One Year Later

I've been thinking about this for months; the anniversary of my brother's death. And here I am, a few days from the one year mark (and a few days from his birthday) and I still don't know what to do. Last year, hours after I got the call that Ralph had died, I returned home from the hospital and my mother's house. It was the middle of the night and I was alone.So I wrote. I cried and I paced the halls, and dug out pictures that I hadn't looked at in 10 years and I wrote. I did this for hours because I didn't know what else to do. I was so consumed with raw grief and regret and pain that I didn't know how else to get it out. So I wrote what ever came to my mind and within minutes I had written something that came strictly from my heart. I posted it on Facebook, tagging people I thought may want to know. I wasn't sure if I had done the right thing but at that moment, I didn't really care. My brother was dead.

After sleeping for about 2 hours, I got up and began to plan my brother's funeral. I felt compelled to run the show because I was so desperately afraid that who Ralph was as a person would get lost in the formality of a funeral. The Catholic guilt reared it's head early when my mother insisted on a viewing. I reminded my mother of Ralph's own severe aversion to funerals and distaste for anything of ceremony and the idea was nixed within a few minutes. We were unfortunately stuck with a Catholic funeral as my mother insisted on burying Ralph with my father, but knowing how much Ralph admired my dad, it was a necessary evil. We went to great lengths to balance the ridiculous rules of the Catholic Church with who Ralph was. I had been thinking of ways to put Ralph's signature on his funeral and as I wrote a very personalized obituary, it became clear that of all things, Ralph was a legend maker. Everybody had a Ralph story. That night Ralph died, all I could think about were those crazy moments between 2 siblings 12 years apart in age and how in spite of it all, we managed to be so connected.  So we put together what we called "his real funeral" - a memory book that paid tribute to who Ralph was in the context of our family. And in the context of the music he loved so much. And we gave it to everyone at the funeral because we knew that there was no Catholic funeral that could ever do who Ralph was, and what he meant to us, justice.

This year has been difficult. The most difficult this far of my life. I cannot fully express the pain of losing a sibling to someone who has not been there. I have lost my father. I have lost friends. I have lost a marriage. Nothing compares to the pain of losing Ralph. In a single moment, my family constellation changed in a way I never expected it to. At 38 years old, I had to consider that my other brother and sisters could die and I would be the only one left. As one of six siblings, I became racked with guilt for only having one child. And as irrational as that sounds, I was consumed with that for months.

It has been a slow road back to normalcy and normal doesn't look the same without Ralph. But looking back over the past year, I learned a few amazing things about myself and the people around me.

- I learned my mother is a much stronger woman than I ever believed. When I was 11 years old, my father died, leaving my mother widowed at 44. Having been a stay at home mother and wife to a domineering Italian businessman, my mother did not have the self esteem to believe that she could go out and start over. It was years before my mother ever got a job and the recurrent themes of a Irish Catholic housewife never really went away. I truly believed my mother could not survive the death of her own child. But she has. She has gotten out of bed and continued to live her life the best she can knowing that she has buried her son. She still laughs and keeps Ralph's memory alive through allowing all of us to celebrate who he was (warts and all). She has helped the grandchildren through losing Ralph by meeting them where they are in the process, even if it means having to read the newspaper article my 7 year old nephew wrote shortly after Ralph passed announcing his death (literally - it read "Extra....Ralph died").

- I learned children can process grief and pain in a healthy way, even helping us grown ups along the way. I remember feeling such fear after my father's death; much of it in reaction to my mother's own shock and despair. My biggest fear when Ralph died was that moment Stephen and I sat Max down to tell him. I was convinced I would rip his sense of security out from under him in the same way it had happened to me. And that wasn't the case. In many ways, Max took care of me, intuitively understanding my need to grieve. He showed me none of the fear that I had internalized as a child. For days, Max would come into my room in the morning and put his fingers on my closed eyes checking to see if I was crying in my sleep. He admonished me on my 1st day back to work for trying to cover up the dark circles under my swollen eyes, saying "Everyone knows you've been crying, Mommy." Like trying to hide it was the dumbest idea in the world. And my favorite of all of the grief moments - Max coming into my bedroom as I sat on my bed crying, blowing my nose for the thousandth time and saying "Come in the living room and sit with me Mommy. You're killing trees with all that crying."

-I learned that my family; the good, the bad and the ugly, continue to be my family and that I wouldn't have it any other way. I thank God everyday that I was raised in a family where there is no need to pretend not to see the writing on the wall. I see too many brothers and sisters, parents and children adhere to a polite formality that fails to tap into the most intimate parts of the self. If you can't be real with your own family, you will never be real with yourself.

-Finally I have come to terms with my relationship with my brother. It would be so easy to have regrets about the could have's or the would have's. But what made Ralph who he was and me who I am is our strong, often pigheaded convictions. It was not all, as Ralph would say, "roses". It was a relationship of real ups and downs. Real disagreements and fierce loyalty. All that is good and bad about Irish-Italian tempers. But there were alot of laughs. You couldn't have been raised a Ciliberti and not know how to laugh. And for that I am most grateful. Because I had a brother who I loved and who loved me. And we laughed. And we fought. And then we laughed again.