Losing My Brother

I lost my brother when I was very young.

At the age of three, I didn’t understand death the way adults do. I understood the world through television — through stories where help always arrived in time. When they took him away in an ambulance, I believed everything would be okay. On TV, 911 saved everybody. I remember watching the ambulance drive away with my baby brother truly at ease because I just knew he would be coming home.

At his funeral, I shushed my cousin.

I thought I could hear my brother breathing again.

That moment never left me.

Not only because of the grief, but because it was one of my earliest realizations that adults aren’t always safe — and the world doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to.

No one had explained what was happening in a way a child could understand. And so my body filled in the gaps the only way it could: with hope, confusion, and the belief that rescue was just late, not impossible.

I understand now why stories about children dying affect me the deepest. Why they bring a kind of despair that feels physical. When I hear about children being harmed, it doesn’t stay at a distance — it pulls me back into that three-year-old place where belief and reality first shattered.

Grief like that doesn’t disappear.

It sits in your mind, your body, your very being.

Your early years are formative, and it shows up years later — in vigilance, in protectiveness. It shows up in the quiet understanding that some losses shape you before you ever have language for them.

After my brother passed, I looked at the North Star — the one that sits near the moon — and feel, in a way I can’t fully explain, that it was him. As a child, I believed he had become that star. Something steady. Something constant. Something that stayed. Something I could always find.

I still stare at that star today.

As an adult, I carry it with me in a different way now — a moon and a star, inked onto my body in memory of him.

I'm not overcome with grief anymore, though I still tear up when I think of him. Or when I write about him. When he left, I had a hole in my heart, that never quite got filled, and it won't, because that piece of my heart is always meant for him.

I’m writing this not because I’m falling apart, but because I finally understand it more clearly. Because I can look back with compassion for the child I was — the one who believed in rescue, who listened for breath, who found her brother in the sky when the world stopped making sense.

Healing doesn’t mean forgetting. I will never forget.

It means understanding what we were too young to hold at the time.

His life was short, but his presence never left me. He will be with me always.