Half a Year

Today is 6 months…6 bloody months since you have gone. I think about you constantly, but not so much with such despair as I used too. I still feel the emptiness where your life once resided within me, but that’s something that will never go away. The anger has slowly dissipated, and unfortunately, I’m moving into acceptance. Acceptance that I’ll never hug you again, acceptance that I’ll never speak to you again, acceptance that I’ll never buy you a Christmas gift again, acceptance that I will no longer share a birthday with you again, acceptance that I’m a twinless twin.

Reaching acceptance is vital, for me, for my life, for my sanity. I replay that moment every day, I hear mom's voice telling me you are gone, I hear myself screaming, it's a constant loop inside my head. It doesn’t mean I still don’t cry myself to sleep at night sometimes (or the fact that I’m crying as I write this). But I had to accept the choices you made, and I have to accept that there is absolutely nothing I could have done to save you. Though, I have wished a thousand times to bring you back and I’ve bartered and begged to make this just a nightmare that I can wake up from instead of this now being my life, I have to accept that it is.

6 months….

So much has happened in 6 months (half a year), yet I still feel like I just got the call saying you were gone. My life has changed, I’ve changed, my relationships have changed, my heart has changed. I’m no longer the girl I was before February 18, 2019 at 11am. Your death taught me life is just too damn short, too short to be wasting it on people who use you, too short to waste it on materialistic stuff, too short to not make the best out of every moment, too short to not be going on adventures and too short to be worrying about where you stand with people and their opinion of you. It’s insane to think how in one second a simple phone call can change the trajectory of your life. In one little second my entire life changed, right there and I didn’t even realize it at the time.

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You have visited me, I know that. In dreams mostly, especially in the dream with the eagle, I know it was you and I know you knew I needed you then. I’m sorry I don’t visit your grave often, but, it’s very hard for me to stare at your name on your stone and it feels like someone has this grip around my throat and I can’t catch my breath and I need to run and the further I get away from your grave the less the grip has on my throat and more air that is reaching my lungs.

I’ve dreaded today, more so than any other month. For some reason 6 months seems monumental to me. Like, how the hell have you been gone for half a year already and also, DAMN IT, in only a short 6 more months I’ll need to deal with it being a year. In another 6 more months I’ll need to remember your death and try to celebrate turning another year older without you. Why did you have to die the day before our birthday? Like, of all the fucking days! It feels so cruel, like a joke that’s being played on me, that for the rest of my life I’ll need to remember your passing and then pretend to be happy I’m growing old without you.

I started grief counseling, because, well, to be honest, because I cannot understand how to disconnect my life from yours/ours. The connection our souls had, being twins, is so unimaginable to those who are not. But I have never had just my life, it is always ours and I honestly don’t know how to be just me. It’s weird that my entire life I’ve always been addressed as Brandy and Aaron, oh the twins, etc. Now it’s Brandy (with pity), the twinless twin.

Pastor Lee spoke about dashes at your funeral, the dash that is in between our birthday and our death day. The importance of filling that dash with great memories, with great love and with kindness. To lead a life you are proud of.  I hope that I’m doing just that, spending my dash with a life that makes you proud. I have loved you since conception…I’ll never stop loving you, I’ll never stop missing you.

The Dash Poem
By Linda Ellis

I read of a man who stood to speak
at the funeral of a friend
He referred to the dates on his tombstone
from the beginning to the end.

He noted that first came the date of his birth
and spoke the following date with tears,
But he said what mattered most of all
was the dash between those years.

For that dash represents all the time
that he spent alive on earth.
And now only those who loved him
know what that little line is worth.

For it matters not how much we own;
the cars, the house, the cash,
What matters is how we live and love
and how we spend our dash.