Somehow it is January 27th again and you should be turning 27. You should be about to go for another spin around the sun we barely see in the dead of winter. You should be sleeping in and mom should be making you another birthday cake and you’d only eat all of it if it had a thick layer of fondant on top. You’d pile blobs of fondant onto a plate and put it in the microwave until a sickly sweet smell would fill our kitchen. You’d take a spoon to that wet, hot, sweet, and sticky situation and eat it all alarmingly fast considering none of us would be knocking you over for a bite. I should be getting to hug you today, I should get to tell you how proud I am of who you are and who you are becoming. I should get to show you the house we transformed and be mad when you inevitably found the one thing you didn’t like about it. You’d probably make a joke about the aggressive floral wallpaper I chose. I should get to laugh with you and laugh at you laughing at me.

I should get to show you that I’m learning to take a joke. That I take things less seriously because in your death you taught me it’s the only way I’ll survive. I should get to show you how I’ve grown. How I am working on the anger we shared and that sometimes I win now. That I am more grounded and also still quick to float away. For six years now I’ve thought about who you would have become. Who you’d be in the face of the absolutely absurd world we find ourselves in.

Each day I reckon with this see-saw of grief spun existential agony. I wonder who you’d be. I wonder who I’d be. I wish you were here and I cannot conceive of what my life would look like if you had not gone. I created a career from the loss of you, never really knowing if it would break me as I tried. Never really inhabiting my body for the ride because how

how would I ever walk through those doors with your name on them?

how would I be able to speak your name and tell your story and fight for you and your legacy?

how do I begin to process that the life I live each day has been crafted from your death?

It is your golden birthday today. 27 on the 27th. Golden like the morning sun that cascades through my office window and hits the side of my face enough to warm my skin ever so slightly. Golden like your heart and the way it couldn’t stand to see other people in pain.

It is your golden birthday so I’ll tell you how grief is a magician, transforming me into an alchemist that is expected to turn a mound of your ashes and our guilt and regret and despair into something new. Somehow my new job is pressurizing them until something shiny comes through. The work is hard but comes easy when you realize how many people are willing to see the magic, too. Each person who loves you helping us weave our intangible grief into something we can hold. Collecting the enormous pressure off the chests of everyone with your grief choking them today, we somehow come up with a way to turn your ashes to gold. To turn your legacy into something that reflects in the sun. To turn your legacy into something that helps people excavate their bloody and worn-out hope from the decay and detritus of their worst moments and the failing systems. To turn your legacy into a shiny, gold mirror in an old building in an old city where people get to begin to see themselves as they truly are. Where they get to feel safe and protected and cared for in a way I so desperately wish we could have done for you, Jake. Those are my best hopes. My best hopes because every extraordinary, unique, and precarious human heart matters more to me now that yours doesn’t exist. The price of grief is far more than the value of gold ever was. I would give every single thing in my life up to have you back. I would trade places with you so that others could have you back in an instant. But, grief magic doesn’t work like that and instead, we make something with what we find in the rubble of missing you.

Stay golden, little brother. You are missed beyond reason.

With your heart,

Sis