Six in one hand and a half a dozen in the other. Whatever way you say it, it will never be less absurd that it has been six years since I’ve last hugged you. Sometimes it feels like six years is just enough for me to feel like you were never even really here. Other times it feels like six measly years could never touch the memory of you, could never rob me of what it was like to be your sister. This is grief math. This is the impossible juggle of the contradicting truths of big g Grief. Capital G Grief. Life-changing, life-sucking Grief. Six in one hand and half a dozen in the other. Impossibly long and incredibly short. Sometimes you feel so absolutely real and tangible and sturdy that I feel like I can lean against you. A lot of times you feel like a mist that is falling but barely perceptible. Like if I close my eyes and concentrate I can conjure up the ghost of you but I have trouble recognizing which parts were real and which parts have been filled in by longing and desperation.

Six years ago today I had no idea how to survive the next 24 hours. Six years ago today I was screaming into the void on the side of a highway, trying desperately to claw back the time. I watched each minute pass that day brutally aware that we were on an airport moving walkway that was rapidly heading away from you. Sure, it’s a cliché, but I know there is a part of me forever stuck screaming in the moment between the before and after.

Sometimes I think I have become too good at compartmentalizing. That I have somehow found a way to vacuum seal the air out of your memory so that you lay flat in the back of my mind making room for the other parcels I’ve picked up along the way. I write your name 100 times a week. I give out my business card with your name on it and pass your picture in the hallway at work. I speak your name and talk about your legacy with hundreds of amazing folks without wincing. I have gotten good at holding my hand on the flame of your memory without flinching. I talk about you on radio shows and promote what we’re doing on social media and the wildest part of all of that to me is that this all exists in the enormous you-shaped hole you’ve left behind.

I have spent today trying to find the energy and capacity and spoons and resources to excavate the ziplock bag of you from the back of my mind and breathe enough life into it that you start to take the shape of my brother again. I am trying to find you in my brain, overturning every rock or stone to find the pieces that I have left of you. Was this true, or did I make that up? Did you like the colour green or blue best? Wait, what was your favourite food again? Was it fruit? No it was pizza. No, fondant. No, it was ham and potatoes. How did it sound when you said “love you sis”, again? Was there more inflection on the “love” or the “sis”? Were your hands bigger or smaller than mine? Were you 6’1″ or 6′.5″? My brain rapidly lists facts and figures and details desperately trying to prove that I still know you. That you belonged to us. That the memories are all still there, they’re just folded up and compressed onto one another and look smaller than they actually are.

It feels like I have written everything I could ever write about you and that I could never stop. That I have almost nothing left to say and that I haven’t even begun. That I have run out of memories of you and that they will never, ever be fully done appearing to me.

This is what I know for sure: it will never get easier to miss you, Jake. It will never not take every molecule of breath out of my body to sit in the full realization that you are gone. The magnitude of your loss is so big and the reflection of your legacy so large that I forget that I am allowed to make room for you to just be my little brother. Then, on days like today, I take as a deep breath as I can manage and allow you to just be Jakey and me to just be Kelso. We are back on the trampoline in our backyard trying to land the best flip. We are pretending the ground is lava as we float down the stairs on your comforter and save your stuffies from the disaster. We are racing each other on ski-doos on Cape Broyle Pond and fighting over the remote. We are watching our sixth hour of the Game Show Network while screaming the answers to Lingo or playing our twelfth game of Godzilla for PS2 in a row. We are crying together about how f’ed up the world is or you are pep-talking me into be a full-time writer. I realize, of course, that your memory is as clear to me as my own reflection. That sometimes they get fuzzy but I do not need to panic because they are all there. Nothing has been taped over. Nothing has been erased.

Jake, I have healed and grown and changed in so many ways, and I am still so, so sorry that I couldn’t figure out how to save you. That I couldn’t just take a butterknife to the monsters in your mind like you did when you always volunteered to go down the basement steps first. That I couldn’t protect you or convince you or love you out of the pain you were experiencing.

There is no way to tidy up the mess of grief. There is no way for me to summarize my findings as I walk into the sixth year of carrying the full, grotesque and inhumane weight of the loss of you. All I know is that the love I have for you continues to grow bigger each year.

No amount of time can erase you, Jake. Even if there are days when you feel far away I know deeply that somehow you are always as close as you have ever been.

I miss you. I love you.

Sis