Paris Is Always a Good Idea - Jenn McKinlay Page 0,123
understand. I thought it was like a cold or the flu, and she’d just shake it off. I mean, she was Jess—nothing stopped her. But she kept getting weaker and weaker. I thought she was milking it to get out of school. I’d had to go without her, which sucked, and I didn’t realize what was happening, how serious it all was, until I found my mother in the kitchen one afternoon. She was sitting on the floor, curled up against the cupboard, crying into a dish towel. It was then that I knew it was bad, really bad.”
He swallowed hard. He blinked. And then he continued, “She was in treatment for two years, but her cancer was aggressive, and her body was so riddled with tumors that they couldn’t save her.” His voice was raw, and he ran a hand over his face. When I looked into his eyes, just a glance before he turned away, he looked broken.
“She was the person I loved most in the world,” he said. His eyes were watery and his voice tight. “I wanted to die with her because in my mind, we were supposed to do everything together. We were a team, two halves of a whole, and I didn’t understand how she could leave me.”
I nodded. I knew how that pain felt. A tear coursed down my cheek, and I wiped it away. This time I did reach out to him. I took his free hand in mine and gave his fingers a gentle squeeze. When I would have let go, he turned his palm and laced his fingers with mine as if he wasn’t ready to give up the comfort of contact just yet.
“I didn’t know how to go on without her,” he said. “In fact, I refused to celebrate my birthday—it was our birthday—for years. When the big life moments came up, I didn’t want to participate in any of it. Graduations, proms, getting my driver’s license—every event felt like something, or rather someone, Jess, was missing. I couldn’t get past it.”
I knew exactly what he meant. Grief. The bottomlessness of it had been what surprised me the most. Every time I thought the feeling of loss couldn’t get worse, a birthday would roll around, or a holiday or a special event, and the realization that my mother wasn’t there to be a part of it would send me spinning into bereavement like a drunk on a bender.
I was twenty-two when I lost Mom. It had always felt so young to suffer such a great loss, but Jason had been twelve when he lost his sister. If I had struggled, and I had, I could only imagine how hard it must have been for him to go through the process of grieving his twin at such a tender age.
“After a few bad episodes, I ended up in therapy,” he said. He gave me a rueful look. “Not surprisingly, I couldn’t manage everything I was feeling, grief and guilt and rage, and I tried to relieve my own pain by hurting myself. Small things, a cut here and a burn there. When my mom saw a scar on my arm, she flipped out. She was not about to lose another kid. Not on her watch.” He paused, and his mouth curved up just a little on one side. “I went right into counseling, and my therapist helped me to understand what survivor’s guilt is. It took me a long time to accept that it wasn’t my fault that I lived and Jess died, a very long time, and sometimes I still wonder—”
“If she should have lived instead?” My voice was barely a whisper.
“Yeah.” He choked out the word and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
I didn’t know what to say. I knew what I wanted to say. My heart was exploding with it. That the world needed him, that I needed him, but I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I took a deep breath and asked, “And what would Jess say if she knew you thought that?”
A surprised laugh burst out of him, and he said, “She wouldn’t say anything. She’d kick my ass.”
He turned to me with a small smile, which I returned.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. My voice was tight. I cleared my throat, wanting to be strong for him. “That must have been just brutal.”
“Yeah, it was,” he said. “But I learned to keep moving forward even when I didn’t want to.”