White Jacket Required (19 page)

The next few days after the funeral passed quickly, a hustle and bustle of airport trips, neighbors stopping by, and casseroles lining up centimeters apart on our kitchen counter. Most extended family had left the day after the service; only my aunt, my mother's sister, had remained to help out for a week. Though I finally had let go and cried, I still felt a hard ball of pain and anger in my chest that threatened to explode at any moment.

When it did, I was sitting on the couch with my mom and my aunt late in the afternoon. Rob and my dad were talking about hedge funds, and the news was droning softly on TV. My aunt was talking to my mom and me about how my twenty-something cousin had matured into such a great guy, and I laughed and said, “Well, I'm sure he's had his fair share of drinks and parties, too.”

My aunt didn't smile but just turned to face me. “Nope. I would know. James never has touched marijuana before. He's a good guy.”

“Are you telling me that my brother wasn't a good guy?” I asked, my face getting red and my heart starting to pound into my ears. Normally, I would never have started a conversation like this, but something in me just felt dark.

“Jennifer. I'm not saying Johnny wasn't
a good guy.
He was my godson, for crying out loud. I'm just saying my own son has never smoked pot before.”

Something in me broke loose. “I know EXACTLY what you're saying. You're saying that your son was better than my brother and now my brother is dead. He is dead!” I started crying, getting madder and madder. “You know what, I hate you. I do. You're self-righteous and claim to live this perfect life with your perfect son who never does anything wrong. I hate you, I hate you, I HATE YOU!” I screamed.

I had no idea who I was in that moment. I ran out the door and slammed it. All I could hear now on the inside of the house was my mother wailing and my aunt sobbing. Had I done this? Had I just said such horrible, horrible things? I felt empty and alone. My brother was dead, I'd quit my job impulsively, and now I had just told my aunt that I hated her.
Hated
her. I'd never even thought such a thing before. She was my aunt, my mom's only sister—the same aunt who had changed my diapers, watched me grow up, and flown out from Wisconsin to watch me graduate from culinary school only a few months before. Too stubborn to go back inside, I sat at the end of our cobblestone driveway in the heat and dropped my head into my hands.

Where in the world was I supposed to go from here?

19
THE NEW NORMAL

W
E FILLED THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WITH ERRANDS; I DIDN'T
want my mom to be by herself, and knew I had to keep myself busy to make it through. My aunt had left a few days after my outburst, and I had never apologized; instead I hid at Rob's house for the remainder of her stay. I was ashamed of my behavior, of course, but making things right with her had felt way too overwhelming. Living hour by hour was about all I could handle.

Physical activity became an outlet for my grief, but not in the way I would have expected. For the first time in my life, yoga scared me. Being vulnerable and open to discomfort in the way that yoga demands felt like it could suck the life out of me. The one time I attempted to go to my favorite Thursday-morning class, I almost had a panic attack and had to walk out while all the other students were sweating in triangles and plank poses. Instead, I took over John's elite membership at the health club down the street—the health club he often went to, after getting high with his friends, to sit in the steam room for hours on end. My dad had handed me John's membership card and told me it was mine now.

The first time I walked in the club to work out, I handed the cute brunette behind the front desk my brother's tattered card and she didn't understand.

“John Taylor Weber,” she read aloud while smacking gum between her lips.

“Yeah . . . that's my brother,” I said, not sure if I could say any more because my voice had started to give out and I felt a ball of emotion welling inside.

“Okay . . . if you are going to use his card I'm going to have to get you to fill out this form please. Is he out of town?” Smack, smack, smack went her pink gum. I grimaced.

“Well, actually he passed away last week.” The words flew out of my mouth before I could stop them, and bubble-gum girl just stared at me.

“HE DIED?!” she asked, her voice rising in alarm, and I glanced around and caught several members now looking our way.

“Yes. It was pretty sudden. Did you know him?” I could now feel tears welling in my eyes and gritted my teeth to halt them.

“Oh my God, of course I did! He was a little hellion . . . always came in with that David kid. I'm so, so, so sorry!” Now she looked like she was about to cry, and I wasn't sure if I should reach out to her, get my card back, or just turn around and run. “Well, of course you can use his membership. Don't worry about anything at all, sweetie. Is there anything else I can do?”

“Thank you . . . no. Thanks so much for your help.” I desperately just wanted to grab my card and get out of there at this point. She gave me a sympathetic look and I pushed my way through the entrance into the women's locker room, card clutched in my sweaty palm.

Spinning class took the place of yoga as my primary mode of exercise, and I came to crave that dark room where I could just go and block everything out. On the bike, no one knew my brother or me, so I could escape the “I'm-so-sorry-for-you” looks that I got so often from friends. I felt best in the dark, with beads of salty sweat dripping from my brow. At night I would nurse my sore muscles with hot showers and massage, cooking comforting meals that required just enough effort to take my mind off things for half an hour while I mixed, beat, and blended.

Despite it all, normal patterns began to return to our lives, slowly but surely. As my parents went back to their jobs and Rob began to finally feel comfortable leaving me at home by myself, I tried my hardest to just keep going. Writing heartfelt blog posts and responding to emails became a new routine that helped keep me grounded, and I was blown away by the outpouring of love and support by my readers. Care packages from foreign countries began to come to the door, as did book-length emails from girls telling me how much they admired my strength throughout the ordeal.

Numerous people—readers, and friends—asked if I would consider taking some sort of antidepressant to ease the trauma of the previous month, but I always refused. In college, I had gone through a brief period of depression (or what was diagnosed as depression) and had resorted to one of these medications for a year. Instead of helping me cope, it had merely numbed my brain and left me feeling strange and plasticlike. Now I wanted to feel things, to really feel them for all they were, even if there was some pain, so instead of pills I just focused on staying busy. I threw myself into freelance writing, planning for a bloggers' conference, spinning, and cooking.

On the outside, I maintained the sunny disposition that I'm widely known for online; I kept on a big smile and laughed at all the right moments. On the inside, though, it felt like pieces were breaking off my heart, one crumb at a time. I've never been one to really express my feelings; whenever anyone asked me how I was doing, I just answered that I was fine, fine. Throughout my life I've always taken on a protector mode in times of trouble, and I told myself I had to keep it together for my family.

In May, one month after John's death, at the urging of my friend Christie, I took a spontaneous weekend trip to the South Carolina Lowcountry. I needed to get far away from Tampa. When, after six hours of driving nonstop, I finally entered the Charleston county lines, the sense of relief was so great that I started to cry. I rolled down the windows and took deep inhales of the salt and marsh and sea, and for the first time in a long time, I felt lighter.

When I was very young, we lived on the South Carolina coast for a short time. My brother was born on Hilton Head Island in the early nineties, and there was just something about the Lowcountry that had gotten into my soul and had never left. No matter what stage of life I'm in, that drive on Highway 17 from Beaufort to Charleston always feels like coming home.

As I drove on through West Ashley and approached downtown, I could see the Cooper River Bridge in the distance and the stately antebellum buildings of College of Charleston rise up in the sky. The scents of the ocean were replaced with aromas of roast oysters, shrimp, and incense. When I pulled my old black Honda into Christie's driveway on Vanderhorst Street, across the street from the college library where I had spent so many hours memorizing Shakespeare and studying Victorian literature, she came running out and gave me a long, comforting hug.

That weekend we soaked up Charleston culture, beaching ourselves on the warm sands of Folly, eating benne wafers at the French Market, and drinking far too much red wine at my favorite wine bar next door to my old apartment on King Street. We went shopping, ate frozen yogurt, and traded hysterical stories about high school and our tiny hometown that seemed a million miles away. At one point, I thought to myself,
Is it okay to laugh?
Laughing felt foreign and forced; it was as if deep, permanent lines of sadness had been etched into my once bright disposition. And when I stared at myself in the mirror in Christie's bathroom, I had no idea who the girl looking back at me was. I felt as if I had aged ten years in the past four weeks.

I mentioned this to Christie, and that night we both plastered our faces with mineral clay. Sitting on the bed with my best friend, I felt the strange, light feeling come over me again and started to giggle. Cracks appeared in the mud around my mouth, and all at once, I knew it was going to be all right. Maybe not right now or in the next few days, but someday things would be okay again. I could still laugh. Under the layers of grief and sorrow, I could find glimpses of the life I once lived. We washed off our masks with warm water, got dressed in sundresses and sandals, and headed out for dinner and drinks at a hole-in-the-wall French restaurant on Broad Street, the type of place that the snowbirds would never find, where only locals could appreciate the $4.50 glasses of house red wine.

“You know, you seem to be doing all right,” Christie said as we clinked glasses and shared our favorite appetizer of escargot, the garlicky, buttery snails oozing on our forks.

“Some days I am . . . some moments I forget he's gone. It's like I'll totally forget what happened and order a pizza, half pepperoni, half cheese, the way he would like it, and then I remember and it's as if someone has punched me in the stomach.” I stared at the couple sitting across from us, holding hands and talking in hushed Southern voices.

“Sometimes I still feel guilty; I wish I could have been a better sister; I wish we hadn't fought so much.” Memories of the final day began to surface: my yelling at John to get a life and John slamming the door behind . . . for the last time. I was supposed to help him write his college admissions essay; the document was still sitting unedited on my laptop, breaking mid-sentence. I caught my breath and pushed a strand of hair behind my ear, tucking it neatly and out of sight. Christie took a sip of wine and looked at me.

“Jenna, you were a great sister. Brothers and sisters fight all the time, you know that. John knew how much you loved him.”

I looked down at my wrist. Two weeks after his death, I'd gone with my family to get tattoos, a very atypical bonding experience for us all. John had wanted to get a tattoo for his nineteenth birthday, a cross on his back saying “give me strength” across it. His death was only a week and a half after his birthday, and he'd never gotten around to getting inked. So we found it fitting to do it in his place. Until the tattoo, I was relatively numb, but as that needle dug in over and over into the soft flesh of my wrist, I felt a sense of satisfaction in the pain. I rubbed the blue cross now as Christie spoke, as if to wear it in farther.

Our food came then, plates of delicious fish fresh from coastal waters and vegetables dotted with butter and sea salt. We each ordered more wine, and our conversation became quicker and more light-hearted as we shifted topics, starting to discuss what our high school classmates were doing with their lives six years later. Christie told me how our friend Mary was already pregnant with her third child, and my high school boyfriend was thinking about getting engaged to a girl he had met in college.

Other than eating, we spent our time over the next few days taking incredibly long walks all around the city and down near the water, admiring the magnificent hundred-year-old Charleston homes. I loved the feel of my sandals on the cobblestones and the sunshine on my face.

Christie, recently having graduated from law school, was in the midst of studying for the bar exam, so one day while she studied, I made my way to my old yoga studio to see if a class might finally bring me some peace. The studio was so comfortably familiar, and as I looked in the mirrors that lined the walls, I could see for the first time how my grief was affecting my physical self. Over the past five weeks, I had lost about ten pounds. I had always been slender and the loss was not flattering on my frame; my collarbone and backbone protruded sharply. There's no real way to explain my weight loss other than grief. I had eaten my fair share of cookies and cakes brought over by the church and neighbors, finding solace in the sweet crumbs and icing. Despite all I ate, though, I continued to lose weight. It was as if my sadness and grief took the place of the gym in burning calories. I took this as a sign to eat all the delicious Southern food I wanted on my little vacation, and eat I did.

My absolute favorite Charlestonian dish is shrimp and grits. A standard on the menu of pretty much every Charleston restaurant, this comforting one-pot meal is said to have nourished shrimpers and sailors as a hearty early-morning breakfast before they headed out to sea. I like mine for dinner, with plenty of hot sauce on the side.