So, I am a new member to a site I had never dreamed I'd want to be a part of. And quite frankly, in this very moment I still do not wish to be a part of this community. Yet, here I am. I am only one of countless people shuffling through their day, overcome by grief and heartache.

My story starts when my older brother, Craig, retired from the Marine Corps in 2011. He had put in a full twenty years and was looking forward to the start of his next chapter: civilian life. Where, as he told me countless times, he "would make money hand over fist and prepare for the next retirement". And he DID! He really DID! He started working on his second career fast, becoming a mechanic for an oil company working in the Gulf of Mexico. He jet setted all over the globe with this company for school and worked hard, earning great money and pocketing it in hopes to buy him and his wife a beautiful home in California where he lived instead of renting someone else's beautiful home. I'm certain he would've done it too. In any case, as part of the protocol for his employment with his second career, he had to go through medical release with physical exams. That's when they found it. In the entire 20 years he was a Marine, no military doctor ever heard the heart murmur. It took retirement for that to be discovered.

For sometime we knew Craig would have to have a corrective open heart surgery. It wasn't an emergency situation. He planned for it. He worked for a couple more years to get through the education portion of his new career. He went on vacations and visited his family all across the US and even in other countries. He came home to see all of his immediate family in what he joked as his "farewell tour". It kills me to even type that now. His surgery was planned for Wednesday, June 18th, 2014, but the Naval hospital where he was having the procedure had problems with the electrical system that day and his surgery had to be rescheduled for the following Wednesday. The next Wednesday, another retired Marine had an emergency and Craig's surgery was again bumped, this time to the next day, June 26th, 2014. His surgery went as planned and he was in recovery. We all took a big breath of relief. Then the next morning happened.

I was always used to being separated from my family, as I live four hours from my parents and even further from siblings. Craig was in California and I'm in Chicago, but the distance was never a problem for the two of us. We were always very close. Talking often, texting more. Not more than a day or two went by that I didn't hear from him or he from me. So that Friday morning my entire world disappeared from under my feet.

My phone rang as I was getting up and getting ready to shower for work. It was my mom. I could barely get any intelligible words from her other than, "Something's wrong with Craig. They told me something went wrong!" Immediately I told her to hang up her phone and keep it off the hook for when I called her back, and I set to work getting flights booked for her from St. Louis and myself from Chicago to California. We got there later that day, as he was being transferred to a civilian hospital, with his chest still open. He crashed on the way. A massive heart attack. So massive that my forty-two year old brother, in the absolute prime of his life, never woke again. He made it until Monday, when as a family, we decided to let him go. He wasn't there anymore. It was all machines and biology, but not my brother. And I was there. Holding his hand. Telling him to feel all of my love for him in my hand and to take it with him. To hold it forever with him. To know he was loved. That I loved him.

Yesterday marked four weeks since Craig died. Four weeks of feeling like a zombie. Of walking through the world with unseeing eyes. I'm enveloped in grief. I see these words on the screen and I know they are true, but I look at them and think it's all some sort of mistake. It cannot be true. I've been on autopilot and people comment about how well I'm doing. Well meaning people, of course, but people who don't have any concept of how unwell I am. On the inside. I want to scream at people moving from work to home and home to work and to the other daily stops and starts they make. I want to scream at them that THE WORLD IS NOT OKAY! MY BROTHER IS NOT HERE! WHY ISN'T HE HERE?!

And that is pretty much the road I'm on and where I am at in my walk of grief. Maybe it's denial. Maybe my brain is not able to really comprehend what happened yet and I'm walking in a fog, aware but not. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to feel this hurt anymore. Like a petulent child, I want my big brother back. Nothing I say or do can bring him back. Helpless. Scared. Angry. Heartsore. Decimated. All words that describe how I feel at this very moment.

My hope is to find that I am not alone. That there are other people out there who can offer me fellowship on this tiresome and painful walk. I'm clinging on to that hope.