August 2012
Mark, your unexpected passing has pushed me—and many who loved you, I’m sure—through a number of stages in adjusting to the experience. And adjusting to life without your presence.
Until you died, I’d been spared the kind of grief that comes from losing someone very close. I’d just had very different relationships with family members who’d preceded you in moving on.
What has surprised me as I have been moving through this is how physically I have felt your loss. For me there has been a profound energetic adjustment to your leaving this world. The immediacy of that has been perhaps the biggest surprise—all the more so because you’ve led a fairly private and separate adult life, and we didn’t see each other very often the last few years. Despite that, with you ‘here’ I felt you; I knew you were in my life. That physical sense has been subtracted now. That hole doesn’t feel like something that will be filled. So life now is about navigating that empty space in my being. Not much fun, as of yet.
So, Mark: the note from this point in grieving is that I don’t just miss you in my heart, which aches with a sadness that just doesn’t go away. But I also miss you with my body. Just can’t get past the ‘little brother’s gone’ reality my body has—framed that way because of the power, I suppose, of the times we spent together as children.
And now, as the ocean has claimed what the Earth gave you, we claim the loving and lovable memories of all you have been to so many of us throughout all the phases of your life and loves. I truly am glad, and grateful, that you are out of pain now, and if what I believe is true, you are moving on to the next phase of whatever.
I just wanted to send you a love letter. I miss you.
In 2012, my brother died. It was an unexpected death, and being ambushed by grief took me through a new kind of journey.
It continues, triggered by memories, circumstances, pictures and conversations.
I’m not sure where it’s leading me, and I don’t much like the ride. The story of my brother’s life is a complex mix of plot lines, of talents expressed, of relationships limited by broken places he struggled to mend.
I had sort of assumed over the years that grief was something of a self-centered process: because someone has left your life, you grieve over what’s missing—from you. What I had not counted on was the experience of such an energetic readjustment: that yes, someone is gone from my energetic field of relationships, but while there is a very deep sadness involved, I had not counted on how much the subtraction of Mark pulled on so many relationships.
You slipped your body’s crippling bonds
And now both are free:
The sea reclaims the wind-whipped mist of what the Earth gave you
And you return to your Source
Nameless embrace, wholeness reclaimed.
Stephen Bolles
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