Didion writes about spending time at an ICU. She writes about the patient, her daughter. She writes about pneumonia, insufficient oxygen, an hour, brain damage. That’s the order. It is not too sad for me to read, and I know that I have no understanding of my mother’s pain. Months later, she tells me about not being able to sleep at night. Menopause, anxiety, but also the garbage disposal, in the sink. She’s seen what it does to spoons and worries, what if a hand gets caught in there, one of ours? The permanence concerns her. “You would never be the same,” she says.

Sometimes I think that I enjoy the sadness. I’m relieved to find that I am still capable of crying fully over my brother, that what happened years ago still feels a part of me. I remember being sixteen, crying over a boy. No one else was home so I took out photo albums of my brother and cried in the middle of the house. I sat on the floor and let myself sob over the photos, not discerning why I was crying but just feeling comfort in the way my body manifested being upset.

He is gone but we still look complete. Father, mother, two sisters, and now, another brother. I wanted my mother to have another baby. She says that I told her so that first night, the night that Paul died. I wanted her to have a baby boy, not a girl, and I wanted to name him Paul. My mother did have another baby, and we named him Mark. When he was young he would sometimes ask when Paul would come back. Back then we were all still wondering that, but there was no one else around to say it.

We used to go to the cemetery in December. We would park our minivan on the road beside the grave. The hill where his stone was wasn’t as crowded as the others—I suppose this is usually the case in the years that follow. It felt right because he was mine and he didn’t belong with anyone else, but also I worried that he might be cold and he might be lonely.