Grief truly is love with nowhere to go
I once read that grief is love with nowhere to go.
Maybe that’s why my face hurts from crying.
The more you loved, the bigger the grief, the larger that swirl of energy inside. It’s a silent tornado of pain that keeps bumping against your heart but refuses to leave.
My dear nephew Michael died this week. He was 34.
Before I got the official call, I got the unofficial call. My daughter called to say his friends were posting tributes to him on Facebook, saying he had died.
Ten minutes later, a sister called. It was true.
Michael was gone. How he died is for the medical examiner to determine. It really doesn’t matter how he died. What matters is how he lived and how he loved.
What matters is the essence of Michael Francis Brett X.
And we so loved the essence of Michael.
He loved that X, being the tenth. But he was surely different from the 9 who came before. He was my parents’ first grandson and our family’s exclamation point.
Some might say Michael lived recklessly, but actually, he loved recklessly.
He was born restless. As a child, he was always pacing. His brain was always hungry for more. He read my parents’ encyclopedias when he was 5 because he was bored.
Michael was Mensa smart. Einstein smart.
Street smart? Not so much. When I took him to look at colleges, we were walking around Ohio University and three times, he almost walked into a tree, his mind was so deep into Heidegger, Hegel and Plato as my eyes glazed over listening to his brilliance.
He almost died once. And knowing Michael, he probably had many other brushes with death we never knew about. But the first brush nearly devastated us all. He was a little guy, baby/toddler size, who suddenly became violently ill.
I can still see that little diapered boy with all those tubes running in and out of his tiny body in the Intensive Care Unit at Akron Children’s Hospital. They didn’t know what had made him deathly ill, so they were treating him with various drugs to fight anything and everything.
At one point, the doctor came out and told us, If he lives through the night, we think he’ll make it.
That was the longest night.
He lived. They pumped his little body so full of drugs to save him, I think they hurt his brain forever. I think those drugs rewired his brain and set him on a course that was never going to allow him full access to the mainstream of life.
Or maybe Michael was just born to do something and be someone boldly different on this planet.
His friends joke that he was from another planet. Michael was like a comet, soaring through the atmosphere, light years ahead of us in thought, unable to touch down for too long in any job or relationship or home.
Michael had the biggest heart. He would literally give you the shirt on his back, the last dollar in his wallet, the food on his plate.
One year at Easter, he gathered up his own books that he loved and gave them away to his cousins as gifts. One Christmas, he gathered up his beloved collection of Star Wars figures and gave them to my grandson.
As one friend’s tribute said, “You gave even when you didn’t even have anything to give.”
His friends posted memories of sleepovers and bonfires, Mario Cart and Smash Brothers, Dungeons and Dragons, metal music and jam sessions, high school wrestling and martial arts.
Michael was always trying to prove he was tough, but his heart gave him away, every single time.
He let go of the façade when he wrote me long emails from college. I saved some, hoping to share them with him later in life, on a wedding day that will never come.
Those emails cut through the tears this week and made me smile:
“There's nothing like knowing how to fight to test the true limits of one's pacifism. When you can look an adversary in the eye, realize they're at the perfect height for a flying knee to the skull, and walk away, THEN you know you believe what you're saying about non-violence.”
And this: “I have learned to find more joy in a simple spoonful of generic Spaghettios than some people experience all day.”
While taking a class that covered the evolution of the vampire from a Romanian fireside tradition to Bram Stoker, Michael wrote: “First of all, Dracula was NOT killed by a stake, and I am pissed. It's like I've been lied to for twenty one years.”
He could have completed that Ph.D. in philosophy and become a brilliant professor, but Michael was too radical for a life that tame.
“I have the brains to excel in the capitalist, white-collar, nine-to-five mockery that passes for self-fulfillment, but it's not who I am. I am Michael F. Brett X, eldest grandson of a line stemming from orphanage, famine, and immigration,” he once wrote.
He once shared how he quit drinking over a girl he dated, then got more honest. “I didn't stop drinking, but I started doing it for the right reasons.” You had to laugh. And smile at how he signed his emails:
Peace, Love, and Metal.
Peace, Love, and Grooviness.
Peace, Love and Wisdom.
I hate Facebook for breaking the news of his death and I love it for giving me the chance to see how loved he was by so many people. They are calling him “the kindest soul,” “a beacon and a rock,” an “original thinker.”
Michael was all that and more. His dear friends knew he was crazy, deep and different, and they loved him for it, not in spite of it.
They knew he was a rebel without a cause, or maybe one with too many causes. There were so many issues Michael raged against, but it was because they hurt people who were already hurting.
And now we are all hurting.
The comet that was Michael is gone, and our world feels so dark.
Michael leaves behind two parents that gave him more love than any heart could hold, a sister and brother who were the pillars of his life, and countless friends, cousins, aunts and uncles whose lives will never be the same without him in it.
We were all blessed to be part of his wild adventure here and will keep our eyes to the sky to see glimmers of where all that light might be headed next.