At 4 a.m. on Sept. 19, 2003, the world as I had known it for the first 13 years of my life shattered and fell all around me. I woke up to the sounds of my father’s moans of pain and my mother’s sobs downstairs. I heard the urgency in my father’s voice as he pleaded with two men whose voices I couldn’t recognize. “I want to go pick up my son… I need to go get him…” Out of fear and confusion, I stayed in my bed-some part of me knew what had happened, but for the time, I was content with my oblivion. After an hour of restless speculation, I finally knew I could no longer delay what could only be tragic news.
I slowly descended the stairs, my heart pounding, and walked into the light of the kitchen. I kept reminding myself what I had heard my father saying an hour earlier. If he wanted to pick up my big brother from college, something must have happened to one of his friends. It couldn’t be my brother was hurt. But then why the two police officers? The Rabbi? The priest? And why was my mother broken in the corner? Why couldn’t my dad look at me?
I finally broke the silence. “Daddy? What’s going on?” He looked up at me with anguish in his eyes and said, “Rachel, Scot’s been in an accident.”
“But he’s okay, right?” This time, the first I could remember, my father couldn’t give me an answer. My stomach dropped, and my head began to spin. I didn’t feel sadness, I didn’t feel anger-I couldn’t feel anything at all. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even cry.
The night before, around 10 p.m., my brother had been with one of his friends on their way to a party in an area of campus with which they weren’t familiar. They were going to a party to celebrate a teammate’s 21st birthday. The friend he was with was on the phone, getting directions from the birthday boy. They were in the backyard of a fraternity house on the scenic Cornell University campus and heard one of the fraternity brothers in the house yelling, “This is private property. You’re trespassing!” Knowing my brother, he probably made some smart-aleck retort before asking his friend where to go next. They were told to hop a fence into the next yard. My brother jumped a meagerly constructed split-rail fence. Within seconds, the fraternity brother, who moments ago had yelled at my brother and his friend instead of warning them about what lay in the darkness beyond the fence, ran to Scot’s friend and physically restrained him from following suit. My talented, overprotective, incessantly happy older brother had mistakenly hopped the wrong fence. Instead of landing safely on the other side in the next yard, he had fallen 150 feet into one of the signature gorges of Cornell’s campus. He broke his neck and died instantly.
The next years of my life were the most painful, darkest times I have ever lived through. Grief after loss is a hard thing to explain. It’s not just an emotional experience. It feels like your heart, your body, is being constantly torn apart in a million directions. There is a physical pain, an emptiness, in the pit of your stomach you hope will finally leave you, but you can’t imagine it ever will. At the tender age of 13, I was experiencing such complex emotions I didn’t think I could live. In fact, through high school, I didn’t really want to. I couldn’t talk to my parents, and the numerous grief counselors I met with couldn’t help me. They couldn’t understand how I felt-they saw my grief as normal, but how could it be? They didn’t know Scot, my hero, my friend, my role model. They didn’t care that he was a brilliant man on the way to doing spectacular things, or that he was a member of Cornell’s championship wrestling team, or that when I cried he would distort his face into an unnaturally hilarious face until my tears were from laughter and not sadness. What they didn’t realize was that he wasn’t just anyone-he was MY brother. And I couldn’t comprehend a future that didn’t include him. Why was I left behind when he was the one who was special?
Alone as I felt I was, I somehow persevered.
Eventually, I made it to college. I grew from a frizzy-haired, awkward, depressed high school student into a happy, fun-loving young adult. It’s hard for me to say exactly how I moved on with my life after feeling so lost and helpless, but I’ve grown to realize the only way I can truly show respect for my brother’s memory, and allow him to live on within myself, is to exude his confidence, his strength, his love of life. That’s not to say I don’t still have nights where I just curl into a ball and cry myself to sleep, or moments where that hollowness inside of me returns, but those times are fewer and farther between. It’s gotten easier to enjoy my life, even with all I know is missing from it, because I’ve finally come to realize the loss of a loved one is not something you ever get over. Rather, it’s something you come to live with because you realize there are other things worth living for.
