When grief presents more questions than there are answers

Jean Balchin

It was the eighth anniversary of my brother’s death a few weeks ago, writes Jean Balchin.

Death anniversaries are always peculiar things. The day looms ahead for weeks — a black square on my calendar moving inexorably closer.

As the anniversary shuffles nearer, I find myself feeling heavier and slower, as if my grief has manifested itself as shackles around my ankles. In a way, this countdown is the antithesis of childhood Christmas excitement.

It’s real, numbing adult grief that builds and builds, but somehow never quite abates, even as the day passes.

I wish I knew exactly which date and time I should commemorate John’s passing on. But there are a number of confounding factors. Firstly, when my brother needed me the most, I was some 18,000km away in Edinburgh, Scotland, embarking on a student exchange programme. New Zealand is some 12 hours ahead of the UK, depending on daylight saving hours. Grief and anxiety, moreover, have a perversely distorting effect on time. A single day of waiting for news about one’s missing brother can feel like a lifetime, especially when exhaustion and dread make simple time difference calculations seem as complex as solving the Hodge conjecture.

Secondly, my brother was missing for some time before his body was found. Do I commemorate the day he took off from my parents’ anxious hands as they took him to be sectioned, or should I commemorate the following day, September 24, when he was found? Or should I commemorate some unfocused moment months before when he began to slip truly into the depths of depression?

I know that it’s pointless to focus on the particulars of John’s death. After all, this has all happened. There is nothing I can do to save my brother. But human beings require certainty, especially when it feels like one’s life is spinning out of control. Grief tends to exacerbate that feeling. And some part of me can’t help but feel that if I knew exactly what happened to my brother and why, I might somehow be able to change things or justify the actions those around him took in his final hours.

Denial is, as we are told, one of the key stages of grief. When I learned, over a patchy Skype call at 3am, that the police had found my brother’s body, I could only scream "no" over and over again. I physically resisted learning more about his death — stuffing my fingers into my ears or running off to the bathroom to vomit— when Mum tried to tell me more about John’s final moments.

The problem with learning more about a tragedy is that you [might] also realise just how preventable it was. In retrospect, my brother’s journey towards death becomes a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel of horrific proportions. What if I hadn’t urged my brother to follow me down to Otago University? Would he have developed depression if he hadn’t felt so hopeless and far from home? What if my parents had sought out medical assistance sooner? There are infinite forks in the path of my brother’s life. I’d give anything to go back and redirect him on to the right way — the path leading him to a happy, balanced life.

I was one of those infuriating children who asked a million questions an hour. Why did we have to go to church every Sunday? Why did I have to eat dinner before pudding? Why did my library book say the world was 4.5billion years old, when according to the Bible, our planet was only a mere 6000 years old? Why weren’t women permitted to preach in church?

I am grown now but I still have a perverse desire to know why certain things happen — why my brother had to die like that, at only 18 years old.

Over the last eight years, I have learned and unlearned things about my brother. At first, based on comments John made to my father in the days before he died, I thought he was abusing meth. I thought that this might explain in part his apparent break from reality. But then I learned that his autopsy found no drugs in his system. What then caused John to forget who my parents were? What caused him to dissociate so fully from reality?

I am left with more questions than answers. To wield another cliche, perhaps ignorance is bliss. Perhaps Ursula Le Guin was right when she said "To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness".

One day I might bring myself to read my brother’s autopsy notes and to ask all those painful questions of my parents and siblings who were there in John’s final days.

I might try to put together all the pieces in this hideous jigsaw puzzle.

On the other hand, perhaps these questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Perhaps I am better off living in this half-ignorance. At least this way there is room for imagination — for some solace in believing that John’s final moments were peaceful and that everything that could be done for him was done.

Jean Balchin, a former English student at the University of Otago, is studying at Oxford University after being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

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