The Middle is Gone

On losing a brother and holding on to what’s left

Today, the quiet approach of marking the first anniversary of loss is here. There are no more heart-dropping moments when the waves of remembrance hit, while going through the banal motions of everyday life, that time is inching closer. It is here, and tomorrow the clock starts again. It is both hard and soft. Emotion bears down a physical weight that one has no choice but to shoulder, and yet there is lightness at the edges of the years of happy memories and laughter and awkward brotherly hugs. Streaks of light piercing through the dark clouds. When I was little, my mother told me that if the sun comes out while it’s raining, it won’t rain for long. That means the storm is passing.

The night after my brother passed as I was unable to sleep, a thought struck me that forced my body to move. In the despair of the late hours, and feeling as though I had to do something, to get something out in that moment, I started to write my brother’s obituary. A task I had never done before and no one asked me to do then, it was a compulsion of releasing a coiled spring in my body to honor one of my big brothers.

The strange thing is as I was experiencing it, each moment seemed to instantly sear itself on the ridges of my brain. Never having experienced walking through a cloud like the one that hung throughout that week, it seemed like I would never forget each tiny detail of every second. One year later, possibly as one of the mind’s coping mechanisms to bury trauma, the details have faded. But some remain prominent.

I am the youngest of three boys and the brother who passed was in the middle. The day of his memorial, I knew I needed my eldest brother on one side and a parent on the other. Unmarried and single, those pillars would help to prop me up. After expressing this to my mother, she worked on the choreography which surprised me at its complexity. I had no idea the placements, hierarchy, and etiquette involved. Apparently, his widow should have the place of honor on the inside aisle of the first row of family, but our eldest brother was speaking so also needed to be on an aisle. In the end it was all sorted, after much talking amongst family, with my brother to one side and my mom on the other.

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As the crowd rose for the arrival of the family and we entered to approach our rows at the front, the rise of uncontrollable tears burned my eyes. Standing in place as the rest of our close and extended family walked in, I didn’t dare turn behind me to face the crowd who had come to pay respects. Almost as soon as I stopped walking, without thinking, I grabbed my remaining big brother’s hand and held it tight. He’s ten years older than I am and so surely must have held my hand when I was little, but I honestly can’t remember and I know it hasn’t happened in this way since. But the middle was gone, only the big and the little left. He didn’t react, didn’t look over, didn’t ask what I was doing. He simply held it back as we stared ahead silently waiting for the service that no one wanted to begin, as the tears rolled down my face.

Our minds and bodies are amazing things. In order to protect us, our minds will shove down something traumatic or hurtful but our bodies remember what the conscious mind can’t. Just because something is hidden, doesn’t mean it’s gone. And when it comes to a point where we can go no further, our bodies will try to remind us.

Over the course of my life, so many comments, events, and traumas have been pushed to the graveyard of my mind. What I’m slowly realizing is that I have to actively go after them, dig them up, to release them. Otherwise, nothing changes. Oprah has a great quote (I think maybe she got it from Maya Angelou) that I’ll paraphrase. We all have a voice in the back of our mind that begins as a whisper. If you ignore it, it will turn into a yell. If you still ignore it, you hit a brick wall. To me, traumatic events are the same. You either actively work through them, dissect them, grow from them, or you ignore them at your own peril.

I don’t want to ignore the grief of Wayne’s passing. When the waves of grief come, I want them to carry me wherever they lead, then set me back down on the sand. I want to remember his body-shaking belly laugh, his courage in the face of adversity, his tender heart. I want to remember the tiny details of the week after his passing and his memorial.

And now I know the perfect thing to do today. I’m going to have a pimento cheese sandwich and a slice of chocolate cake. Two of his favorites.

A slice of his life, and a portion of his obituary:

Wayne Cameron Merritt (June 25, 1975-April 10, 2025) passed peacefully in Dallas in the home he grew up in with his wife and family at his bedside. Born with partial sight fully lost at the age of 11 and a rare genetic disease which caused life-long health complications, rather than let the circumstance of his congenital conditions define him, he defied them.

A life-long lover of music, Wayne joined his Junior High marching band to play the saxophone and the euphonium. In High School, he drove a farm truck across a Paris, Texas ranch. In his 20’s, he loved riding on the back of his friend’s motorcycle and the two jumped off a cliff into Lake Travis.

During college years, Wayne attended a rigorous training program at the Colorado Center for the Blind, which included applications he would bring to his later working life. He received a B.A.A.S. in Applied Technology from the University of North Texas. His professional career included 16 years working for the Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center in Austin, Texas where he helped the blind and visually impaired prepare to navigate a lifetime with blindness.

Above all, Wayne had a belly laugh that sounded like a car trying to start, a sweet and sensitive soul, and a deeply felt love for anything chocolate. He also frequently laughed at his own jokes, and we love him for it.

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