In the awkward little jeans pocket no one knows what to do with — the one my brother Truman once joked was meant to hold “a sneaky little treat” — I carry a jagged piece of gravel from the parking spot where he died. Every time I reach for my phone, my fingers brush it through the denim, triggering a reminder.¹ That’s the point. The most pernicious falsehood people hold re: grief is that the griever doesn’t want to be reminded. On the contrary, these little remembrances are often all we have left.

*

As a grad student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I mostly drank and did an embarrassing Denis Johnson impersonation, I could often be found in one of Iowa City’s 50+ bars reliving the same drunken night ad infinitum. In fiction, I loved when characters doubled back over their own pasts, never quite re-treading them but sometimes coming close, like Jay Gatsby yearning by his green light or Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time: telling the truth but telling it slant, a la Dickinson. In my undergrad English sections, I lectured often on this spiral-as-narrative-device, teaching my students how to spot the pattern’s omnipresence and analyze its cyclicality. My younger brother, meanwhile, dealt with living spirals as a zookeeper: chameleon tails, Nautilus shells, rams’ horns.²

It was in Iowa City where my alcoholism veered dark; every night meant 10 shots of grain alcohol if I planned on hitting the town, 15-20 if I planned on drinking alone. I routinely had to re-watch episodes of The Walking Dead or Riverdale because my blacked-out ass couldn’t remember them from the night before.³ Like I wrote at the time, “When you black out every night, your mind crumbles into flimsy bits of memory. Like wet newspaper, the ink from one page bleeds into those beneath it.”

My alcohol- and nicotine-addled brain collapsed into obsessive limerence, looping into intrusive thoughts about ex-partners, my brother, and my own mortality. Re: one ex, my therapist peppily counseled, “You’ll likely dream about her for the rest of your life,” only deepening my recursion. Both my LDS-sober mother and 30-year recovering alcoholic father had warned me for decades of our family’s genetic predispositions. But as I eventually learned, in matters of addiction, each generation must themselves tread in their forebears’ footsteps.⁴

As I was circling the drain in Iowa, Truman was returning from his LDS mission in the Shenandoah Valley, where he’d been randomly assigned to the exact county we’d spent all our summers in with our dad. The happy accident had marked another unexpected spiral, and a breach of Church custom: no one serves near immediate family. Afterward, resuming his studies at BYU Idaho, Truman met his first wife and, this time following Church custom, became engaged within a few months.⁵ The Brothers Burgess could not have lived more differently, me crying into my beer at Dave’s Foxhead Tavern, Truman kneeling with his wife for his nightly prayers. But as far apart as we strayed in lifestyles, he remained my first and best friend. That’s why in retrospect I’m still baffled: when I became suicidal during that period, why the fuck didn’t I call him? And, worse: if I had then, would he have later done the same?

*

For many years, cognitive scientists believed that memory functioned similarly to videos saved to a hard drive. With repeated use, the files could weather but at their core remain unchanged. But by 1995, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus had shown repeatedly how easily a life story — a life — can be rewritten. Turns out, as neuroscientist Karim Nader found in 2000, not only does each act of remembering require the brain to synthesize new proteins to “rewrite” the memory, but chemically interrupting this reconsolidation process — with a shot of anisomycin, for example — physically erases the old one.⁶ Ten years later, Daniela Schiller achieved the same memory overwriting through simple clinical retrainings, no drugs needed. In other words, the more times we remember someone, the less accurate our memory becomes.⁷

Why, then, if I know all this, do I insist on incessantly reminding myself of my brother’s death?

Perhaps it’s self-preservation; it’s only when I refrain from these little remembrances that I awaken sobbing, sheets drenched with sweat. Cue Sappho: “What cannot be said will be wept.” But days when I’ve allowed myself to cry over a song Truman loved or a “hopecore” Instagram Reel become nights filled with brotherly adventure dreams instead of terrors: what cannot be wept will be dreamt.

*

Like me, Truman suffered a rocky relationship with his faith — one complicated by back-to-back divorces after the back-to-back births of his daughters (two lights of my life, both named after flowers). When he died last year, I delved into the neuroscience of grief, putting to work the mental faculties I’d restored through five years of sobriety. Grief, I learned, lights up the areas of the brain linked to loss, but also those linked to seeking. Acute grief stings because it’s our brains obsessively searching for our beloved and realizing they’re not just gone, but gone forever (“You’ll likely dream about [him] for the rest of your life…”). Chronic grief becomes physically exhausting as our brains are forced to revise countless neural pathways that now land at the same dead end.⁸

Today, I wear my dead brother’s flannels and write in his old leather journal. I walk in his shoes — size-12 Timberlands — thumbing through his dog-eared Whitmans and Le Guins; the more I allow myself to remember his kindnesses and quirks (my sneaky little treat), the more ably I can carry his memory. I recall my old Iowa professor Charles D’Ambrosio’s advice, “Instead of sobbing, you write sentences,” and I scrawl poem after story after journal entry about the Brothers Burgess ad infinitum. 

Perhaps my stint with booze-addled limerence pre-wired my brain for recursive grieving. Or maybe, if the God my mom believes in exists, all those early spiral swoops were preparatory tender mercies. I know the darkness that beckoned at my Iowa City rock-bottom is that to which I lost my brother; it’s what our parents inherited and passed along, what we’ll pass, too. But wet newspaper pages and memory reconsolidation be damned — I will remember my little brother because he deserves it.⁹ I’ll tell all the truth but tell it slant, filling pages with the love I couldn’t give him and embracing these jagged little remembrances, all I have left.