Happy Birthday, Evan

*Sensitive Content Warning: This story contains references to an infant death caused by medical negligence. There are no graphic accounts or details included.*

Today is my dead nephew’s birthday.

Some years this day only hits in the respect that I worry about how my sister, Tara, is doing. In the years when she’s doing especially badly, it breaks my heart for her. But today I had the revelation that I’ve spent so long worrying about how she is dealing with it that I may have displaced my own grief out of concern for hers, which is so much vaster. Not that I’ve ever lost sight of how sad it was or I thought I was “over it” or anything like that. But I think that all these years I may have set my feelings to the side and today they’re looming over me even larger than the mountain I came to climb to get my mind off of things.

This morning as I drank my coffee, I was writing poetry like usual. A couple of poems in, I realized what the date was and so I began writing about Evan’s death. Not a happy topic and I often get emotional while writing poetry, so tears weren’t unexpected. But I wound up ugly crying by the time I got to the end. Like tears rolling off the chin, snot coming from my nose, heart pounding, profuse sweating, needing to change my shirt afterward type of bawling. It was so dramatic that it even scared the kitten, Tig, who was sleeping on the couch. He sped out the cat door and it was only once he reached the porch that he turned to peer cautiously back toward the sliding door to see what had disturbed his rest.

It’s been a long time since I got that emotional about it. There’s a part of me that wonders if the bigger response this morning, which was unexpected and came seemingly out of nowhere as I was writing, is stemming from the fact that just about everything feels raw right now. Between all the crap happening in life and the world, coupled with starting therapy last month and new meds this week, maybe I’ve got all of my feelings and trauma at the forefront? Or is it the case that this, too, is something that I’ve buried? Repressed? Denied my feelings about? Must I add this to the lengthy (and ever-growing) list of things my inner child needs to heal?

I notice a flat rock beside the stream I’ve been hiking along and as I set down my bag and take a seat to listen to the water flow its course for a bit, I reflect on the irony of this discovery. I’ve often lamented how much of my sister’s life is constructed around her trauma from this. Not judged or resented, because I totally get it. It just saddened me that she got stuck and can’t seem to move on from her grief back into living life fully and joyfully. Kind of like how Mom got stuck in her depression after Dad died.

In contrast, I have gone too far the other way - by not wanting to get lost in grief that way, I was too quick to cast it to the side. I tried to move past it instead of through it. So, like Tara, and like Mom, perhaps I am equally stuck by denying valid, difficult feelings and attempting to live around them.

He would be 26 today. Now that Hunter, Tara’s oldest living child, is in her 20s, the concept of Evan being 26 is a little less difficult to imagine. But when Hunter was still in her teens it was crazy to think about how we’d have a 20+-year-old if he were still living. Since we never saw him in life as anything besides a teeny-tiny infant, it’s hard to picture him as anything besides that.

I don’t think it’s fruitful to get too swept away in picturing what he’d be like had he lived. Anything I conjure up would be a total projection, there’s no way of knowing. But it’s hard not to consider to at least some extent how different life might be for us if he had lived. When I mosey down that path, I don’t dream of it whimsically, but it inevitably would’ve had an effect so I find myself wondering things like: Would Tara be a happier woman? Would she and John have stayed together? Would they still have wound up in Pittsburgh, where they ran out of money so quickly that John impulsively signed up for the Army, which removed them both away from their support network at the time of their greatest need?

Thinking of myself at that time, would I have had even a slightly less difficult time relating to my classmates, who were told by teachers the day of the funeral that people needed to “be nice” to me when I returned to school. Already a social outcast among my homogeneously rural, aggressively Christian peers, who had relentlessly teased and ostracized me for being overweight, this move by the faculty hardly helped matters. Even today, I seethe with fury recalling the letter one classmate wrote me in her effort to “be nice,” which equated my 12-hours-old nephew’s death caused by medical negligence to her sister’s miscarriage. She’d gone so far as to suggest that it was “for the best” because Tara was so young and would now get a “second chance.”

I still have that letter in one of my memory boxes. And apparently I’m still in full possession of my trauma from Evan’s death, too, because whatever bubbled up this morning was clearly unsettled. It wasn’t like the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder episodes I’ve read about and Tara has described; I didn’t feel as though I was reliving the situation. I just felt so terribly bad for younger me. Such profound and heavy sorrow arose.

I was only 13 when Evan died and I’d already lost so many people beginning at the age of 8; first Dad, plus both of his parents, my maternal grandmother, great-uncles and -aunts. We went to so many funerals during that time that my mom, who went by Jo, often joked that she would have to change her name to Job after the biblical figure afflicted with great suffering, including the death of all of his children.

Once I got past the momentary shock of learning that Tara was going to be a teen mother, I was wildly excited when she announced her pregnancy. After all of those bleak years filled with loss and sadness, here was the largest glimmer of hope we’d had in a long time. A baby! Yay! Something pure and joyful and promising with infinite potential and on and on - all the good things. For even that happiest of situations to also then turn into death and grief and a set of medical professionals for Tara to have to battle against, just like Mom had to do so often with Dad’s doctors and the insurance company while he was battling cancer? Sheer devastation.

But it was so long ago. And we’ve had three other children brought into the world since then. In addition to Tara’s two daughters, my other sister, Juli, had a son following many miscarriages (that I only learned of years later). It always struck me that these kiddos are the light at the end of the tunnel, so we should be focused on the present and all of the good things we do have, right?

Right!

But, also wrong…

This is the kind of thinking that often gets me into trouble. It’s similar to something I explained in therapy this week about how all of the death culminated into this wild pressure I put on myself. Like I know death is real, imminent, tragic, and can come at any time. Therefore, we have to appreciate our lives, live every day to the fullest, focus on joy, and all that jazz. But to know this and still spend so much time miserable or feeling like I’m wasting time or not doing enough with my life? It makes me feel like a screw-up. Like I know better than most people that I should live like X, yet here I am doing Y.

But that’s probably exactly why I can’t move past some of this stuff, because I’m measuring my life in relation to it. And I’m constructing myself entirely around who I think I’m supposed to be or how I should feel as a result of it. Not to mention how little grace I’m offering myself at any juncture.

I recently learned that while some mountains are shrinking from erosion, like these Appalachian Mountains that I’m hiking on today, others persist in growing taller as a result of tectonic plates continuing to press against one another far below the surface. But there’s also a third category that actually do both simultaneously and neither grow nor shrink; they stay constant. As I arise from the rock I’m seated on and begin walking up the path between the stream on my right and the pines and ferns to my left, it’s not difficult for me to picture these opposing forces of reduction and expansion resulting in no net change.

In an effort to coax my brain into overcoming its impasse of the past few years since losing my job, getting divorced, and the arrival of COVID-19, I finally accepted that outside help was needed. In addition to beginning therapy, I’m now on my third day of Zoloft atop Wellbutrin, which I began several months back. I don’t love that I went from “I don’t want to take pills for my brain ever” to “I’m taking multiple different pills daily,” but I’m keeping an open mind and know that I’m still working hard on myself in all of the other ways. Therapy, mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises, books, podcasts, videos, journaling, you name it. No part of me is overlooking how much of a priority this is. I’m not doing it perfectly. Sometimes I think I’m just soaking in a ton of information but not applying it, which is the biggest part of the battle! But I’m doing my best and know that I need to honor myself by giving credit where it’s due.

Some days, like yesterday morning when I started the day feeling so bright and positive, I almost wonder if maybe I have finally turned the corner and should reconsider this pharmaceutical regimen. But things turned south in the evening as I wound up over-eating and doom-scrolling on social media instead of exercising and practicing piano as planned. I went to sleep bloated and discouraged, woke up anxious multiple times in the middle of the night, and it didn’t take long to start feeling heavy and dark this morning.

Indeed, one good morning does not equal stabilization. My reluctance to do medications is surely what motivated that brief hope, more than some blind belief that it was “the sign,” but I’m also not sure what that cue will be. Wellbutrin was originally prescribed by my doctor for “situational depression” and we intended for me to be on it for only six months. Five months in, instead of considering dialing back, we’re increasing my medicinal treatment. I am eager to reach a point where this isn’t necessary but have no sense of what gauge to use for that. A good week? A good month? A good year?

It’s common for folks coming off of meds to relapse into whatever state prompted having the prescription in the first place, so I definitely don’t want to rush into some artificial belief that I’m good to go. But I also don’t want to become reliant on the pills to reach a baseline of being “okay.” 

Grappling along this path is causing me to find ways to somehow be comfortable amidst great discomfort. Unlike the physical mountain I’m presently hiking along, occasionally stopping to take photos or rest, I don’t care to dawdle on this mental health journey. But I realize I can’t hasten it along either. Knowing that, though, doesn’t prevent me from expectantly looking to see whether I’ve reached the peak so that I can finally, at last, begin the descent.