Everything is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss

by Stephanie Wittels Wach

When you lose a sibling, you lose a huge piece of your identity. Your history. Your context. It’s the loneliest feeling.

‘Let’s stop finding a new witch of the week and burning them at the stake. We are all horrible and wonderful and figuring it out.’”

You’re gone. You’re never coming back. And it sucks. And it hurts. And it will always hurt. And that’s just the way it is now.

It starts all over again. Every day, wading around in the toxic waste of longing for a person who will never return.

I finally understand the meaning of acceptance on the grief chart. It’s not that the bereaved ever accepts the death of the loved one—I will never accept your death—it’s that you come to accept that these really are your shitty, irreversible circumstances. One day, it just becomes clear: this is the way it is now. The delusions, denial, hysterics, depression, torment—it eventually starts to melt into this pit of mush that lives in your stomach and just sort of weighs you down. It’s not even necessarily fueled by emotion any more. It’s just the way your body works now. Like the day you accept that your stomach will never again look the way it did before you grew a child in it. You’re never gonna like it, but you’ll eventually get to a point where you go to the fucking store and buy pants that are the next size up because you have to wear pants. Acceptance.

I think about the day a person dies, how the morning is just a morning, a meal is just a meal, a song is just a song. It’s not the last morning, or the last meal, or the last song. It’s all very ordinary, and then it’s all very over. The space between life and death is a moment.

And while it was over for you in a moment (at least I hope it was that fast), it will remain alive in me for hundreds of thousands of future moments. I am forever changed by something that happened to you in a moment.

What’s the worst thing that happens? It fails? So what. That’s not the worst thing that could happen. I survived the worst thing that could happen. I can survive anything. I’m a fucking champion.