and being treated with humanity. I lived on so easily where he died, because circumstances were simply different for me. Circumstances largely beyond either of our control, where it was easy for others to dehumanize him and just walk on by as he suffered. No one looked, no one cared, no one helped. Why? Because of the label: criminal. In this country, when people are in pain and in need of saving/helping we toss them in cages and call them criminals for having acted out and we treat them as irredeemable, unforgivable, worthless… like trash we toss in a garbage bin. Yet, we understand as mothers that when our children act up it is a cry for help, a need not being met. Negative behavior is a way to communicate to the world that all is not well within when someone doesn’t have the means, education, or ability to communicate it any other way. Adults are not so different than that, especially ones who never had any one teach them how to properly express their unmet emotional needs.
There are many labels we use in society to help us de-humanize others in order to be able to look away from their pain: criminal, illegal, homeless, lazy… It’s easier to decide they are simply less worthy humans than it is to ask ourselves why or look under the hood to see what might be the real problem. It is easier than admitting we might be wrong or don’t have all the information, and certainly easier than doing the work of caring. Especially because many people know that actually addressing the problem often means making changes to how things are currently being done, and change is hard and inconvenient. So, we look away. We ignore it. We avoid thinking about it. If we take everyone whose pain is spilling out of themselves and lock them up in cages away from the rest of society then we get to pretend like the problems don’t exist. And people like my brother continue to die, completely neglected and cast out from their community instead of helped.
Over the first several months after his death I felt him the strongest as I put together a book to give his daughter. I knew he wanted me to give her something that would help her feel his love for her and I knew, knowing Mike, that had to include music. He felt through music, expressed himself through music, and loved through music. He exists within the very beats and notes of certain songs even now. If I close my eyes and listen to the music that spoke to his soul most, I feel him right there in the songs. So I compiled a book of pictures of him as a baby and growing up, so she would have something of her dad’s. I included a list of songs that I knew would express his love for her. The most interesting part of this whole project was that half of the songs that ended up on her list I hadn’t ever even heard before I started on the project. They just all found there way to me and every time I heard a song that felt right, it got put into a playlist for her.
This is how Mike communicates to me even now: through music.
One time more recently, I went to a psychic medium’s group mediumship night and she said a bunch of stuff to me about Mike, but it was the ride home that really hit me strongest. I said out loud “Ok Mike, you choose the next songs” and I put my playlist on shuffle. On came on the song “Remember Me” from the movie Coco. I thought that was beautiful. Then the song finished, and the next one that came up on shuffle was a different version of the same exact song a second time. The playlist I had on has over 200 songs and is 13 hours long. The odds of that happening randomly were pretty small.
So, in the spirit of the way Mike himself communicates most, below are 3 songs for you.
Remember Me, from Coco, so you can remember what the lyrics say in this song.
One song that I had never heard before it went onto his daughter’s playlist “My Wildest Dreams” by Ron Pope
One song in which I can always feel his presence within the bass notes: “Soul to Squeeze” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This one is because I grew up hearing this bass line coming from Mike’s bedroom incessantly for months and even years as he practiced it and then just loved to play it. A song he felt a deep connection to.
Thirty-Three 