Jennifer Sinor is an essayist and a professor of English at Utah State University.
All that is not given is lost. —Indian proverb
“We lost Bryan,” my father says into the phone, his voice breaking in the cavernous space between each word. He is talking to an old friend of his, someone I knew as a child, one who also lost his adult son. Sitting at a wooden table carried across the prairie in a wagon, my father cradles the phone with one hand and his head with the other. His elbows rest on wood seeped in dailiness and grief. Silence fills my parents’ kitchen as my father either weeps or receives condolence. I don't remain to find out. I do not stay to learn what can be said next.
Upstairs, I close the door to the guest bedroom. The walls have been so recently repainted in Breezy Beach that the pictures have not been rehung. They remain stacked against the baseboards. That feels right to me. Tracts of emptiness. It is 10 in the morning on the second day after my 46-year-old brother died alone in his bed. We are all new to the language of death. I have heard my parents tell others that their son has died, or has passed away, but this is the first time I hear my father say that we have lost my brother. Like a sock or a wallet. He is not dead, only missing.
I had just handed the passports to the Delta agent when my other brother, Scott, called. My husband, Michael, our two teenage children, and I were on our way to Costa Rica for 10 days. For a moment, I considered not answering the phone, but Scott is often in the mountains and out of service, so I took the call. Pragmatic and a lawyer, Scott did not tell me to sit down. He did not lead with reassurance and love. He did not tell me everything would be okay. “Bryan is dead,” he said. Three words.
In the middle of the recently renovated Salt Lake City airport, where benches double as artwork and an iridescent glass sculpture cascades from the ceiling, I went to the floor. I just wanted to be near the ground, as if a tornado were in the area, or lightning on a mountain ridge, a grizzly on the trail—make yourself small, bring yourself low.
The black granite was cold, hard against my knees.
“Stop checking in,” I sobbed to Michael. “Bryan's dead.” The agent held our passports in her hand, suspended. The line of passengers pulsed to move forward, roller bags leaning hungrily against legs level with my eyes. I wanted out. This would become a familiar feeling over the next two weeks, the desire to step outside of my life, shed it like a jacket, leave it behind. But grief has no edges; it is only center. Surrounded by strangers all eager to be somewhere other than where they were, I stood up, the phone still to my ear, and threaded between bodies in search of an outside I would never find.
The line pulsed to move forward. I wanted out. This would become a familiar feeling over the next two weeks, the
