Why I Hate Columbus Day

So it's that time of year again. That time where the days get shorter and the weather turns chillier. The days where the leaves start to turn colors and fall from their branches and the smell of their crisp dry remains create the aroma of autumn. The time of year the fields turn golden as the harvest approaches for the farmers. The time of year for me that will always represent a turning point in my life. October will always be a month I simultaneously dread and adore. As autumn is a natural part of the earth's flow, I look forward to the change in weather and wardrobe and all the aesthetic beauty going on around me - nature's final fashion show before the cold, dark, colorless months of winter arrive. However, each October represents one more year gone by without my big brother.

This is the first time in almost a year I have been able to publicly write about my personal experience in dealing with my brother's death. Let me first say, death is a unique experience to everyone, especially when you lose someone you have known your whole life. Death is a rite of passage that only those who have gone through it can understand. There is no greater pain in this world than losing someone you love to death. Some nights I thought the pain would cause me to have a heart attack because of how mentally and physically it took hold of my body. Growing up, the worst I ever experienced was being broken up with in bad relationships. Now I look back and wish I could tell my younger self that such pain cannot compare to what would be a head of you.

Losing my older brother was probably the most traumatic experience of my life. It changed everything and quite frankly, fucked everything up for a long time. Some who have never gone through such an experience don't quite understand how death feels - they also don't know the relationship I had with my brother and why it was so hard for me.

In short, my brother was my best friend. Of everyone I know and everyone that everyone else around me knows, no one had a sibling relationship like me and Dan. My mom and her sisters are really close however she has four of them. All of my cousins have two siblings each with the exception of one who has always been an only child. My boyfriend has two brothers but isn't very close to them in the way Dan and I were close. Dan was my big brother. He was only a year and a half older than me - which isn't that much older. Growing up, it was always just the two of us. Yeah, maybe we weren't a rich family and my parents worked hard for everything they gave us, but looking back you could say we had the text book nuclear family: Dad, Mom, Son and Daughter. I was the annoying little sister that always wanted to tag along with my big brother and do everything he did. The reason I started playing violin was because Dan played it. We went through the typical sibling rivalry phase in our early teen years but by high school we had grown to become friends. I had started to be known as "Dan Riegel's Little Sister" and part of me felt proud when people would call me that. ..

Yet imagine every holiday, every birthday, every orchestra concert, every teenage heart break, every vacation, every school bus ride, every homeroom class, and every family gathering for 24 years - he was always there. When you grow up exclusively with someone constantly by your side, it's kind of a given that they will always be there and when they're not the world just doesn't seem right. As we grew into adults and went our separate ways at college, we still remained very close. We talked on the phone a lot, when he was in an area that actually had cell phone reception. When we did see each other it was like we were kids again. He would come to Bethlehem to visit me during Celticfest and Musikfest and we would get drunk and dance and have so much fun together. No matter where we were, whenever he saw me for the first time he'd always pick me up in a big hug and spin me around. He used to call me by my full name "Maggie Riegel" and we'd always greet each other with "Hey Asshole, How You Doing?"

What made our sibling relationship special, to me at least, is the fact that he was there for me unconditionally. No matter what time of the night or where he was if I needed to talk he would always be there. He even drove from Kutztown to Bethlehem a few nights just to stay with me while I was having problems. He never judged me or criticized me for my mistakes - he'd always just listen and give his best big brother advice. That's a rare trait to find in someone, whether they are a family member or a friend - Dan was the best of both.

I'm writing this for reasons not completely known right now. I would like to say that this will be the first of many blog entries, even the beginning of a book I have in mind, but I'm old enough now to understand that life doesn't always turn out like we had planned. I'd like to continue to write about it, though I don't know if I'll always be strong enough to.

I'm going to pretend that this will go further than just a one time blog entry and start with a preface to the worst night of my life on October 10th 2011.

Let me just say that you could ask anyone at the time and I'm sure they would tell you that before this day I was the happiest girl in the world. It seemed like everything I had worked so hard for over the past four years of college had finally paid off and life was starting to form in the right direction. Summer of 2011 was the best summer of my life, I'm convinced of it now. I had been accepted into Lehigh University for the fall on a full scholarship and spent my summer working at jobs I love surrounded by friends and no worries in the world. In May I started work at the Arts Quest Center at Steel Stacks and immediately fell in love with the place. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a four story arts and entertainment venue in Bethlehem where I waitressed and bartended at concerts. It was here I met my current boyfriend and (fingers crossed) the love of my life. We had both just gotten out of long term draining relationships and found each other very soon after. The best part of our relationship was the only part: we had fun together. We would work together at the concerts then go out drinking afterward and share the best nights together. He was different from anyone I'd ever dated and he told me he was lucky for dating the prettiest girl at the Steel Stacks. That summer was a comforting blur of sunshine and music with the sweet high of infatuation that comes at the beginning of every new relationship.

I started graduate school at the end of August and loved every second of it. I was finally in a place that was challenging my mind everyday while expanding it with new and fascinating information. I remember being very on top of all my work and looking forward to classes and my readings. I worked so hard as an undergraduate at Moravian, supporting myself with two jobs and a full time school schedule that I finally felt all that hard work paid off with a full ride to graduate school - something I always dreamed of having.

This all changed in one night. I may not have realized how much my brother's death would fuck everything up, but I still remember that night like it was yesterday. I think about it every now and then, wondering if the course of events could have gone differently somehow to prevent it from happening. It was like being shaken awake from the most magnificent dream into the most terrifying nightmare. The subsequent months of innocent happiness are a dream I'll never be able to have again. This night made sure of it.

It was a Monday night and I was sitting at home in my studio apartment on Main Street Bethlehem at my desk, writing a paper for my political science methodology class.  Earlier that evening I had wrapped up the first ever Occupy Bethlehem meeting at the Unitarian Universalist Church. At the time the Occupy Wall Street Movement was starting to gain momentum and I was eager to start organizing something similar in Bethlehem. The paper I was working on was due on Thursday and around 9:30 PM and right after realizing I had a lot to write, my phone rang. I thought it was unusual that my mom was calling so late (not late for me, but anything after 9 was late for her since she woke up at 5 every day to drive bus). 

When I answered, she spoke in her panic-voice: that voice that you know there is something wrong with your mom because she sounds concerned and stressed at the same time. She asked me where I was and what I was doing and then asked me to come down to her house because of something urgent. Earlier that day, I had dropped my car off at the mechanic to get an oil change and my stereo replaced. I remember because Dan and Anna actually picked me up after I dropped my car off. I told my mom I didn’t have my car but that I’d call Russ, my boyfriend, and ask him to drive me. He was all the way out in Emmaus with one of his old friends he hadn’t seen in a while, so I called a few other people instead. While on the phone with my friend Alexa, my mom’s number came up on my cell phone again. However this time it was my Uncle Mike on the line. I thought it was weird he was at my mom’s house so late. He told me I needed to get here as soon as possible. I asked to speak to my mom and when I demanded to know what was really going on, which she wouldn’t tell me at first, she said “Your dad is sick and needs to go to the hospital and I need your help with him”. After that I started to get worried – I knew something was wrong and after she mentioned my dad, I started to think something bad had happened to him and they didn’t want to tell me over the phone. I kept trying to call my brother to see if he knew what was going on but his phone kept going straight to voicemail: which wasn’t out of the ordinary since he lived in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have great cell phone reception.

My boyfriend was nice enough to drop his friend off and come pick me up. He knew it was something serious and I’m glad he was the one to drive me to my parent’s house that night.

While I was sitting outside my apartment waiting for him to arrive, I called Anna, my brother’s girlfriend, to see if they were at my parent’s house. Frustrated, I kept demanding to know if they were in Kutztown or Riegelsville with my parents and she just got more and more upset crying telling me to just go to my mom’s house. I was so angry and starting to realize that something really bad happened. Right before my boyfriend arrived, my Uncle Mike called to see where I was. When I told him we were on our way, he said “Don’t get pulled over”. However, that’s exactly what happened. At that point, my boyfriend had never been to my parent’s house and on the way he accidently got into the wrong turning lane and didn’t use his signal when coming back and the Hellertown police pulled us over. When I told them where we were going and that it was an emergency they didn’t believe me. So I called my mom and she put a State Police Officer on the line who asked to talk to the cop who pulled us over. What was a State Police Officer doing at my parent’s house at 11:00 at night? I couldn’t tell you at the time, but I would soon find out.

The Hellertown cop took his sweet time running my plates and our licenses as well as checking the credentials on the State Trooper, despite he probably knew what happened to my brother before I did. We found out my boyfriend’s license was expired so the cops told me I had to drive and that he would receive his citation in the mail. However, I have never driven a stick shift car before and my boyfriend drove a VW Jetta. That night I got my first, almost crash, course in driving stick. I got about a half mile down the road when the engine stalled and we pulled over. The cops, right behind us, pulled up next to us and when I explained to him I didn’t know how to drive this type a car, he rolled his eyes and said “just get to where you need to go”.

When we arrived my Uncle Mike came out on the porch and held my boyfriend back from following me. Now, the whole ride over in such a torturous state of limbo, I figured something happened to my father and that he was dead, since my mom gave me the excuse he had to go to the hospital and that’s why she needed me there. I walked in and saw my Aunt Missy all puffy eyed and two State Troopers with their hats off. I saw my mom and she was speechless as she tried to say through the sobbing of what happened. She hugged me and I said “Don’t tell me…” getting choked up thinking she was going to tell me my father was dead.  I looked up and saw my dad standing behind her and pulled away and asked what was going on, thinking to myself for one last sweet moment of innocence, the last second of happiness before my whole world changed, that this was all a practical joke. My mom finally managed to say in a full, but broken sentence, “Danny is dead”.

I questioned. What? I denied it. No. Then she told me what happened. No. What the fuck. No no no… erupting into me screaming not fully accepting it but knowing, based on the state of my surrounding family, it happened. She tried to hug me, I pushed her away. My mind was like a volcano and everything I had ever learned, knew about the world, all my perceptions and my entire life up until that moment exploded out of my head back into the dark oblivion of the universe – the state of nonbeing where we exist before we are born. I can’t recall the subsequent actions that followed that moment, as for months after my memories are hazy with the faint stench of scotch lingering somewhere amongst them. I walked outside and hugged my boyfriend. I didn’t even know what to say. He didn’t know what to say. We had just seen my brother the day before. Dan still owed my boyfriend a pizza and hot wings from the last time we all hung out at Celticfest and my boyfriend passed out while everyone else was still partying.  We were all going to go to dinner at the Wooden Match because they both loved “Beer, Meat, Cigars” as the sign read the day before when we passed it on our way to Octoberfest. We were going to take Dan out for his birthday that weekend…

My boyfriend left that night and though I didn’t want to stay there I had to. Comforting my parents was not easy and to this day I still don’t know how to be a good daughter in their time of need. I fell asleep on the couch that night with the television on and awoke later to my mother’s screams. Rather than see if she was okay, I turned the volume on the television up and put a pillow over my head and tried to fall asleep.

So that was the night it happened. The night where my world fell apart and here I am a year later, still trying to rebuild myself. Today is Columbus Day and one year ago, on this Monday in October I lost my big brother. Ironically, he was also born on Columbus Day. I’m not sure what that means, if it means anything – whether it is a cruel joke or a divine sign – but it sure as hell is a coincidence. This past year has been a nightmare, the worst year of my life. As much time has passed, the pain is still there and the absence of my brother still resonates deep in my soul where my other half was ripped from everything that I am. My whole life up until that Columbus Day of 2011 seems like a fairy tale now. One where I had a hero – my big brother – who was there to save me many times, to guide me through dark times and inspire me to live a life just as full as he lived his. I say it feels like a fairy tale because like all tales of fiction, the characters are imaginary and so fantastic they can’t possibly exist outside their story books. However, my brother was a legend – he was one of the most intelligent, honest and beautiful human beings that will ever exist. Though time’s cliché has made life bearable again, every year on this day will remind me of that night and the pain that settles on that memory still stings just as hard as that moment I found out.

Like I said, I don’t know why I am writing this or why anyone would care to read it. Sometimes stories need to be shared so the story teller can let go of some of the weight of carrying it in their minds. Even if I write down every experience, every feeling and thought since that day, you won’t truly understand until you’ve shared the experience – and I hope that no one should ever have to endure this pain. Death is a personal experience as it afflicts everyone differently and you will never know how it affects you until you’ve lost someone very special to you. It’s a burden and a handicap I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life but I am at least grateful to have someone as wonderful as Dan as my big brother for over 24 years. It was truly a privilege knowing him and and an honor to be his little sister.