by Jennifer Bunn

Created on: August 27, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Losing my brother is perhaps the most difficult thing I have had to overcome in nearly 40 years of living. Fully twenty years later, I recall vividly the phone call I received from my older brother, calling me home. I was nineteen, and nothing I thought I had gone through in my life prepared me for the loss of my little brother, Tommy.

Tommy (he hated when I called him that-he preferred the more grown-up Tom) and I were like most siblings. We fought, we argued, and we were sometimes cruel to each other. Yet underneath was a bond of friendship. We were 13 months apart, and our closeness in age made us fast friends and bitter rivals, depending on the day and situation. At different points in our lives we were closer than others. I am grateful that we were close at the end.

We shared our first cigarettes and alcohol, a love of music and MTV, boyfriend and girlfriend woes, and a strange liking for the movie "Better Off Dead", which we watched so many times that I still know lines from the movie virtually off by heart. Perhaps I wouldn't have watched the movie with him so many times had I known what was in store.

I remember the long months after his death as having a surreal quality. I felt so disconnected from the world that I wonder how I survived. The truth is, at times I did not really care if I survived. I was nineteen years old and it felt as if my life had ended when his did. The pain was unrelenting, and even to this day, small things can recall his memory and bring the grief to the forefront again. Sometimes I welcome these surprise bouts of grief, as a way to actively think of him and reflect on how much I miss his presence in my life.

Every year, I sit and watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as Christmas draws closer, and every year I sob. My daughters ask me why I am sad, and I use this as an opportunity to tell them about their Uncle Tommy, and how it makes me sad that they never had the opportunity to meet him. They would have loved him, and he would have loved them back unabashedly.

Tommy is forever frozen in my memory at eighteen years old, with his whole life stretching before him. College, marriage, children...I find it difficult to imagine him at these phases of his life. There is a woman out there somewhere who missed out, and some wonderful children who might have shared his sense of humor and his ridiculously long eyelashes. I feel cheated that I did not get to know the more adult "Tom".

I think I would have liked him. You would have, too.

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