In the Before

It’s 2020. It’s 2015. Every experience is novel. Everything is 5 years old. I’m exploring new territory while treading well-worn ground, reliving a familiar series of events that seem more foreboding with each passing year.

Paul, Joe and Sarah, May 2015 (Photo credit: Emilia)

Grief is like Groundhog Day.

My youngest brother died, suddenly, in June of 2015. He drowned. He was 24. It was the day after Father’s Day.

Up until that day, the year was wonderful, if not wonderfully unremarkable. Our two babies weren’t babies anymore, but walking, babbling time dominators. Our worlds revolved around them.

We took walks to the park. We ate donuts on Saturday mornings. We traveled to see my mom and my in-laws. My husband, Matt, visited a friend in Beijing, returning with dainty umbrellas and tiny statues for our daughters. I met my college girlfriends in Brooklyn for three days of kid-free conversations, warm walks against a brownstone backdrop and lazy hangovers.

The day after I returned home from New York, Matt ran a marathon and we cheered him on.

My brother came to visit us, but mostly to visit his nieces.

Life was wonderful if not wonderfully unremarkable.

In June, we met my mom and siblings in the Ozarks, swimming and snapping pictures.

Paul died there, and time stopped.

The rest of that year was spent trying to stay sane. Trying to remember and forget. The second half of 2015 is a feeling— of sleeplessness and dread, of routines that suddenly felt foreign. Of the kindness of friends, the comfort of family and the aching presence of unending grief.

But the first half of 2015, those months of travel, reunions, a marathon and mundane weekends. Those months of not knowing what was to come— I find myself living them over and over, every January through June.

Sudden tragedy opens up a time warp. I never knew this before. Now I look back on the first half of that ill-fated year and wonder how I didn’t know. How I was unable to see the speeding train and the missing track.

When we rang in 2015 at our friends’ baby-friendly New Years party, sipping champagne while our daughters slept in our laps, how did I not know?

When we planned Matt’s trip abroad. When my brother came to stay with us and sat on the patio with our oldest daughter, meeting her prized collection of ants. When we drew handmade signs for Matt and clapped as he rounded the twentieth mile. How did we not see it coming?
When Facebook presents my friends and I with pictures of our girls weekend in Fort Greene (“On this day four years ago!”), they see a blissful moment frozen in time.

“That was the best!”

“We need to go back!”

“I can’t believe it’s been four years!”

The texts volley back and forth with fond memories and tentative plans for another reunion.

But in those pictures, I see ignorance. I see myself smiling and laughing and mildly worried about the cost of an Uber to the airport, blindly unaware of what the next month would bring. Through all of it, there was a dark cloud hovering that I just didn’t see.

Or at least it feels that way.

In reality, there was nothing fortuitous about those months leading up to Paul’s death. There was life and love and mundanity and memories.

And then there was an accident.

A terrible accident that opened a yawning chasm between before and after.

Those of us who have experienced tragedy, and maybe that is most of us — we are and will always be straddling that line. Reliving a different year, wondering how we didn’t know and how we will go on.

I think, or maybe I hope, that with each passing year, the time warp will shrink and I will begin to feel more present in the present.

Until then, as social media and my own memories play back images of the before, I’ll remind myself that the ignorance was bliss, and the bliss was beautiful.