Grief keeps its own calendar.

February comes in like a quiet thief, soft-footed and merciless, carrying dates that glow like coals. My brother Randy — gone on his birthday February 7th, just thirty-four, the candles never meant to be memorial lights. Four days earlier I was in a hospital bed with a broken leg, my own body wrecked but breathing. I have replayed that cruel timing more times than I can count — as if rearranging the order might change the ending.

It never does.

Then Larry — February again on the 10th — 26 years later, another phone call, another sentence that split the world clean down the middle. Cirrhosis took what it wanted and left the rest of us standing there with our hands open and useless. That is the part no one prepares you for: how helpless love can feel once the body is gone.

Sometimes I sit with the question that has no polite answer: why am I still here?

We were born of the same mother, the same house noises, the same early mornings and hard lessons. Same blood, different endings. Survival feels less like victory and more like a mystery I did not solve — just inherited. There are days it feels like I am holding extra breath that belonged to them.

And here is the hard truth I don’t dress up — I am angry at them, too.

Angry that they are gone. Angry that I am the one left holding the family history like a box with no lid. I was the youngest. The only girl. I was supposed to have my brothers growing old somewhere in the background of my life — arguing, teasing, showing up. Instead, they exited early and left me standing by myself.

People like to pretend anger cancels love. It doesn’t. It proves it had roots.

Now my closest blood relatives are my children and my grandchildren. The line did not break — but it changed direction. I look at their faces and see the future looking back at me, while my past lives only in memory and photographs and stories I refuse to stop telling.

Loss is not loud anymore. It used to be a thunderclap. Now it is weather — always present, sometimes gentle, sometimes suffocating. It shows up in small places: a memory that slips in unannounced, a laugh that sounds like theirs, a habit I caught myself doing with the exact same hands. Grief has learned my address and lurks.

I do not only miss who they were at the end. I miss who they were before the breaking. Before the substances. Before the sickness. Before the long, slow unraveling. I miss the ordinary versions — the joking, arguing, alive versions. The ones who thought there would be more time.

Love does not end when breathing does. It changes shape and refuses eviction.

I carry them forward in stories, in warnings, in tenderness, in fury, in forgiveness that took years to grow teeth and stand upright. I speak their names so they do not disappear into the midsts, unmourned. They were not mere statistics. They were my brothers, and they were loved.

Some days the ache is a weight. Some days it is a candle.

I am still here though. I am still saying their names. And that, too, is a kind of keeping.