Dear Jake,

Happy 26th Birthday, my beautiful brother. It sounds so cliche, but it is so hard to believe that this is your 5th birthday where our hearts weigh so heavy in our chest it feels like there’s no room for the air in our lungs. The 5th birthday where we celebrate you and grieve you all in one shallow breath. Where we remember your lightness and goodness and also honour the deep pain you carried with you for many of your days here.

I wonder where your beautiful consciousness is right now. I wonder if you still know me best. Still know the pain I carry, still know my hopes and dreams and values more than anyone else. I wonder if you’re watching them evolve, me evolve, as I drag myself through the hell that has been losing you. I wonder if you know that you have always been and will always be my favourite human. I hope you know that being your big sister has been and will always be my favourite thing about myself. It feels like a miracle that these past years have taught me to love other parts of myself too. I am your sister and so much more. I am in grief and pain but I am so much more.

We have a little brother now, Jake, and he is perfect. He is tenacious and brilliant and a bright shiny light in my life, just as you were. It amazes me every day that I am lucky enough to be chosen to be the sister of the sun and the moon. To get to love you both endlessly. To get to love you both so differently. Every moment with him is precious and achy and pure, profound joy. I stare into his eyes and hold his tiny hand and I embrace the raw, ridiculous, unexplainable love that we get to have for our siblings, if we’re lucky. When I am with him there is only you and him.

It is your 26th birthday and I can’t help but spend today deep in the grief rituals I have collected these last years. I’ve been walking around my house holding my “JP” playlist close. I’ve been crying and descending and coming up for air. I wear your necklace and smell your cologne and stare at old pictures while sobbing and cracking wide open. The only thing that has changed? I no longer expect myself to do this differently. I no longer sit waiting for this pain to subside, for it to get easier, for these days to mean less to me. I walk into these dates knowing that I will be devastated while honouring all of my pain and all of my love for you. I carry the reality of grief like a shield to my undercover expectation of getting back to a “normal” life. I carry the lessons I have learned in this darkness like treasures mined and bled for. I tend to my grief like it is a sweet and complicated child. I never question why my plants require weekly watering, and I’ve come to know that grief requires tending too. It requires a relentless commitment to self-compassion and self-trust. It requires me to be as strong as you always thought I was.

I love you more every day, Jake. I always will. I carry your legacy through this world because you are worth getting to know, even though you are gone. Your heart was so heavy but your spirit is light. You will always be loved and held and remembered, even if the pain of it burns us up. Even if it still sometimes feels impossible to live my whole wonderful, scary, weird life without you.

Just like you, Jake, I am so much more than the pain.

With your heart, I try to show others the same.

Love always,

Sis