I heard someone sneeze at work, yesterday; a sneeze that sounded a bit like my brother’s sneeze.

My brother’s nose figured prominently in our childhood. He had a way of smashing it flat with the palm of his hand and then moving his palm around in a wet, vigorous circle while he pressed down on it, cartilage crunching away. He would do this, and I would say, “Oh! Ug! Stop!!!” when he did, probably because I, personally, found it too painful to mimic. Our noses were always itching inside because of our allergies, and this motion was his unique way of dealing with his itch. I probably just stuck my finger up my offending nostril. We were very itchy kids.

Grief is such a strange and wondrous thing, if what you feel when you miss someone who is dead is grief. I heard this sneeze, it sounded familiar, and the bottomless longing engulfed me. I became paralyzed, like I always do. Immobile, fingers hovering over my keyboard, thankful I wasn’t talking to a customer, terrified my phone would ring, a deer in the fluorescent headlights of work. What am I saying? I wasn’t terrified the phone would ring, though I was briefly glad I wasn’t talking to someone. “You’re almost right here,” is what I thought, what I always think. “You’re just out of reach.” “You’re missing.” “Why can’t I just call you?” “Why did you die? Why you? Why me? Where are you? Is this, could this, can’t this be a dream?” My eyes misted over. I gulped. My lower lip quivered. I gulped again. Got up from my chair and pretended I needed to go to the bathroom for a few minutes so I could collect myself and stop missing him.

My break came up about an hour later, and I stood outside near the curb and smoked. I was thinking some profound thought about death, something to do with how I wished I could walk upstairs and say, “I have to go home and cry, my brother just died, this is going to take some time to get over.” I thought about how I couldn’t do that when he died, and about how I had known at the time it would be like this, these episodes, overtaking me, for years to come, and how resigned I’d felt to that. How secret you have to be about it when it hits, even though you’re talking about it being your only brother who died. Any person in their right mind would say, “Whoa, it’s been nearly seven years. You should’ve gotten over this by now. You’re mentally ill, eh?”

A girl I’ve seen around but don’t know walked outside for her own break and came up to me. “Are you ok?” “Oh sure, how’s your day going?” Instant mask. I am sunny and cheerful. You must have misunderstood me. Flash back to the plane ride to Dallas the morning you died, the steward walking up the aisle, kneeling next to my seat, placing his hand around my own, asking (quietly), “Did someone just die?” Me nodding because I couldn’t speak (because I would’ve starting crying). Him nodding back. “A close family member?” Me, hesitating, wanting to say (loudly) “My only fucking brother, oh fuck, oh my God, just hold me, please, just put me somewhere nobody will see or hear me, for God’s sake. Sob, oh Sob, oh Wail Wail Wail.” And just nodding. Pleased that someone had noticed.

The girl from work started talking about a call she’d taken earlier in the day, and I waited for some way to interject in to the conversation, “I was just thinking about my brother. Someone just sneezed like him. I am overcome with longing. Do you think it would be wrong to go home and cry? Do you think they’d give me an incident for it? If I get another incident they’ll have to put me on verbal warning.” And then she would hug me in a silent, comforting motion. And I would take a deep breath. And the missingness would pass more quickly. Instead, the skinny girl with the platinum hair and the very hip haircut walked up and they compared horror stories about the first girl’s weekend salon visit. And I pretended to be part of the crowd, but I wasn’t really. So I just finished my break.

I figured the kind of opportunity to tell someone about it, to tell someone my brother is dead, and to tell them about the sneeze, would probably come up. And it did, this evening, like a small, red-headed blessing. The guy who sits next to me told me his parents are both dead, of cancer, and told me about their last days. And then he asked me if I have any siblings (because he and his sister are the only ones left), and I said yes. I told him about the sneeze, and I said, “Because I have a very wonderful view of the afterlife, I feel that he’s with me all the time, except for when I really need him to be.” And he nodded, not too solemly, and said, “Sometimes it’s just so weird that my parents aren’t here. That it’s just me.” And then I told him how John Larry died. We are all so young to have lost so much. And neither of us became morose. We went from that to his last visit to Japan, to teaching school for Army kids, to “Engrish” translations he’d taken pictures of. Sweet relief.

I don’t know if he ever thinks to himself that these secret moments of engulfing, drenching, confounding missing are sweet. Are the most intimate reminder of the role you no longer play in this world, and the role that was just for you that someone else used to play.

My brother and I were itchy kids, and we sneezed all the time. Even though I have a painful lump in my throat just from writing this, the memory of feeling so close I could almost touch him is like that itch. Like that sneeze. So odd. So persistent. Our sneezes were quite satisfying, when we were kids. I miss him very satisfactorily, I think. Or maybe I just miss him.

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