Jason C Ward

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… the pain of guilt. (warning: depressing, adult content)

Just a few weeks back, I made the decision to be haunted. I made the decision to feel, really feel, the most heart-wrenching pain that my relatively short life has brought me. I made the decision to feel guilty, at fault, for the death of my brother.

I’m not the sort of person that allows myself to feel much. I can tune most things out, even things that have happened to me personally. It isn’t a lack of empathy, or sympathy, and it isn’t apathy. Honestly, I blame it on a philosophy that I developed for myself after a childhood of biting disappointment and sadness, most of which I only barely remember. 

My philosophy has been a simple one.

Worse things have happened to better people.

It has been my personal mantra since I was was a young adult. But to be clear, it hasn’t pushed me to experience life any less than most others. I am profoundly happy most of the time. In the parlance of our culture, “I am blessed.” I also feel anger, lots of anger, an unreasonable amount of anger, and sadness, when those emotions are appropriate. But it is the whole-hearted embrace of my mantra, worse things have happened to better people, that has allowed me to move past my anger and sadness. 

Why?

Because it is true. No matter when I say those words to myself, they are true. My woes pale in comparison to those of others. While my life might in the past, or for brief instances, have been a steaming pile of shit, it certainly isn’t the stuff of horror that some others have experienced. In fact, quite sadly, much of what has occurred in my life has been tragically American, culturally normal, and all too common. But that is a tangent for another day.

As I said, just a few weeks ago, I made the conscious decision to allow myself to feel absolutely terrible for something. I decided that something that happened wasn’t just a thing that happened. I decided that the death of my brother was, and remains, at least in part, my fault. 

My brother, Josh, was nine years my junior, so we didn’t have much of a shared life. By the time he was even remotely interesting to me, I had gone away to college. I never really knew him as much more than my obnoxious little brother. He was obnoxious, and extremely difficult to get along with, even for his friends and my youngest brother (on my dad’s side), Joe, who idolized him. 

Here’s the thing. Despite being so hard to get along with, he had an incredible heart. He was extremely generous, and loyal to a fault. He’d fight any battle at any time if he thought it would somehow improve the lives of the people he loved. That was his way from the time he was old enough to start thinking of others.

By the time I graduated college, he was old enough to start getting into real trouble. He got into fights. He got arrested. He got kicked out of school. He hung out with all the wrong kids. He used a lot of drugs. He drank. All this before he was seventeen. I guess I always hoped it was a phase, but in reality I always knew it was because he was either depressed or bipolar. I had enough psychology and social services training to spot the signs. I even mentioned it to our parents, somewhat off-handedly, a few times. 

He died nearly 8 years ago from a bad mix of drugs in his system. He was self-medicating, I think. Until recently I never really allowed myself to feel anything other than intense sadness of loss. I miss him, or at least the idea of him, mostly because I didn’t know him very well when he was alive. 

That not knowing him very well part, that’s my fault. I was the older brother, and I could have tried harder, even if it meant pissing him off in the process.

The other part that was my fault, and about which I have allowed myself to feel most guilty, is that I didn’t use my education and my training to push him to get real treatment. He needed it. We all needed it for him. Instead, he treated himself for several years with a mix of alcohol, drugs and adrenaline. 

I decided to let myself feel that guilt because I’d been ignoring it for so long, and that ignorance allowed me to be okay with his absence. Well his absence isn’t okay, at least not for me. It’s not okay that my daughter walks by his photo and says, “that’s uncle Josh” without ever having met him. 

That’s haunting. But the haunting guilt and pain feels authentic, human, unlike the ignorance and callousness that comes from the thought that worse things have happened to better people

I’m not sure that’s true in this case.

  1. saramcguyer said: Wow. Very raw, moving stuff. I had no idea. I’m sorry feels too thin a thing to say.
  2. jasonward77 posted this