Annie Sklaver Orenstein is a qualitative researcher, oral historian, and storyteller who has spent over a decade collecting stories from people around the world. Her work has been featured on NBC Nightly News, Comedy Central, Huffington Post, Politico, TIME, and Mother.ly. In 2020, driven by a desire to share these stories beyond the walls of corporate America, Annie founded Dispatch from Daybreak, a collection of letters written by womxn to their earlier selves. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, children, dog, and chickens.

The day my brother died, I was sure there had been a mistake. I maintained, for at least two weeks, that the military had made a grave error. We never got to view the body—how was everyone so sure it was him? Didn’t we owe it to him to confirm? It seemed like the least we could do. What if he was still alive out there? Those thoughts weren’t rational, I know that now, but I was unable to comprehend a reality in which the Ben I had before October 2, 2009, was the only Ben I’d ever have. There was no future Ben.

It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. This was not a world I wanted to exist in. It was the upside down, the twilight zone, the wrong timeline. The new memories I was forming were all amiss.

I remember standing next to Sam as he delivered the eulogy.

I remember his mouth moving, but not the sound that came out.

I remember my eyes scanning the packed sanctuary.

I remember it was a standing-room-only crowd.

I remember Sam made everyone cry—or maybe they were all crying already.

I remember gripping an index card.

I remember taking a calming breath as Sam concluded and handed me the microphone.

I remember asking for memories. More accurately, I remember begging and pleading for them. I asked that people send me memories. I said I’d make them into a book.

Some people did, though not many. I was caught off guard when those emailed memories made things worse. Why did all these strangers know more about my brother than I did? Each note was a reminder of how little I actually knew about his life. I stopped reading them. Project Memory Collection was abandoned.

It was strange how many things appeared the same in this new world but were quietly deteriorating under the surface. Our mom, for example, had long been collecting sea glass on her morning walks along the shoreline. Over the years she has amassed a large collection of beautiful translucent vessels that overflow with smooth, colorful glass treasures. After Ben died, without telling anyone, she labeled which vessels were found when he was alive. That way, she later told me, she’d always know which were found in that part of her life—some found by his very hands. A physical representation of the memories that stopped on October 2, 2009. She has added more overflowing sea glass vessels to her collection in the decade-plus since Ben’s death, but the one she was filling at the time of his death remains only half full. Stunted. When, years after Ben’s death, my toddler tried to put a new piece of sea glass in that half-filled vessel, I dove to stop him with the same urgency I would if he’d been reaching for a lit flame. The two collections were never to be combined.

You might have moments like this too. Books, movies, songs, even entire rooms that are off-limits in your grief. That’s okay. You’ve experienced a significant loss, and you can’t just muscle your way through it.

In his book The Art of Making Memories, Meik Wiking describes memories as the “glue that allows us to understand and experience being the same person over time.” Except, how can I be the same person over time if I spent twenty-five years as a younger sister with two older brothers— and I was now expected to live the remainder of my life without one of them? There was a crack in the glue. Instead of having one big collection of sea glass, I’d have two smaller ones—one found in a world that no longer exists.

Wiking goes on to explain that memories are our “superpower which allows us to travel in time and sets us free from the limitations of the present moment.” When I read that I thought of the sea glass and questioned its logic for the first time. Ben wasn’t there on the beach when my mom filled up a vessel of sea glass in 2010, but he was present. My mom was likely thinking of him as she combed the beach, his name has been invoked around it, and the pieces bear a striking resemblance to those he’d found a year earlier. Why can’t they mix? What if memories, like the trajectory of our lives, aren’t linear? What if memories are our key to time travel?

Excerpted from Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner’s Guide to Grief © Annie Sklaver Orenstein, 2024. Reprinted by permission of the author. Available everywhere books are sold.