It’s another late night post, I’ve got a lot on my mind! It’s been a busy week at work which is good because it’s given me a bit of a reprieve day-to-day from some of the weight I’ve been carrying around. My brother’s birthday was two days ago and its been well over a year since we’ve spoken. I miss my brother a great deal but it’s also difficult because the brother I miss is not the person they now are. That seems a little dramatic now that I’ve typed it out but at our last contact that’s how I felt. I won’t get into gritty specifics about the why and how, it’s a story that could cover a couple blog posts, but it’s pretty heavy on my mind and it colored a lot of 2025 for me, which was a very difficult year for my wife and I.
I’ve been listening through all of Sufjan Steven’s music these past couple days, which is an artist my brother really liked when we were still close. Stevens is a prolific songwriter and as such has covered many different themes, but he’s most known for his poetic lyrics and orchestral and folky compositions. I don’t know if my sudden interest in his music is connected to my recent thoughts about my brother but its been a double edged sword in that respect. It reminds me of times when things between me and them weren’t so strained, and also of times when me and them both were struggling with other familial issues together.
Stevens has an album titled Carrie and Lowell that explores themes of grief, childhood trauma, and spiritual crisis. It is a lovely album, it is also heartbreaking and famously relatable to people who have experienced any of these. The inaugural song Death With Dignity is one such song that explores grief and loss. It’s very toned-down compared to much of his other music and it creates this very intimate atmosphere. The song references his grief at losing his mother, Carrie, and describes this loss in very painterly language describing a lack of direction, and an emptiness at her death among other things. One thing to note is that the album is less about the grief of his mother’s death and more about the grief caused by their lack of a close relationship when she was alive. This song is really tearing me up because I feel a lot of parallels between its themes and my relationship with my brother. In a way I feel like I’ve mourned their loss. Preceding the event that caused out relationship to dissolve I was already feeling a distance between me and them that felt unnatural because of how close we were years prior. Additionally my wife and I lost a coworker and two family members last year, so while I think the song is beautiful and necessary, it’s a hard listen.
I’m not entirely sure what the future looks like for my brother and I, and I don’t know when I will. The strength it would take to work that out on my own feels much to big for me on my own. Luckily though I am surrounded by people who love me so I am not alone in this. I am lucky enough to have a wife that is ever supportive of me, friends who love me, and parents that though they hate to see their children fight and would rather we just forget about it support me as well.