I’m still here…

People love to simplify grief when it isn’t theirs.

They ask about my sobriety like it’s a contradiction. Like the fact that my brother was killed by a drunk driver should have automatically made me immune to alcohol. Like pain follows logic. Like trauma rewires you into something clean and principled and easy to understand.

It doesn’t.

They look at me sideways, like I’m evidence of hypocrisy instead of evidence of what grief actually does to a person. They don’t stop to think that two things can exist at once—that I can hate what took my brother from me and still try to numb myself the only way I knew how. That I can carry rage and still reach for something to quiet it. That I can love him deeply and still lose myself completely.

It’s not that I didn’t care.
It’s that I cared so much I didn’t know what to do with it.

I still grieve him. Not in neat, quiet ways people are comfortable with—but in the ugly, unpredictable ways that show up uninvited. I still think about him in moments that don’t make sense. I still replay everything. I still ask questions that don’t have answers.

Why him?
Why not me?
Why does someone who lived fully get taken, while I’m left here—broken, confused, barely holding it together?

That question doesn’t fade. It sits in your chest and rots.

And when you don’t have the tools to process that kind of pain, you do what people have always done—you escape. You reach for anything that makes the noise quieter, even for a moment. Even if it costs you something later.

So yes—I turned to alcohol.

Not because I didn’t understand what alcohol could do.
Not because I didn’t care about what happened to him.
But because I didn’t want to feel the weight of being the one who survived.

I didn’t want to sit with the anger.
Or the guilt.
Or the betrayal I felt toward a world that just kept moving like nothing happened.

I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror and see someone who didn’t know how to live anymore.

So I numbed it.

I drowned it out.
I filled the silence with anything that would make it less loud inside my own head.

And yeah—there was self-pity in that. There was avoidance. There was a kind of slow self-destruction that felt easier than facing the truth.

Because the truth is unbearable sometimes.

But that’s not where my story ends.

Now I turn to God.

Now, instead of reaching for something that takes me further away from myself, I reach for my faith to bring me back. I hold onto my sobriety like it’s something sacred—because it is. It’s hard-earned. It’s chosen, every single day.

I still feel the grief. I still carry the questions. Faith didn’t erase the pain—but it gave me somewhere to put it. Somewhere to lay down the anger, the guilt, the confusion, even if only for a moment at a time.

It gave me a way to face myself.
To sit in the silence instead of running from it.
To believe that even in all this loss, there is still something holding me together.

I didn’t get here because it was easy.
I got here because I had no other choice if I wanted to survive.

The truth is that grief doesn’t make you noble. It doesn’t make you better. It cracks you open and leaves you trying to survive however you can. And sometimes “however you can” doesn’t look good to other people.

But they weren’t there.
They didn’t feel it.
They don’t carry it.

I did what I knew how to do at the time.

And now I’m choosing something different.

And if someone can’t understand that—if they need my pain to look cleaner, more respectable, more consistent with their expectations—that says more about their need for comfort than it does about my reality.

I’m still here.

Still grieving.
Still healing.
Still holding onto my sobriety.
Still holding onto my faith.
Still trying to figure out how to live in a world that took him and left me behind.

And none of that is simple.