Through the glass

Misplaced hope. Guilt. Shame. Blame. Anger. Sadness. G R I E F. Not good grief. Bad grief. I don’t even know how to grieve. When you lose a loved one to an overdose it’s like a robbery. When you are robbed of something precious, someone is to blame, someone is at fault, and someone fights to get back what was lost. I spend so much time and energy fighting, in my mind, for yesterday. I want back what was robbed from my family and I. We fought for him. We fought with him. We fought ourselves in our spirits. We enabled him. We cut him off. We opened our homes to him. We prayed for him. We loved him. We love him. We miss him. He’s not his overdose. He’s not his addiction. He’s not his behavior in the height of the addiction. He’s a man, son, father, friend, and my little brother. He bore the same scars that I have. In his mind, in his heart, and on his body. He was the one person in my life who knew. The one person who REALLY knew. He saw what I saw. He was in the trenches with me. There were times when he endured the abuse in my place. There were times when I covered him and received the stripes on my back. The crack of the belt is a sound that will send me speeding to the past, heart racing. He was a survivor. We survived together. The story is that I knew he would pass. It’s a dreadful, awful, unforgettable feeling. It’s a, you know, you know, you know feeling and there’s an emergency rush to try to stop what you know is coming. And I couldn’t do it. The illusion of control. He received Jesus at Eleanor’s dedication and I have that comfort and hopeful expectation of seeing him again in glory. But, in this life I have only memories. Memories that get fuzzy and sometimes skewed. But I see him. Saved pictures, precious happy, healthy, moments on my phone. I see him now more clearly than ever. With more understanding and compassion than ever. With more life and love than ever. Looking at him through the glass.