I don’t even know where to begin, honestly. It’s… it’s a lot. And I feel like I can’t talk about it with anyone in my actual life, you know? Because they’re all grieving, and they’re looking at me, and I’m supposed to be like, the strong one. The one who's got it together. My parents are just GONE, like, emotionally, and my wife is trying her best but she didn’t really know him, not like, intimately. And I have to keep it together for the kids, obviously. Every single day, every day it’s like, another thing, another email, another bill, another call from the hospice people, or the funeral home, or… you get it. It’s just relentless. And then he… he died. My brother. After, like, what felt like a hundred years. Not really, obviously, but it was a long time. Years. Years of doctors, and hospitals, and false hope, and then just… that slow, grinding deterioration. It was awful, truly. I mean, the kind of awful where you just stop sleeping, and you’re just existing on coffee and adrenaline, and every single phone call feels like an electric shock. Every time the phone rang, my stomach would just drop. Every time. For years. And he was just… suffering. Really suffering, in a way that just breaks your heart to watch. So, you know, there was part of me that, like, wanted it to be over. For him. For us. I guess maybe that’s normal? Is that normal? To wish for the end of someone’s suffering, even if it means… the end? But then it happened. Like, two weeks ago. And it was… quiet. After all the frantic calls, all the rushing, all the holding vigil – it was just quiet. And I remember sitting there, in the hospital room, after the doctors had left and the nurses had done their thing, and it was just… him. And me. And for the first time in forever, I felt this, like, profound sense of… peace. Not just a little bit. Like, a DEEP, deep quiet. The kind of quiet that you get after a really intense storm, you know? When the rain stops and the wind dies down, and everything just feels… still. And I felt… calm. Genuinely calm. For the first time in years. The anxiety, that constant buzzing background hum that I've just gotten so used to, it was just… gone. Like someone turned off a switch. And I actually felt, dare I say it, a sort of… relief. And then the guilt hit, like a tidal wave. Because how can you feel relieved when your brother just died? What kind of monster feels relief? But it wasn't a relief *that* he died, if that makes sense. It was a relief from the unrelenting pressure. From the constant state of hypervigilance. From the dread. It was like a cessation of the ambient emotional noise that had been my entire life for so long. Like, a physiological response to the abatement of a chronic stressor, I guess. That’s probably the right term. And now everyone is all sad, and heartbroken, and I am too, truly. I loved my brother. And I’m sad for my parents, who are just shattered. And I feel that, you know, the grief. But underneath it, there’s still this… this calm. This quiet. And I feel like I’m faking it, sometimes, like I’m putting on a show for everyone. Because I’m not as utterly devastated as I feel like I should be. I’m just… tired. And calm. And I don’t know if that’s okay. I really don’t know. Am I a terrible person? Is this… a normal response to prolonged anticipatory grief? Or am I just completely messed up? I just needed to say it somewhere, even if it’s just to strangers on the internet. Because I just can’t say it out loud. Not yet. Maybe not ever.