One of Three
My plan to analyze texts on grief, death, and life
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” - James Baldwin
I have, at multiple times in my life, described myself as one of three. Those who know me best know how close I am with my sisters. How close I was. Still am. But now Anna is gone.
Anna was my older sister by two years and six days. She died unexpectedly on December 24, 2025 from complications of breast cancer. When I first shared that she had died, I said that for me Anna was basically an extension of myself, and I was in the process of figuring out how and who to be without her. Before December 24, I’d never lived a day of my life without her as a constant in my world. Two and a half months later, I have not figured out much. I’m still here. She is not. It still doesn’t feel real. I don’t know when or if it ever will.
When we were growing up, it often felt like Anna knew me better than I knew myself. She was older, wiser, and unnervingly intuitive. Being her younger sister, this annoyed the hell out of me. And I took it for granted that I had a sister who was so close to me that she knew what I was thinking or how I was feeling before I knew myself.
As we became adults, she remained the person who knew me best in this world, but she learned to temper how she expressed her frighteningly accurate insights about me out of respect for my autonomy. At times, though, she let slip how much she understood, but also how much she looked up to me. These moments always came as tiny shocks to me. I still looked up to her as the wise one, so it was jarring to experience flashes of her expressing admiration for me. And her talent for verbal communication meant that she could with minimal strokes put to words how I felt but struggled to express.
Since I don’t have Anna’s gift with words to express my thoughts, I often turn to quotes instead. It is not the same as having someone who knows me give me the words to express myself, but it still helps. I often live my life through quotes.
When people ask me how I am doing right now, in my head I respond,
“Okay. Not good. Probably bad” in a Russian accent.
Iykyk.
After several weeks of unnecessary resistance on my part, I have fully embraced that I am living in the cottage. And I think I’ll mostly stay here, because why the fuck not. Anna would understand and be amused, even if she might not have joined me. She could always convince me to watch her favorite shows, but I couldn’t always get her to watch mine. But she would fully support me immersing myself in queer hockey smut that is healing a lot of people through corrective emotional experiences. This is far from the worst coping mechanism I could turn to right now. Though it can’t heal what’s wrong with me. It is mostly escapism, when I am alone and sad, which is often. It is also a way to embrace and affirm life. My brain craves it, and there’s no good reason not to give in. It is not the first time I’ve used rewatching and rereading texts as a means to cope and survive. I don’t ever want this problem to ever go away. I don’t want to move on or have my memories grow more distant or less raw. I want to live in the melodrama, because it means that I am feeling things, perhaps deeper than maybe anyone realizes.
Immersing ourselves in texts was something that Anna and I shared. She was older so did everything first, and she often forged the path through the books we read when we were young to the movies she fell in love with to the television shows that were formative in the shaping of our world views. All of my core shows came from and were shared with Anna, from My So-Called Life to the X-Files to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Veronica Mars to Battlestar Galactica to Queer as Folk. Television presented unique immersions because of the timespan that they evolved across and the fan communities that grew around them. I learned from Anna at a young age that pop culture texts were as open to intellectual analysis as canonical literature, and she opened wonderful discursive intertextual worlds for me through this revelation.
So for the times I decide to temporarily leave the cottage, I have been revisiting texts about death and grief, many of which Anna and I consumed together when I still had her. I’m not much for books directly about grief and how to grieve, as these feel a bit too on the nose for me. But I can do fiction, and memoirs. Movies, both narrative and documentary, and television episodes. And music.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about input and output, and how both of these can serve me through my grief. I’ve been taking a lot in, and I would like to also create things to balance out how much I am taking in. Writing is one of the simplest ways for me to do this, so I’ve decided to write about my grief texts. This idea of having a project for me that I can also share with others appeals to me. It is also a way to let people know that I am still here, sometimes in liminal space, sometimes in the warm hues of the cottage. Okay. Not good. Probably bad. But still here. Inviting you to join me.
