Grief has taught me many things about the fragility of lifeand the finality of death.
To lose that which means the most to usis a lesson in helplessness and humility and survival.
After being stripped of any illusions of control I might have harbored,
I had to decide what questions were still worth asking.I quickly realized that the most obvious ones --
Why my brother? Why me? --were as pointless as they were inevitable.
Any appeal to fairness was absurd.
I was led by my fellow sufferers,those I loved and those who had also endured irredeemable losses,to find reasons to go on.
Like all who mournI learned an abiding hatred for the word "closure,"with its comforting implicationsthat grief is a time-limited process from which we will all recover.
The idea that I could reach a point when I would no longer miss my brother was obscene to me and I dismissed it.
I had to accept the reality that I would never be the same person,that some part of my heart, perhaps the best part,had been cut out and buried with my sons.What was left?Now there was a question worth contemplating.
