The Split Second
A second too long with a picture of my brother.
“Sometimes I feel as if I made him up. Did I really remember what his laugh, what his voice sounded like, the presence that we had when we were together, what it was like to have a conversation with him?”
~ Dr. Valerie Lentine, Episode 45
I was recording with Dr. Valerie Lentine when she said that sometimes she feels as if she made Andy up.
She said it had been three years since she had physically been with him, and her brain had started playing tricks on her. Had his laugh really sounded like that? Had his voice really filled a room the way she remembered?
Earlier in our conversation she described the same experience a different way. She said that when she goes too long without thinking about Andy, it hits her like a freight train and sends her into a spiral. She said she doesn’t remember her brother as well as she used to. She said it out loud in a way bereaved siblings rarely do.
I wondered aloud whether a lot of us have felt that.
I didn’t tell her, in the moment, that I had been sitting with my own version of it a few weeks before.
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A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through pictures of my brother as I prepare to revise our website. I stopped on one of Tony in young adulthood.
For a split second, I didn’t recognize him.
It only lasted an instant. Then my brain caught up, and realized, of course that was my brother. Yet the gap was enough to send me spiraling.
I started obsessively looking at other pictures to remind myself. I sat with specific memories. I grounded myself in his familiarity, in the small things that were unmistakably him.
Underneath all of it was anger and frustration that my own brain would do that to me.
I don't know who my brain thinks it is protecting. Certainly not me.
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What was happening in that split second, I think, is something grief researchers have written about for decades.
Attachment does not end in death.
When we love someone, we build an attachment to them that lives in us at a deep level. That attachment does not have an off switch. Even after they die, we keep holding them as present, because that is what attachment does. It was built to do that.
The problem is that we also carry the memory of the death. The phone call. The hospital. The funeral. Those memories are real, and they are true, and they coexist with an attachment that keeps telling us the person still exists.
Grief is the slow reconciliation between those two truths. Every major grief theorist writes about some version of this. It is why the work takes years. It is why it is work.
When I looked at that picture of Tony and didn't recognize him for a split second, I think those two truths briefly collided. Tony was one of, if not the only, secure attachments I had. My attachment to him, which is still alive and running, didn't match the frozen image I was looking at. My memory of his death did.
The spiral that followed was me reconciling. Looking at more pictures. Walking myself back to specific memories. Grounding.
The anger was because the glitch felt like betrayal.
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I think what Valerie is describing with the freight train and the fear of making Andy up is the same thing. The longer you go without actively remembering your sibling, the more the death takes up the space where they used to live in your brain and in your heart. When something forces the two back together, it hurts.
That is not evidence that you are forgetting. It is evidence that you are still doing the work.
The texture of someone you loved does not disappear. It gets stored more deeply. It moves from the part of your brain that keeps things on the surface for quick recall, into the part that holds things for the long haul. That move is what makes it feel, for a moment, like they are slipping. They are not slipping. They are being carried.
You are not making them up. You are loving them from farther away than you used to, and your brain is figuring out how to hold both of those truths at the same time.
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After the photo glitch, I kept that picture of Tony open on my phone for a long time. I looked at him. I remembered the sound of his voice. I said his name out loud.
When the freight train comes, when your brain plays the trick, when you wonder for half a second who that person is in the picture, don’t push it away. Sit with it. Look at them on purpose. Say their name on purpose. Remember something specific on purpose.
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There is so much in this week’s episode I want you to hear. Valerie’s story has stayed with me. Please listen wherever you get your podcasts.
If any of this landed, try writing on this:
When was the last time your brain played a trick on you about your sibling? When was the last time you didn’t recognize them for a second, or couldn’t hear their voice, or felt like you might have made them up? What was that like? What did you do next?
Write for five minutes. No editing, no judgment. Just let it come.
Stay tuned for a few more free prompts tomorrow. The full Wild Grief Prompt Set for this theme (9 prompts with reflection questions) will be available for paid subscribers this weekend.
If any of this resonated, send it to someone who might need it. Or hold onto it for yourself. Both matter.
🎧 Half of Myself: A Surviving Sibling’s Story of Losing Andy
Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺
The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
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