I heard or read (I don’t remember which) that grief was a chronic illness, an illness that can’t be cured, you just have to treat the symptoms as they arise and learn to live with it. So true, I thought.

In my case, I think I first contracted the illness in 1987 when my mom died. When my dad died in 1970, I think I was just too young to realize what I’d lost. Dad was more like a person who hoovered around the periphery of my life. I’ve said this before, but neither he nor mom was demonstrative in showing their love, but I felt that their way of showing love was to make sure that they provided us the best home life they could.

You read about these mothers and daughters who are best friends. I can definitely say that was not the case with my mom. After I married at eighteen and moved out, she was still busy raising my two younger brothers, working full time and having a social life.

She had a large circle of friends, both men and women and hung out at a neighborhood bar, The Blue Lounge” where she developed many friendships. Before she met and married my dad, she had been in love with another man. They wanted to get married, but because she was Lutheran and he was Catholic, Grandma and Grandpa forbade it. Marrying outside your religion just wasn’t done back then. So several years later she met and married my dad, had four children and then was widowed at 41.

Mom was pregnant with my older brother when she married my dad but I don’t think it necessarily was a “shotgun” wedding. It probably just sped the timeline up a bit. For all outward appearances, she and Dad had a good marriage and loved each other. They hardly ever argued. The one argument I remember was on a Friday night. Dad would get his paycheck, take it to the bank and then stop at “Ervel’s Cocktail Lounge” which was a bar/restaurant not far from our house. I guess on this particular Friday night Dad had stayed longer than mom had expected and she was upset about it. I don’t remember all of the argument (and it was more like a louder conversation) but I remember my mom saying “I just wish that place would burn down” and Dad’s response was “Now, Jeanette, you don’t mean that.”

So when Mom died it left a pretty big hole in my life, I was an orphan. But I was busy trying to navigate life as a single mom and then as a married mother in a terrible marriage, and my career as a police officer so I didn’t have a lot of time to grieve and the grief mostly went into remission.

In 1992, when my older brother was diagnosed with cancer, it came back but still in a milder form. It got worse in 1993 when he died, but because we hadn’t been extremely close, it was a still manageable.

By 2019, my grief illness had been in remission for so long, I almost forgot I had it…until November 8, the day my step-daughter committed suicide. I thought my heart would break.

She had been my cohort in crime. We’d go on weekend trips to the lake or day trips to some local place. We always said “What happens at the lake, stays at the lake”, not that we ever really did anything worse than sitting around having some drinks and smoking cigarettes.

I had a particularly bad episode one evening after she died.  I had been making her a personal photo calendar for Christmas for several years. That year in October before she died, I stole quite a few photos from her Facebook page and used them in her calendar. The calendar was delivered shortly before or after she died, I don’t remember which, and I gave it to the Great Hunter.

The evening I was on my way to my book club’s Christmas party, I was talking to the Great Hunder on the phone. He casually mentioned he had given that calendar to his oldest son. I completely lost it. I can remember sobbing and saying he had to get it back. That calendar meant so much more to me than I knew it could ever mean to someone else. His son and daughter were from two different mothers. They were not raised together and didn’t even see or communicate with each other for over ten years when his son moved to Louisiana.

My stepdaughter loved to sing and it seemed she knew the words to every Country song as soon as she heard them on the radio. When she died, I wrote in her obituary:

“Her passing has left an immeasurable hole in the hearts of the people who loved her. The light has dimmed and our world will never be the same without her. We are all better to have known and loved her. We know she is feeling the peace we all await and she’s now seated at the foot of our Savior, singing with the angels.

That Christmas Eve, our choir was singing at the altar in front of the congregation. We started singing the song “Hear the Angels Sing” and a total grief bomb hit me. I started to cry and couldn’t stop. I finally had to leave the altar through a side door and ended up sobbing in the Altar Guild room.

Again the grief illness went into remission until May of 2020. At the height of the Covid epidemic, my brother who was four years younger than me, was diagnosed with Stage 4 Renal Cancer. I couldn’t believe it could happen again. The average life expectancy after being diagnosed with this cancer was eighteen months so we knew we didn’t have a lot of time.

After mom died, the four of us children continued to get together for holidays.  When our children got older, we decided the adults would start getting together for a special evening. We would go to a nice restaurant for dinner and afterward, we would go to a play or a concert and one year we took a carriage ride through Tillis Park to see the Christmas lights.

Because of the Covid restrictions, the Christmas before my brother died to keep him safe since he was doing immunotherapy, we had our get-together in his driveway.  The weather had cooperated and was mild. We sat in lawn chairs, had drinks and snacks and talked. Along with Covid and all its restrictions, this was also the height of Black Lives Matter and Biden election. I, (along with many others) felt Biden had been elected due to voting irregularities. My point of view was different than my brothers who were much more liberal. I must have said something that afternoon that they took offense to although I don’t know what it was. I didn’t care that we had different opinions and assumed they didn’t either, we were family. We had different lives and looked at things differently but they were my brothers, I loved them and respected their right to believe differently from me.

A couple weeks later on January 6, 2021, was a day that would go down in infamy. Not just because of the Capital riots, but because that was the day I saw a side of my younger brother that I didn’t know existed. I had posted a snarky comment on my Facebook page, “Welcome to the United States of Kamelica” or something like that. I’d always held that Biden wouldn’t be able to finish his term and that Kamala would end up being our President (I was close in my prediction). My youngest brother texted me and told me he had stopped following me on Facebook but had deliberately gone to my page to see what I might have posted. He asked me what that statement meant and I told him just that. Much to my complete shock, he told me he was ashamed to have me as a sister and that I needed to lose my hate among some other hurtful things. This was so extremely out of character that I thought he was joking and asked him if he was. He told me he was serious and I was broadsided. Then he told me he didn’t want to talk to me again for several months. I told him not to bother. He told me to have a good life. My last text to him that day was “I love you”.

I was so completely and utterly devastated by this Kamakaze attack that I immediately called my other brother. I told him through sobs what our brother had said to me. He admitted that he’d stopped following me on Facebook too because I was too vocal about my conservative point of view. I don’t remember everything we talked about but I remember saying to him that now he and my brother would have each other and I would have no one. By this time, he was crying too and said I would still have him.

This felt like a death. I loved my little brother. He’d always been so special to me since the day he was born and I was so thankful for the family I had left. It felt as though he had ripped my heart out. We had never spoken a crossword to each other in our lives. I cried the rest of the week and all weekend. I put my framed photos of him in a drawer and took down the framed posters I had made for him that he’d sold in his store. It was just too painful to see them and not think of him and how much he had hurt me and how I was going to live my life without sharing it with him. I’d seen a side of him that I didn’t know existed.

The following Monday I received an envelope in the mail from him. I was afraid of what was in that envelope so I tucked it under a table runner on the island. A couple days later, I gave it to the Great Hunter. I asked him to take it to his room and read it and if it was anything other than an apology, I didn’t want to read it. He came out and said, “You need to read it.” It was an apology. Not as effusive as I would have been had I hurt someone as badly as he hurt me, but nevertheless, it was an apology.

We didn’t have a lot of communication for the next several months, sort of testing the water. That fall he invited me to go with him to a Van Gogh Immersive Exhibit in Indiana. I immediately said yes, that I would like to go, but in my heart, I was very afraid to be with him. I was still very fragile, afraid that something would happen and he would hurt me again. The weekend turned out to be nice. As long as he lived, we never, ever spoke about why he said what he did and how badly he had hurt me.

In May 2021, our brother died. Another reoccurrence of the chronic illness of grief. This episode was bad. This brother was loving and helpful and had a great marriage and a successful career. He was always laughing. We sang together in the church choir and once sang a duet of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”. This was our dad’s favorite song and one that had been sung at his funeral.

After his first round of immunotherapy, my brother said “If I didn’t know I had cancer, I wouldn’t know I have cancer.” The treatment had so little negative effects on him. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay that way and subsequent treatments caused diarrhea, mouth sores, fluid around his lungs, and Atrial Fibrillation. The mouth sores were so bad he basically stopped eating, it was just too painful for him. The doctor finally decided he would take him off the immunotherapy drugs to see if that would help his mouth heal.

He went to the hospital on a Monday because he was experiencing some shortness of breath. He expected to be released by the weekend but the weekend rolled around and he was still in the hospital. He texted us that it might be Monday before he’d be released. He wasn’t released on Monday, in fact, on Tuesday he was placed in hospice. He went home on Thursday. My sister-in-law invited my brother and me to have dinner with them on Saturday night. When we arrived, he was lying on the hospital bed in the living room. As he struggled to get out of bed, his wife objected and he said “I’m going to get up and hug my siblings. He ain’t got me yet.” He put his arms around both of us and hugged us. He was so thin and drawn. He died in his sleep the next night.

It took several years for this episode of chronic grief to subside. My remaining brother and I became closer and saw each other at least every other month if only for lunch, but we texted to stay in touch. Then September 7 happened. My life has been changed forever. I don’t know if this bout of grief will ever fully go away or if I will just live the rest of my life limping along.

I find that I’m afraid of everything, well, mainly afraid of losing someone else that I love or someone I love losing someone that would cause them the grief I’ve felt.

I react to things in ways that I never would have in the past. My son let his dog get too close to the campfire and she singed her tail. I’d told him repeatedly that I was afraid she would get hurt but he didn’t listen. When this happened although she wasn’t hurt, I dissolved in tears.

I volunteered to stay with my son’s mother-in-law who has dementia so he and my daughter-in-law could go to dinner. The mother-in-law, who still talks but is incoherent began exhibiting symptoms of having a heart attack, clutching her chest and rocking back and forth. It scared me so badly that I called my daughter-in-law and asked her to come home. She did, with an ambulance in tow. Turned out, the mother-in-law was fine but the stress of the event made me dissolve into tears.

I turned seventy last year and the Great Hunter is turning eighty in a couple months. We are getting older, which terrifies me. We are both in good health and he has outlived two of his younger brothers and is older than the average man’s lifespan.

I make bonehead mistakes. I underestimated the distance (or speed) between the car and the truck I merged with and was almost smashed by the tractor-trailer. I didn’t even realize I had done anything wrong until I heard the horn blaring behind me, it was a long, “are you a dumb-shit” type horn honk. I looked in my rearview mirror and there it was, the monolithic grill of an eighteen-wheeler right on my bumper.

These last five years have definitely taken their toll on me. I was always the strong one, the cop who took care of everything. I believe my youngest brother must have had the grief illness worse than me, and to him, it was fatal.

There’s no real treatment for the illness of chronic grief. The best way is to treat the symptoms when the episodes arise. This is my treatment. (Sorry it’s so long.)

Thank you for reading.