Tomorrow will be one year since Dante died, and tomorrow they commit my brother Jeb to the deep. Next week is the anniversary of my sister Tara’s death. I have to say, I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Forgive me for briefly sounding like a teenager, but lately I feel as though I am merely a vessel for experiencing sadness. I don’t experience life for myself. I am a conduit for ghosts, trapped here and cursed to feel the infinite black hole absences of my best friend and siblings who are dead. Without them I am incomplete. You can’t help but ultimately conclude that some vital part of you vanished into the ether along with them.

At least a few times a month I have a dream, an identical dream, the same every time, where Dante is still alive at the hospital, and there’s still a chance that he can pull through. In the dream I am taking the train to Zehlendorf, to the animal hospital where Dante spent the last week of his life, and where I visited him every single day until I held him for the last time. I am looking out the window and so nervous I feel sick. The train never gets there. I wake up, and I am drenched in sweat, and then I Remember. Now the day is lost. I am trapped with that sadness and frozen with it in amber until I’m not.

And here I am experiencing the same phenomenon with my dead brother, only this time I’m awake. Every few minutes I will think of him and for a flicker of a second, I’ll think, “They’re going to revive him.” I still think of him out there somewhere on some bizarre adventure like he always was. There was always a comfort in that. Of course, he’s in a freezer, and I’ll never see him again. And when they put him in the ground, a phantom element of myself is in that coffin too. I’ll never get that back. It’s Jeb’s now. I love my brother. He can have it. But now what?

I am exhausted. I have cried more this last year than I have in the last fifteen years combined. All those things they tell you about processing grief are bullshit, by the way. My grandmother, who was one of my closest friends, died six years ago now, and I still feel the soul shock of her enormous absence in my life every single day of my life. The same is true of Dante and now my two siblings. All gone. It feels like being riddled with machine gun fire, all full of holes now. This is life-in-death . . . a fate far worse than death itself. At least when you’re dead, you’re dead. I am dead and yet still alive. And to be alive is to Remember.

Last night I started writing an obituary for my brother that I will post here on my website, because where else would it go. Jeb was one of God’s rarest specimens . . . a true freak. I don’t know how you could possibly hope to distill the life of a planet-sized mutant like my brother into a few paragraphs, but I will attempt it. This is the least I can do for him until I kneel at the foot of his tombstone which, were it up to me, would be a hundred feet tall.

I will cry tears for my brother and for my sister and for Dante. I am a living altar to their memory. I will remember them every day of my life for the rest of my life. The day I stop remembering is the day I join them.