The writer in me wants to narrate my grief. The writer in me wants to remove myself from the muck and mire and pain of navigating this dark valley and rise above it and float, weightless, a disembodied voice that just describes the action, that is removed from the action, that just describes the woman sitting alone at the airport, looking out the windows at the ocean in the distance and missing her father desperately, wishing that he were there – here – to talk to about love and loss and souls. Missing him, and dwelling on the missing, because the missing at least is something, is a known thing, where so much else is not.

And there I go, narrating. And here I go, continuing to narrate, because the words lift me out of myself and allow me to remove myself, a little, from the immediate experience of pain.

I do not know if this is a good or bad thing. It just is.

The night, again, looms long and dark, and tomorrow longer and darker. Police. Coroner. Autopsy. Body. I am not grown-up enough for this, at this moment, at this precise moment when I have been plunged back into my childhood, into my childishness, into my childish need to just creep into my parents’ bedroom and curl up at the foot of their bed and hear them breathing and feel their warmth and feel their love and feel secure in the belief that mom and dad are forever, are always.

At this moment I need my Dad more than anything. At this moment I cannot have him.

All I have is this story of him, and of me, this last story of us, this story that I can’t help but tell because the telling is the only way I know to wrap arms around myself and pull myself some distance, some very little distance, out of the eye of the pain.

(I don’t know how much of this story I will post. I don’t want to lash the Internet with my grief. And I will need, at some point, to just live this, and not narrate. But the narrating helps, the storytelling helps, it’s the only thing, right now, that helps. And it helps to know that you have listened, are listening. I don’t know. I’m keeping comments closed, for now, because I’m not ready for this to be a dialogue. I know that you all are out there, wishing me strength and love. I am so grateful. Thank you for letting me whisper this all to you. Thank you.)

I have moments when I lose the thread of the story that I tell myself about why this is so important to me. I tell myself that this – this story about searching for my long-lost brother – is a story about helping my mother. I tell myself that this is for her, and for him. I tell myself these things, and I stumble over my lack of conviction. It is these things, of course. But it’s more than these things. I want to find him for me. I’m not sure why.

I never knew that I had a brother. His absence from my life, such as it was, was unknown to me. I never felt the loss, because I did not know it. It’s wrong, perhaps, to even describe it as loss. His absence from my mother’s life made it possible for me to exist. Had she stayed with his father, as was her plan, I would never have been born. We were never fated to share a life, he and I, so how can his absence from my life be understood, be felt, as a loss? (Also, oh god, loss. My heart aches for not being able to parse its experience of loss in a manner that makes such loss comprehensible. My heart, it aches, and is confused.) My brother was not lost to me. He was never mine in the first place.

And yet: I’m haunted by the moment, in the telling of her story, when my mother said “your father would have adopted him.” They were friends, she and my father; the circumstances surrounding her giving up this boy brought them closer. My father offered to stay with her, and with him, and make a family. But it didn’t happen that way – my mother didn’t know that she could change her mind about giving up her son, and so the wheel of the fates turned and the boy went to another family and was lost forever to mine. Is it this that haunts me? The idea that he could have been my older brother, that my life might have been the same in every respect save for the presence of a brother? No, because – if there is one thing that Lost has taught me – history does not unfold that way. Keeping my brother would have set my mother on a different path in a different life, regardless of whether or not my father was with her on that path. It would have set her on a different path in a different life. A life without me. So am I haunted by the idea that, but for the grace of the fates, this boy, this lost boy, might have had my life? Is this why I want to know him?

I don’t know. I’m still sorting this out. All I know is, I keep turning this Dharma wheel, hoping that it will project me into a time and place where I know my brother. For better or for worse.

UPDATE: I’m shutting down comments on this post. Apparently, not everyone in the world supports public adoption searches – which, fine, but some of those not-everyones are unable to express their opinion about that in a manner that is civil. My heart’s too vulnerable around this. I’m putting the comments away, to keep private, for myself, and closing further commentary. Anyone who needs/wants to get in touch with me about this, please use e-mail.