Requiem for a death

"Grief" as a word has become almost meaningless, and "anniversary" is a terrible word for observing the day someone died. Maybe there's solace in something ancient and forgotten...

Around the time Alice in Chains released Black Gives Way to Blue, my brother hung himself in the bathroom of our childhood home.

It’s not a particularly well-known album, neither critically acclaimed nor condemned. But I spun it over and over until I knew each chord and pause like the grooves and whorls in the stairs of that house. I can still feel each one imprinted on the soles of my feet: the dents and divots, the varnish cracks and joinery seams, the fleeting tickle of each distinct, familiar creak.

“All tomorrows
Haunted by your ghost.
Lay down, black gives way to blue.
Lay down, I’ll remember you.”

It has been almost twenty years now, and I have long accepted that a part of me never left that house. If ghosts exist, and I’m not sure they do, I think perhaps they’re imprints of the pain left behind when something truly annihilating occurs. Echoes burned into the fabric of space and time, pacing in a loop, lonely and frightening.

If so, our old staircase is full of ghosts.

Life since has been good to me, but I won’t ever be the same again. I am diminished, paler and smaller. It’s not something fixable, and to say this is neither catastrophizing nor bitterness. It is not shame, rage or despair. It simply is.

“Fading out by design
Consciously avoiding changing
Curtains drawn, now it’s done…”

I get like this, all melancholy and bitchy, two days a year: the dates of my brother’s birth and death. In the lead-up I tend to feel unpleasant in a way that’s difficult to pinpoint, a disorientation that seeps in and colours everything when my back is turned.

In the past, sometimes I’d realise only afterwards what time of year it was after a week of wondering what the hell is going on with me? It was like my unconscious knew somehow but wasn’t keen to nark. Trauma’s funny like that, the closer you get to it the less you can hold onto time and memory and thought.

Older, wiser, I prepare. I set reminders and take time off work, and on the day itself I travel to the coast. A long journey (a pilgrimage if you like), far enough away from everything to be completely alone. I listen to Alice in Chains as I drive. I swim in the ocean and the pain slowly becomes clean again, like an infected wound washed pink in the surf.

I talk to my brother aloud. I drink the beer we used to sneak together. I tell him what he’s missed this past year, the comings and goings of life in the months since I last visited. Today, you would have been 21. Today, you would have been 30. Today, you would have been 37. I met someone. The funniest thing happened last week. You’d hate the new Star Wars. I had a huge fight with our sister and we don’t talk anymore. They stopped making that burger you love with the pear and brie. You’ve missed so many seasons of South Park, and so have I, because I can’t watch it without you. Grandad is dying. He never was right again after you left. I’m going to be a mom. I tell him how much I love him, and how much I hate him, and that I’m sorry.

I don’t believe he can hear me. Wherever he is — nonexistence, next life, afterlife — it’s far beyond my reaching. But my being heard is not the point. The point is the ritual. The remembering. What I have come to call requiem.

The concept of requiem is ancient, and it has a few meanings (doubtless it will sit uncomfortably with some given the Catholic connotations). But essentially, requiem is an act of remembrance. It’s not grieving or mourning, it’s more than that. It’s something we don’t really have a secular word or concept for, and I think perhaps we could use one.

After all, grief as a word has become almost meaningless: one can grieve a lost opportunity, or the end of a friendship, or a pre-pregnancy body. It’s also a pathological diagnosis requiring treatment, if it goes on long enough and manifests dysfunctionally enough.

“I know people do strange things when they’re grieving, but …”

Mourning, on the other hand, is about those left behind by death. It is observance: the wearing of black, the taking of bereavement leave. It is the giving of grace, and the permitted absence (however brief) from societal convention and obligation. It is three days off work, and meal trains, and “checking in”.

It is for, and about, the living.

Requiem is about the dead.

Who they were, what they meant. It is not a feeling, it is an act. An offering to the endless void that remains where love was once made manifest in blood and bone and skin and hair and eyes. You lived. You were real. You mattered, and you are missed. The world will never see your like again, and nothing will ever be the same again. Even now, even after all this time.

It is not “Who am I without you?” It is “I go on, and I carry you with me.”

“Silencing all tomorrows
Forcing a goodbye
Lay down, black gives way to blue.
Lay down, I’ll remember you.”

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I’m sorry to have to ask. But since I gave up my public system work for ethical (and sanity) reasons, I’m increasingly focused on both Substack and trying to get my other (self-funded) project off the ground: contributing to psychotherapy research while running groups to support sexual abuse survivors. Everything I receive from subscriptions goes towards the cost of this (participants can’t afford to fund treatment privately).

If you can spare a few dollars to support my work (even for a month) it would be immensely helpful.

I’ve decided to run a short encore of my 50% off birthday sale: here’s a coupon:

I won’t be able to afford to run another discount for a while, so if you’re considering subscribing now is a good time. I update at least weekly and try to cover a broad range of topics while sticking to core work around trauma, therapy and neurodiversity.

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At the moment we only have celebration words to describe significant days around death and loss. And I am sick, guts and soul, of having to use them. My brother’s birthday is nothing like my son’s, the happy little sunbeam of light and wonder who shares his laugh and his eyes but whom he will never meet. I want to spit when I use the word anniversary to describe the day my brother died. Like it’s a wedding or a bank holiday, not the calendar equivalent of a tooth punched out of a face.

I’d really like another word.

Perhaps, collectively, we can make requiem happen. We made languishing happen after the pandemic. We made slop happen. What we call a thing changes how we understand the thing, and requiem isn’t just a word. It’s a way of doing the work of loss, a framework that aligns pretty closely with what we understand about how to suffer as well as possible in the wake of death.

Anecdotally many (most?) people I meet who live with profound loss seem to find their way to requiem eventually, even without a map or framework for doing so. We honour and remember. We mark the date. We go somewhere, or watch something, or listen to music, or share a meal and stories. We reach for meaningful symbols and experiences. We pledge ourselves to causes. We make music, or paint, or draw.

We write Substack posts, apparently.

None of what I’m speaking about here is strictly clinical advice, but we do know this about grief and what makes one “suffer well” through loss: the ability to face the reality of loss and cognitively restructure are useful in resolving or safeguarding against pathological grief.

Generally speaking, engaging in purposeful acts of remembrance tends to do exactly this. Requiem supports healing.

If I was writing a clinical paper about death and loss, I’d tell you about the importance of restoring effective interpersonal functioning, or challenging persistent negative thoughts about self-worth, self-concept and the future. That integration of the irreversibility of the loss must be addressed and taken into the self, and that the relationship with the deceased must be reformed. That rumination and avoidance coping and catastrophizing can be dangerous. That PTSD and pathological grief are not alike, and one should not treat them as such in therapy.

But I’m not.

I’m not a therapist today, just a sister. And as a sister I’d say that sometimes the barrier between grief and self-pity, the kind that can suck you in and eat your life and fuck you up is as thin as the membrane around an egg yolk. Acting in remembrance, doing something thoughtfully and deliberately, helps keep it intact.

It’s a reminder that it’s not about you.

No, I’m not saying ‘suck it up’, or attacking anyone who loses themselves in the wake of death as narcissistic or selfish. Surviving a loss often really is about survival. I get it. Believe me. But what you do with your pain matters.

Think of it this way: a funeral is inevitably terribly sad. But a funeral where everyone is yelling at each other is the definition of hell. There’s the agony of the wound, and then there’s what can happen to the wound if you let it fester or poke at it or pretend it doesn’t exist or treat it carelessly. Remembering and honouring, acting in remembrance, helps. It’s turning your focus to something outside of yourself, and often we badly need this when we’re bereaved.

In time, you might realise that looking back and moving forward isn’t a choice you have to make. You can, and perhaps must, do both.

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The title track of Black Gives Way to Blue is a requiem, though I didn’t know it at the time. Written for the band’s former vocalist Layne Staley, it’s a poignant goodbye to the dead and what can never be replaced or forgotten, the space that nothing can fill.

At the same time, it’s an acknowledgement that hope and love and art continues, that we go on. That life will grow around what is lost, and that the shape of it will forever remain.

Lay down, black gives way to blue.
Lay down, I’ll remember you.

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This post was written and edited without the use of AI.