I am, I am, I am.

One always insists that it can never happen to you or your family, and then, quite unequivocally, it does.

I got a job as a legal secretary at a civil law firm in south Los Angeles County the beginning of February 2012.  Previously I spent my time working at an animal hospital in Los Alamitos, California, where the wife of one of the partners for whom I currently work referred me for a position their office needed to fill. I work roughly eight hours a day, with an hour lunch from noon to one o’clock. My lunches were usually spent shopping, having lunch with a girlfriend, or planning for an extravagant party I was planning to throw that weekend at my old apartment. I had a party for every holiday: Halloween, Christmas, Anti-Valentine’s Day. I even threw a fifth birthday party for my cat Sherman, complete with tuna cakes. I was the definition of a party animal. Hollywood was my home away from home. I roamed the streets with my girlfriends until dawn broke through the black that blanketed the smog-ridden horizon.

Up until December 2012, Christmas was (and always had been) my favorite holiday. While I am a Pennsylvania transplant, and the majority of my family still resides on the other side of the country, we still found a way to make the holidays special, even across the vast expanse of over 2,300 miles. My mother and I have made it a habit to continue to buy each other a plethora of gifts, wrap them, and them ship them across the United States, only to be opened while we’re on the phone with one another on Christmas morning.       

In early December I went to the dentist for a routine cleaning. I was in the chair while my phone was ringing. My older brother was missing. But how could that be? I’d just talked to him the night before. We’d talked for a few hours. He was having issues with his girlfriend. Like me, my brother had an affinity for all things poisonous to him; for some reason it only keeps us coming back. When he stopped answering my messages, I had assumed that he’d fallen asleep. To this day I still wish that that were true.

On December 5, 2012, a Wednesday, I went to work just as I always did. My brother still hadn’t surfaced, but I thought nothing of it. I’d called his phone a few times, even sent him a few texts, but he hadn’t responded. It was unnerving considering the fact that we talked often, but it was my insistent belief that he’d gone on a drunken bender and spent the night on a friend’s couch. My heart could not bear the weight of any other possibility.

That Wednesday morning passed and was uneventful. Twelve o’clock inevitably rolled around and I went to lunch. My phone rang and it was my mother. We talk often, so I answered without apprehension. Her trepidation was palpable. “I think there’s a serious possibility that your brother hurt himself, Ashley.” I could feel my heart still to a stop behind my lungs, and I went cold.

It was as if it fell on deaf ears. Not my brother. Not Dustin. There was no way. I talked to my mother on the phone for about twenty minutes before I returned to work and told my bosses I needed to take the rest of the day off. I explained why, and they were gracious and supportive. I was in hysterics by this point, hardly able to drive. They offered to give me a ride home, but I assured them that driving was a great comfort to me.

I got home shortly before my boyfriend did. He came in the door off our patio just as my phone began to ring. It was my mother. I answered it, so sure of myself; so certain it was good news. I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I was breathing either. There was a moment of unsettling, dreaded silence before I heard her broken voice, and I knew before I even heard the words: “He’s gone, Ashley.”

I don’t remember what I was wearing or what I’d had for breakfast that day. I don’t remember what I was working on, or any conversations I’d had. I don’t remember what heels I wore to work, or which GUESS jacket. I don’t remember much about that deceivingly normal morning, but I will never forget the sound of my mother’s fragmentary voice on the other end of the phone; the insufferable agony that hung from her mouth with every word, as though I could see it seep through the phone and delve into me with the same amount of inelegance. It was then that I blacked out completely, but my boyfriend tells me I was unrecognizable. He tells me of how I collapsed to the floor, screaming and sobbing and clutching my phone to my chest as though I thought the closer I brought it to me the more quickly this brusque and callous pain would subside. He tells me that his attempts to hold and console me were thwarted by my own hands as I fought him off, exclaiming in unintelligible misery that my very “skin hurt”. Before that moment I had never succumbed to any pain like it, and I don’t believe I ever will again.

It has been just over two years since the untimely passing of one of my best friends, and one of the best brothers a sister could ask for, and if it has taught me anything at all, it is that time does not heal all wounds. With the inevitable passing of time it is becoming increasingly difficult to come to terms with the loss. However I continue to be grateful for the love and support of my closest friends and family.

There are moments of uncertainty. There are dark, draining moments in my life when I think that maybe it should have been me instead. There are brief, frightening, milliseconds of harrowing ambiguity wherein I think that some day I will forget him entirely.

And when it gets really hard, the illustrious words of Sylvia Plath are there to comfort me, reminding me that I am not alone in my anguish:

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.

I am,

I am,

I am.”

In Loving Memory

Sgt. Dustin Lewis Lear 12/22/83 - 12/05/12