They're all dead
All of them, really...
I look around my apartment, at the pictures of my family members, displayed in picture frames.
My grandparents, my parents, my brother.
And I realize—everyone’s dead.
Not that I didn’t already know this, but when I stop to take this in, it’s really quite jarring.
Not just my grandparents, but my parents.
Not just my parents, but my only sibling.
There are moments where I realize, I really *am* the only survivor in my family. I call myself that, but sometimes I too forget. It’s not hyperbole and it’s not a statement to what I’ve lived through. I am truly the only one still alive. A point often made by my therapists when they think I’m putting too much pressure on myself and not acknowledging that, at least, I’m still here.
I guess it really is more than you can say for the rest.
My eyes drifted to the picture of my beloved Grandma Donelson, who passed away in 2006, at the age of 91.
Long before I made my appearance, she experienced quite a whammy of deaths herself.
Her son in 1972.
Her husband in 1979, followed six months later by her mother and father, all within a month of each other.
My Grandma didn’t talk very much about that time in her life.
When I asked her, once, she only said, it was a hard time, stoically.
That was it. No more conversation welcomed.
The only other comment that I recall her making about that time was that a doctor had said to her, “Well, Julia, you’ve had quite a time of it recently.”
To say the least.
In a way, it makes me feel less alone. It makes me feel like my dear, beloved grandmother also would understanding, having too experienced a deluge of losses, grieving multiple members of her family all at once. Her grief too was complex.
Though she didn’t have the suicides, she had unexpected deaths, which pack a different punch, I’m sure—of her oldest son and her husband. Both were shocking and premature, unexpected losses.
I used to wonder about her experiences, being the only survivor, outliving her husband and so many of her peers, even all of her siblings.
I realize that I am kin to her in many ways now, a kindred spirit, of someone who can now share a solidarity.
I too am (likely) facing decades of my life without people I would have thought would be here. If not my mother, because of her poor health and heart condition, then at least I thought my father would be here with the strong Preston and Donelson genes of longevity. Or, surely, at the very, very least, my brother.
It’s often a strange experience to be the only one left.
The only one who has survived.
Sometimes I think I’ll never quite get used to it.