Losing My Brother and Finding Him in Butterflies
The day before my brother succumbed to a fentanyl overdose, I was at a beach cleanup that he was supposed to attend, and while picking trash out of a tangle of dead plants and fishing line, I found a dead butterfly. It was perfectly intact, its orange and black wings folded peacefully. I picked it up, took a picture of it, then moved it to a safe place off the beach trail where it could find its way into the next realm, undisturbed.
Will — my brother — said he didn’t have the energy to do the the beach cleanup; he wanted to stay back and relax. “It’s your vacation,” I said, with an affected nonchalance that belied how disappointed I was that he didn’t want to hang out every second of his already brief visit. I didn’t know that he was in the throes of dopesickness, having invented a nonexistent errand the evening before that turned out to be a drug-buying excursion.
That afternoon, I invited him to a Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the local outlet mall — not exactly a glamorous evening, but it was something to do. He declined. I went with my friends, leaving him back at my apartment with my husband. We had agreed to order pizza and watch a movie when I got home, but when I got home, he wasn’t there. I texted him, and he said he was meeting up with a girl from Tinder. No surprise there — Will was handsome and recently single, and…
