The Guilt of Living Long with No Control Over Anything.

When good people die too soon there are more questions than answers.

Jason in the Keweenaw, on vacation with all of us a little more than a month ago.

“A death in the family”. I hate those words; so impersonal when the worst has happened, when pain is palpable, when grief is unbearable. It happened to us a week and a half ago, and the pain, the grief—they’re there, still strong, showing no signs of letting up.

Jason was my great-nephew. Nothing even came close to suggesting he wouldn’t live a long life. He had everything going for him—a good job, a shining future, a sunny outlook, and friends and family who loved him surely and deeply. He was funny, he was kind, he was generous, he made rooms light up when he entered. And he’s gone.

Forty-three years old. Found dead at his bedside after a morning call from his work saying he hadn’t come in. No apparent reason—healthy, he didn’t do drugs, nothing self-inflicting. An aneurysm, I’m thinking, or something equally quick. His cell phone was still on his nightstand, just inches from where he lay.

They’re saying now that because of county backups the results of the autopsy could take many months. So add that to our agony. The waiting. The wondering. Why? My god, why did this happen? HOW did this happen? Not knowing gives grief a whole new meaning.

We are a close family. My cousin and I married brothers and melded both of our families forever. We are blood on both sides. Our ties are deep. This has shattered his mother (my niece), his father, his brother, and the rest of us who dearly loved this man.

For all intents, I am the matriarch of this particular part of our family—only because I’m at such an age everyone else has died off. I’m the only one of the elders left alive. My job now is to protect those who are younger, to be there for them through all of their trials, to encourage them, to savor them, to watch them grow older.

Jason should be here with us.

This is where life gets unfair. What right do I have to live this long when someone as precious and wonderful as our Jason—almost half my age—cannot? What right do any of us have to live our lives peacefully when something this random and cruel happens to the people we care so deeply about? It makes no sense, yet we keep trying to figure it out, often in ways existential or spiritual. Because we want answers. We need answers. Life cannot send us such heartbreak without a rational explanation.

But it does.

And here we are, waiting for healing. For solace. Waiting for the pain to subside and for the memories to take hold—those times we can remember with smiles and not tears. It takes however long it takes. We have no control over the timeline, any more than we have any control over life.

I can’t—I won’t—end this piece with a life lesson or something similarly needless. If you’ve ever loved someone and lost them, you know how it feels. You’ll be kind and offer your sympathy (though it’s really not necessary), and I’ll know it comes from a healing heart. We all have them if we’ve lived long enough.

I wish you could have known Jason. Then you would know why I needed to write this here, at home, with a coming rain, with a promise to keep every memory of him alive.

There is no forgetting.