Chris Scan 1

Infinity

A grief narrative by Kaethe Cherney

When I was a kid, my brother Chris described infinity to me. I imagined an endless solitary ride lassoed to a force with no destination, hurtling through deep space. The cold gasp of infinity winnowed into my consciousness, never to be unremembered.

Fifty something years later, Chris passed in the small hours of Thanksgiving as I slept nearby. Like an inky miracle, a blank momentum seeped forth and his being was reversed. A chemical transaction occurred that rendered him void.
As the last person to see him alive, I become consumed with bleak wonder. Time ripped so quietly as death stiffened the air. I squandered our final moments with sleep. Did he want a hand to hold or had his internal roaming during his illness prepared him for this seamless onward journey?

In the weeks that now follow, I feel displaced. I’m clumsy in a world that has been rearranged. A wall of my soul is weakened and the door to my grief gives away when I least expect it. His demise subtracts from my being. The math has changed: I’m 50% of my family instead of 20%. My here and now diminishes by the day.

Our cultural differences marked our age difference: Chris was The Beatles and the Stones; I was Blondie and the Talking Heads. He was a hippy; I was a downtown Manhattan club girl. He excelled at STEM subjects and went to a specialised high school; I drew D’s in those topics and went to a progressive one. He was a handsome, accomplished, academic - the complete package. I wanted to play the piano because he did but gave up in frustration because I didn’t sound anything like him.

He was more than a brother; at 13, he became the ‘man’ of the family when our father died, an impossibility wrapped in a tragedy. He and my sister found solace in shared friends, their love of substances and music. He was the true sun of the household, from whom my sister and I drew strength and warmth, while our mercurial mother restlessly orbited newfound widowhood.

Our mother’s choices created a fault line, leaving me on her side of the divide. When I was ten, Chris made a clean break by moving in with a cult posing as an alternative commune. My sister followed suit and their absence spanned years. The vacuum became cluttered with my lack of self-worth. I’m not loveable was my reasoning for their double fold rejection. Make me loveable was the anxiety that shadowed my teens. I’m loveable! Was my eureka moment, when I began to trip my own light fantastic and move forward in the world.

I craved both siblings. My sister made intermittent contact, but Chris just vanished. Back then, I would have tap-danced on a third rail to get his attention. He was a current running through our shared city, unseen yet charged. His absence framed my being; his departure marked time and drew a line I could not cross.

My sister’s association with the cult ended when I was a college freshman, and our reconnection was immediate and unequivocal. But by the time Chris left, I was married and getting ready to move to England. My idealisation had morphed to ambivalence. I had moved on, or so I thought, and wasn’t sure I wanted much to do with him. I was okay with seeing him for a coffee when I was in town but wasn’t in a hurry to relinquish my anger.

When Chris was first diagnosed with cancer sixteen years ago, it shocked me into ditching my issues with him. After his near miraculous recovery, the three siblings enjoyed a golden epoch in which many a dinner ended in the small hours. We laughed ourselves into a new normal. The family that partied together stayed together became our morning-after mantra.

And yet, the family remained triangulated. My mother could never forgive him, or perhaps herself, for those missing years. Her recrimination reverberated throughout their relations until the end of her days. When he offered her free piano lessons, she ended up ‘firing’ him when he had to reschedule her in favour of a paying student. In her view, he had incurred a debt that could never be repaid, seemingly forgetting she’d lent him the emotional capital.

There were aspects to his personality that remained opaque. An ability to be self-compromised by his unquestioning loyalty; idealism that was capable of warping his better judgement; accoutrements that appeared to jar with his belief system. He showed a near saintly patience when his wife developed a degenerative disease, a possible atonement for the times he’d bolted in the past. His maddening ability to overlook the small print. Charming, sweet, funny, talented and clueless when least expected – he was all that, and more.

There are moments when the room itches with his presence. In my dreams, we are together again in our childhood apartment. I saturate my memory with the rich riffs of his voice. All the years I missed him seem like a cakewalk now that he’s truly gone. The other night, I dreamt that a lid to a box lifted, and a winged creature emerged. Maybe infinity isn’t what I imagined. Maybe Chris has become a glorious songbird, flying in a rhapsody of blue.





- Kaethe Cherney