how to keep on living when your little brother dies
and why I can't stand the quote: 'what is grief if not love persevering'
This is an excerpt from our book Make It Make Sense, and also the most vulnerable thing I have ever written. Today would have been my little brother Jimmy’s 24th birthday, but I lost him just after his 19th. If you connect with this in any way, the grief chapter of our book is for you. I really hope you feel seen in it. But mostly I just want you all to know and love Jimmy like I do. Read with care. Luce x
Aftermath
By Lucy
October 1st, 2023. Four years after.
It’s 10am and I’m scrolling on Pinterest trying to find a quote I can post on Instagram about death that doesn’t feel grim or cringe or like it’s been said a million times before. I’m doing this because today is a Hard Day for me, and I don’t want people in my life to feel bad about forgetting to reach out. The only thing worse than feeling obliged to reply to someone who’s let you know they’re ‘thinking of you’ is feeling obliged to reply to someone who’s apologising that they weren’t. Thinking about Pinterest or DMs or Instagram feels like a fucking ridiculous thing to be doing on the anniversary of your little brother’s death, but no one tells you what you’re supposed to do. I close the apps, deciding that reading a bunch of comments about how ‘the good die young’ is probably not going to make this day any easier, and instead I think about the lake. At the lake we grew up at, Jimmy and I used to play a game where we’d each grab the heaviest rock we could find and walk along the floor for as long as we could hold our breath. Each time, in the moments between dropping the rock and reaching the surface, I’d have the terrifying thought that I would pop up, look around for him, and realise I was alone. Now I know what that’s like.
Don’t let your parents Google the Rickshaw Run. The website describes it as ‘easily the least sensible thing to do with two weeks. There’s no set route, no backup and no way of knowing if you’re going to make it. The only certainty is that you will get lost, you will get stuck and you will break down.’
I couldn’t tell you what about that description enticed me into the idea of racing across India. All I know is that back then, I didn’t have a reason to be scared. On the weekend of my 21st birthday, I made it my mission to recruit the only two people I wanted to do the Rickshaw Run with: my little brother, Jimmy, and one of my best friends, Josh. The boys took less convincing than our parents. After almost a year of planning, fundraising and reminding ourselves that life was here to be lived, we were on our way.
India, August, 2019
I’ll admit that maybe we were a bit naive going into this. After saying goodbye to Mum, Dad and my brothers Nick and Ben, the boys and I endured a gnarly few days of travel, only to arrive in Kochi, India and face some of the worst floods I’ve ever seen. After some drying out, we met our rickshaw: a bright yellow lemon with a smiley face on the front. Jimmy and Josh taught me how to drive it, we went and bought what we’d been told would be our essentials – things like jerry cans and zip-ties – and we boarded a boat to the opening night party. None of this was like anything we’d ever done before, and we were intoxicated by that. Jimmy was nervous, in the way anyone would be at 18, so I stayed sober to look out for him. When we got home to our hostel, he leant over the top bunk and repeatedly told me that he’d had the best night of his life, drunkenly sending our family a photo captioned ‘Lucy and I are best friends.’ This photo would become one of my most treasured possessions.
The race began, and we fell into our new roles. Jimmy was the best driver of the three of us, so he took the windy roads. Josh made the playlist and kept the morale high, and I, for the most part, was on map duty. We hit our stride a few days in. Unlike most of the other teams, we hadn’t had a single issue with our rickshaw and were quietly confident that luck was on our side. Jimmy discovered he loved chai and the smell of jasmine. We played cricket with a bunch of local kids, and he caught them out with his ‘soft hands’. Josh was warming up to his bucket showers and getting bolder with his food choices. I was just happy to be along for the ride with my brothers-in-arms.
Jimmy had always been fascinated by dams. The lake where we used to play the rock-game was bookended by two of the biggest dams in the country, so when we saw one coming up on the next day’s route, we diverted to it. We pulled up, and Jimmy carefully photographed it, the way he did with everything he loved, and we decided that if we wanted to keep stumbling upon things like this, we needed to be off the beaten track. And so it was settled: no more motorways from now on. It wasn’t long after we’d made that decision and Josh had taken over the driving that Jimmy got a headache I instantly knew wasn’t a headache.