I have four sisters. I have zero biological brothers. But I had one legally bound brother—my brother in law, Dion. He died this summer. Three days before he died we had our first and last fight.
Everyone always martyrs someone after they’re dead. But Dion wasn’t perfect, sometimes he was shitty. Sometimes he was annoying. Sometimes he was so open it made me uncomfortable—no, I don’t want to talk about your sex life with my sister, even though she loves to talk about it. Sometimes his depression and bipolar tendencies rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes he was so drunk in the middle of the day that I couldn’t stand it. Sometimes he would get so high, he would embarrass us all. Sometimes he put so much academic pressure on me I was afraid to fail, when failing for him was a B.
But Dion always made me laugh. He always understood my frustration with my sister’s weird spiritual shit: blessing the house with sage or using astrology to explain every aspect of someone’s personality. He always supported my love of Greek life, even when the rest of my family made fun of it. He didn’t make me feel totally insane when I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder. He is the reason I have a perfect niece. He was the cool, obnoxious older brother that I never had and never knew I wanted. (If Dion could see me now, he’d definitely be laughing at how fucking clichéd I sound, because that’s just the kind of person he was.)
*****
Dion met me when I was still in the womb, since I was born when he and my sister were sixteen. Dion and my sister, Vickie, dated when she was in high school. They even got tattoos of each other’s names (though I never saw Vickie’s name on Dion…). They eventually broke up, but they were still best friends. He was a constant in my life—their prom picture is still a permanent fixture in my house. It wasn’t until I was much older that Dion became a much more prominent fixture in my life again.
Dion came back into my life during an unusual time. It was before I had been introduced to boys, alcohol, or the wonders of oxycodone. He reentered my life by paying for Vickie to come home for Mother’s Day. Vickie hates coming home; I like to tell myself it’s because she hates Kansas City. But I know that’s not true. She feels detached from our “perfect” family; she thinks she is the unwanted stepchild, because she is my mother’s child and not my father’s, even though I have never referred to her as my half-sister and that concept just pisses me off (as if someone could only half be something). Dion’s gesture was nice yet weird. Why did he do that? I was always planning on asking him.
Though he was nice, I was waiting for the inevitable break up.
It never happened.
*****
They announced their engagement a little less than two years later. That same week, I had my first panic attack in years. I was walking in the hallway, and it was as if the walls of my school were closing in on me. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Everything was too loud. People were too loud: their emotions, their voices, their opinions, their thoughts, and their fears. They were screaming their pain at me, and I couldn’t stop the noises.
It was around then when I was put on a prescription for hydrocodone for tooth pain. The pain went away after a few days and I still had pills and I learned that it could be a nice escape from the agony of a thousand voices shrieking in my ear.
*****
I talked to Vickie and Dion every day during those first couple months of their engagement. It was easier to think about the wedding rather than the fact that I was being forced to accept a new person into my already too large, too loud family. So, we talked about colors, venues, and dresses. I used their wedding to ignore the creeping depression engulfing my mind. Life was easier that way. I was having more panic attacks and lying awake at night crying, because the world was too much. So, we talked wedding. Plus, who wants to marry into a family with a crazy sister in law? No one.
*****
Vickie announced she was pregnant six months before her summer wedding. I couldn’t tell if I was pissed or beyond excited. She texted us. And, of course, she had to get married and have a baby the same year I was graduating from high school and starting college. Of course, she was going to take my year and make it her own, like any time she would come home for one of my sisters’ birthdays and it became more about her than the actual birthday girl. And I was only pissed at her. Not Dion. Just her. Why would she change our lives at a time when everything was going right? But then the depression was getting harder to ignore and the anxiety was keeping me up all night, so I got over the anger and became obsessed with the baby. I went shopping. Dion and Vickie and I talked about names. Dion told me that he wanted the baby to grow up with me in their life, because I was so smart and inspiring. He wanted me to be the example for this baby. I was expected to make the right decisions, get good grades, never mess up. No pressure to be the perfect aunt at all, especially seeing as I was also the aunt who had panic attacks, never slept, and would obsess over the smallest details of things until I felt like my head was exploding.
*****
The expectation of perfection was what pushed me to become closer to Dion. I thought that if he could see me as the person I really was, then the pressure would lessen. I was wrong. Instead he just constantly told me how proud he was of me and that he loved how we were close. And I just kept fucking up.
*****
When their wedding came around, I spent hours on end with Vickie and Dion. I felt like their child. Vickie had referred to me as her baby her entire life (as I was born when she was sixteen), so I became Dion’s daughter too once they were married. I made plans to see them when the baby was born. And for spring break. And for summer break. Spending time with them became a necessity. I stopped being the sister-in-law. Instead, I was their trial child before my niece was born. I was the one they bought things for, lectured, and taught life skills.
Whenever they were in a fight, I was the one who had to say who was right or wrong. I was the one who would apologize to the other, like a child of divorced parents. My sister will deny it, but I was the one they used as a mediator. When I didn’t agree with one of them, it was “obviously” out of my lack of love for them.
*****
After Aeris, my niece, was born, I spent a week with Dion and Vickie. Aeris was a little less than three weeks old. That’s when I learned about Dion’s depression and alcoholism and slight addiction to weed. He never called it an addiction, but isn’t it an addiction when you do something every day and can’t stop? I was the one who watched him drink all day—never drunk enough to stumble or fall, just drunk enough to slur his words but still be able to hold a baby. But I never said anything. Why should I? I was the little sister, not the concerned parent. So, I let him drink while my sister lay in bed with postpartum depression and my niece cried.
*****
We all pretended that the addictions weren’t obvious except my sister. She would call him a drunk, tipsy, or ask if he was high. Only Vickie made it seem like a joke, never real anger. My family and I all turned the other way, because if you can’t see the problem then it can’t possibly be real.
*****
I was slightly nervous to visit them for spring break, but I did. I had been introduced to alcohol and the pain of a heartbreak. I needed an escape. My niece was six months old, and I didn’t feel like going home to do nothing for a week. The first night, Dion got me drunk at a Mexican restaurant. While my sister breastfed my niece, Dion ordered two pitchers of “killer” frozen margaritas (extra tequila) and said he would split them with me. I had about half of one pitcher; Dion finished the rest. None of us said anything, even though they knew that I had only started antidepressants a couple weeks before, even though we all knew that it wasn’t Dion’s first drink of the night and wasn’t the last. We ignored it. It was easier that way.
*****
Later that week, Dion and I had an hour-long conversation about Greek life and school. We talked about how happy everything at college made me, and we pretended like I wasn’t crying every night and having a panic attack every time I woke up twenty minutes late and missed class. Everything was fine. We played with Aeris, and he didn’t drink. We laughed and talked all day. I had the best brother-in-law ever and loved spending time with him. He made sense. Everyone else in my family didn’t understand why I did the things I did, like Greek life, but Dion got it. So, we became close. He was the only one to one-hundred-percent support me in my decisions. Not even my parents did that.
*****
That night, he went out and bought me a handle of vodka. We all pretended like it wasn’t a big deal as I drank a mixed drink or two on a Tuesday night.
*****
That night, Vickie and Dion lectured me about taking antidepressants and how they just make you more depressed and how drugs aren’t the way to go, that I should just smoke weed instead. Or get emergency medication like Ativan. Or go to therapy. But no antidepressants. They would just change me into someone I hated and barely recognized, because that’s what they did to Dion. They made him feel crazier than he really was. They made him turn to pain medications (and alcohol).
In some ways, Vickie and Dion were right. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself, but is that because of the drugs or because of the imbalance in my head? I couldn’t tell you. Sometimes it feels like both. When I look into the mirror, I have to remind myself who I am and when I do something out of character, I skip my medication. Maybe I’ll feel saner that way. I remember that conversation with Vickie and Dion every time I take my medication, and I hate myself for having to take it anyway. Without it, I would be sitting in the corner with my hands over my ears gasping for air as the world becomes too loud for me to handle. So, I take my pills.
*****
The depression and anxiety have lessened because of the medication, but it doesn’t make me feel any less insane. I’ve had to up my dose multiple times and I cry whenever I have to call the doctor and ask her for the new prescription. (Some days, I think I’m just waiting to find someone unrecognizable when I look in the mirror, so I can blame the change on the medication and stop it.)
*****
Dion died less than twenty-four hours after getting out of the hospital. The doctors said they didn’t know what was wrong with him, so they just gave him more and more pain medications. Pain medications that made him angry and cynical. Pain medications that made him ban my sister from the hospital. Pain medications that made him call me to complain about her (which led to me telling my parents, which led to them yelling at him, which led to him yelling at my sister, which led to him hating everyone, which was the premise of our first and last fight ever). Pain medications that led him to believe my family didn’t love him. Pain medications that eventually killed him, regardless of what the coroner said (because of course, normal mid-thirty-year-olds choke to death on their own saliva). People ask me all the time what he died of, and I have to say I don’t know. The hospital is under investigation for medical malpractice, so I couldn’t tell you what the official death certificate said, because I have yet to see it.
*****
My mother, younger sister, and I had visited Vickie and Dion a week before. He was lying in bed most days, complaining of a headache. One day, he puked blood, and Vickie took him to the hospital. The last time I saw him, he was in a gown and surrounded by machines. He looked like he had lost thirty pounds, and the bags under his eyes seemed to hold the pain of the world. But we hugged and made plans for me to visit in October for fall break like I did the year before. The next week he was dead. Sometimes I think I killed him. And everyone can tell me I didn’t, but I don’t think I’ll ever not think that. Our last conversation was me begging him for forgiveness after my father chewed him out for talking to me. I still have the message on my phone saying that he read my text. I stare at it all the time and wonder. If I hadn’t said anything to my dad about Dion complaining about Vickie, maybe he would’ve lived. Maybe if I had stayed and taken care of my niece so Vickie could be at the hospital, he wouldn’t be dead. If I had shut my fucking mouth, my sister wouldn’t be a widow and my niece fatherless.
*****
The weekend after he died, I went to my friend’s house. I got blackout drunk. I chugged a water bottle full of vodka, two or maybe three shooters of fireball, lots of tequila, and God knows what else. But none of it made me feel any better. Dion was still dead, and I was still the guilty party. My sister wouldn’t even talk to me, so, I raided my friend’s medicine cabinet and took a hydrocodone (or two). And laughed hysterically when my best friend asked me if I was okay. And fooled around with my friend’s friend. And I don’t remember his name or even what I did. And I drank more. And more. And I woke up the next morning without clothes on and wrapped in a blanket by myself. And Dion was still dead. And I was still the guilty party.
*****
The week of Dion’s funeral I found out that my retina had detached and I had to get emergency surgery two days before the funeral. I went to Dion’s funeral high on my pain medication, oxycodone. (At least the high made the funeral bearable and extremely humorous.) As I sat in the pews, I made my niece laugh and was told to be quiet by more than one person. But I couldn’t stop laughing. Laughing and laughing to the graveyard.
*****
It’s about four months later. I don’t feel better that he’s dead. Sometimes, I still believe I killed him. I don’t drink until I can’t think (as often), and I made my roommate take away my bottle of oxycodone (and then had my other roommate hide it because I had found it and was staring at it for hours). Because I can’t end up like him. And he would be so pissed if he thought I was abusing drugs and alcohol. Because I’m supposed to be the good one. I can’t be the one abusing substances, because I’m supposed to be the straight A, perfect role model. I’m not abusing anything, so no need to call the mental institution. I just like a little vodka with my sadness.
*****
I still get sad and cry about him on a weekly basis. Sometimes it’s so hard to talk to my sister that I just ignore her for days. Sometimes I make depraved jokes about my dead brother-in-law and get angry when people don’t laugh with me. Sometimes I have to change the radio station because the song sounds a little too much like what he enjoyed listening to. Sometimes I cry when I see a commercial for TV shows we used to watch. I could lie and say that writing all of this out has made me feel better and that the grief has lifted off my shoulders. But I’m not going to lie, because then I would really just be lying to myself. I do that enough already. (Like how I lie about the fact that I drink too much. Or how I lie about the fact that I use sex to feel something other than crushing sadness. Or how I lie about not needing to go to therapy.) I tell myself this truth: that the pain is still there, that some days I still feel the guilt, and that I won’t be able to recover for a while. And I tell myself that it’s okay. Even when every part of me is screaming at me to lie. I tell the truth. Or else I will be in the ground next to him.