Michelle,

I’m happy you are writing. I’m reading.

Sadly, I am reading your journey through grief. Grief seems too heavy a route for anyone. We never choose it. It chooses us, requiring so much when we have the least to offer. Grief shouldn’t yet be your pilgrimage, not yet. Your brother was murdered and too young to be gone, stolen so cruelly.

Your writing will help you, is helping you, on this journey you never chose. As you lost your stutter by letting go, you will find grief lessens, too, when you are able to let go of it, too. In your own time. It is a process. It often feels unsurvivable. Writing will help you survive grief and life, too.

And you will change. When you begin to realize you’ve changed the writing will let you understand how you changed. It will help you realize that the once sharp, physical pain began to dull; that the deep wound began to scar. The writing will allow you to retrace your steps with grief and realize grief is beginning to loose it’s grip on your heart. It is a process.

Writing will help you understand that no matter the way your brother was taken or outcome of the hunt for his killer(s) or the unspeakable pain of losing him, your love for him grow has grown and so will grow. It won’t die. We still have real relationships with those no longer with us because love is able to surpass the boundaries of time, space, fear and traverse the unknowable. Writing will help you continue your relationship with your brother.

Writing will help you survive. And grow.

Your writing is beautiful. It expresses emotion deeply and well. I often feel I’ve been skinned. I hurt. Writing that can make others feel is rare.

Your writing allows me to empathize with you. And to touch my father who died a different death than your brother but is still gone. My writing helped me to give up my desire to control after grief beat my heart to a pulp. I survived. Now I thrive. And I still write about him and grief and love:

“It’s Life” https://crossingenres.com/it-s-life-fd5045a1a073

The writing helped me realize the courage it took to make grief’s cruel pilgrimage. I am stronger and found ways to live possibilities, to live creatively and, as my father would wish, happily.

Your readers will come. I don’t understand Medium’s algorithms but I understand good writing. You will be read widely. And recommended. But from reading you for several months, I suspect you aren’t writing for readers just yet. Write for you, as you’re doing.

Many will turn away from the rawness of your hurt. Mortals hate immortality and true emotion. Until they own them. Then those who wouldn’t read will. And like me they will feel grateful for the company of a fellow traveller on a road unavoidable.

I wish you healing and peace. I am so sorry that you have lost your amazing brother to an undeserved The writing will help you to continue to choose to handle it all, the roller coaster of grief, of loss, of life. You will blossom anchored by this loss you couldn’t feel so deeply if you didn’t love so deeply. That’s a choice and a gift we give ourselves.

I’m babbling. I just want to say that I hope keep writing, keep feeling as the feeling will shorten the grief, and keep loving your brother. Most of all, be kind to yourself. You are very courageous. Reading your writing, I know that.