The Waiting Room After My Brother Died
My brother was my best friend before he was anything else. Not just family, not just the person I happened to grow up next to, but the person I called first, the person who knew which version of a story I was telling and which version was true.
My name is Israel Temmie. I am a freelance writer, and much of what I do now involves trying to make sense of experiences by putting them into words. But before I became a writer, before I learned how to turn memories into sentences, I was simply a younger brother trying to understand how to live without his best friend.
When he died, I did not cry the way people expect grief to look. What I remember instead is noticing everything except the one thing I was afraid to think about: that my brother might actually be gone.
A couple of months before it happened, I came home from school for a visit. I was 22 and in my second year of university. The whole family was around, and we caught up the way we always did.
At some point, right as I was getting ready to head back to school, he and I got into a small disagreement. It was nothing unusual, the kind of friction that happens between people who are close enough to be honest with each other, and we resolved it the way we always did, without much ceremony, before I left. We kept talking a little after I got back to school. Everything about it felt ordinary. That is the part I keep returning to: how ordinary it all was.
Then one night, my mother called. “Temmie, how are you doing, and how are your studies?” she said, and I could hear her trying to keep her voice steady before she got to the rest of it. “Timmy is in a critical condition now and has been rushed to the hospital, please start praying for him.” I was scared that night in a way I did not have words for. I was with a couple of friends when the call came, and I tried to brush off the negative thoughts and just kept talking with them, like if I kept the conversation normal, the night would stay normal too. But as soon as they left, the loneliness set in, and that is when the fear really started. I began doing chores I had been putting off for weeks, cleaning the house at an hour nobody cleans a house, as if tidying something I could control would quiet the thing I couldn't. I finally fell asleep around 2:30 in the morning.
The next morning, my older sister called and told me to rush home. I did. When I arrived, I was met by faces at the hospital, some familiar, some I had never seen before, all of whom seemed to already know who I was.
The waiting room was cold. Time moved slowly in a way I had never felt it move before. Doctors and nurses kept rushing between patients, and for a while my brother's ward was full of that same urgent motion, before it went completely silent the next minute. Then the rush would start again. At some point a doctor said the hospital could not do enough for him, and they began wheeling his trolley toward an ambulance. I was with a nurse at the time, gathering his things. That was when I heard a cry come from his direction, and my mother's voice underneath it: “Timmy, please wake up, you can do it, you are stronger than that, you've got a whole family counting on you.” My sister was already in tears. I knew then that he was gone. Only my mother and my younger sister had been allowed in to see him. I was not, and I never got the chance.
Getting home after that felt surreal, the kind of surreal where your body is doing things, moving through a house, greeting people, and none of it feels attached to you. It didn't fully land until after the burial. The house felt different afterwards. Nobody in it was quite the same person they had been. It felt heavier, too full of grief to hold anything else.
When I went back to school, my friends tried to console me. For a couple of weeks they checked in, sat with me, said the things people say. Eventually they decided to just leave me be, which I think was its own kind of mercy, because I wasn't grieving the way they expected me to. I didn't cry the day he died. I felt something leave me instead, some steadiness I hadn't known I was relying on, and in its place came a loneliness heavier than anything I'd felt before. I pushed people away. I stopped having the urge to go to class. I couldn't read, couldn't hold a page long enough for the words to mean anything. That went on until one day I finally felt the full weight of being alone with it, and I cried the tears I hadn't been able to find until then.
Things started looking up after that, slowly. I put back on the weight I'd lost during the worst of it. I met people who turned out to be incredible in ways I didn't expect. I got better. I am better now, two years later, enough that I can write this and put it down on the page without crying or feeling the old weight of it. That, more than anything, is how I know something in me healed, even if it never fully closes.
If you are grieving right now, in whatever shape it has taken for you, I want you to know you are not alone in it, even when it feels like the loneliest thing in the world. Find the people who will actually show up for you, not just the ones who say the right words once and disappear. Surround yourself with people who are intelligent, good-hearted, and genuinely invested in your healing, the way I was fortunate enough to find mine. They will not fix it for you, nothing does, but they will help carry it until you are strong enough to carry it yourself. That was true for me, and I believe it can be true for you too.
This article has been sponsored by the Psychiatry Research Trust, who are dedicated to supporting young scientists in their groundbreaking research efforts within the field of mental health. If you wish to support their work, please consider donating.
