I wanted to say it's like being under water, but no. That's not quite it. Perhaps more like being in a dream...those ones that have a similar feeling to being under water, but not exactly. I recently wrote about it to a friend after she shared some of her experience about losing her sister with me:
I keep feeling like I'm just a few steps behind my body, as if part of me is still in the hospital standing over his corpse. In the back of my head are the continuous echoes of almost my entire family crying uncontrollably all at once. Everything is so surreal. I took care of George a lot when he was a baby, so I guess it's like losing a son I never really had in addition to a brother I wanted so much for. I'm not falling apart all the time, like I thought I would be. I'm just...half here. I still laugh, discuss, joke and engage, but it's watered down, for lack of a better term. It's like I'm the scientist and the experiment...feeling the effects and recording the data. It's all so unbelievably painful and fascinating all at once.
For now, it seems to be the best I can come up with. I wake up every morning and during that phase of waking, just before we become fully aware, is where it hits that he's really gone...and then I never fully wake up. On work days, I gather my clothes, turn the coffee pot on, get in the shower, get dressed. Still not awake. I have my coffee at the computer, listening to his ipod, sometimes feeling him in the room. Then I continue with the rest of my day, in a sort of dis-jointed high.
This morning was strange. I came to the desk with my coffee and found that the ipod was playing. Strange. I always stop the music before I take the earbuds out. It was in the middle of a Bon Jovi song and rather than start it over, I decided to jump to the next selection. It was a beautiful piano piece by Gackt entitled “Regret”. Lovely and mournful, it trickled its way into my heart as George's presence seemed to fill the space around me. I felt love, comfort and a dull ache all at once. Just as it was getting to be too much, the song ended and gave way to Kiss's “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night”, which with its pefect timing, almost made me chuckle. Something about it was so George.Then I got some Tears for Fears...there's a lot of their stuff on this thing. He only filled his little red ipod just under halfway, but it's still a lot of music. Some of it I expected, but so much of it has caught me off guard. There is so much I'm learning about my baby brother through the music he loved.
I think I'll spend the rest of my life learning from this, really. I'm told that the pain never really leaves, and I believe it. It just gets easier to live with. What an incredible lesson to learn. What a horrible, and fascinating and awe-inspiring lesson.
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