This is the time of the semester where my Composition students begin working on research papers. They're free to choose their own topics, which is both a blessing and a curse. For those who fall into the "cursed" aisle, I assign a topic. What sweet relief for them! Until that is, they can't find any material, can't muster the energy to explore another's idea, even when that idea was carefully selected as perfect for them. 

I feel their pain. I'm with them, right here, right now, trying to find the words to fulfill the assignment suggested by JWorld Cafe's editor. Loss and Creativity. It was at least a month ago when she asked if I wanted to write about the loss of my brother, Jack. My first instinct was to say, no, second was yes, then no, yes, no, yes, and finally I put the idea on a shelf, thinking I'd be ready. But is there such a thing as being ready to write (or talk or think) about a brother's death? My brother's death.

Before you think that I was a perfect sister, I have to say that the last years of our lives were fraught with conflict. We didn't speak much; when we did there was anger, intensity, yearning. How we yearned! Both of us, in our inadquate ways to remember a bond we'd had in childhood--not perfect--but still. We wanted to get that familiarity back but couldn't. Those gorgeous days when we shared comics and baseball cards (he taught me how to flip them), and did acrobatic feats where I stood on my big brother's knees and felt like I could fly. 

Back in the late '50s and '60s, before I could ever have dreamed I'd be a writer, Jack was accruing experiences I'd one day memorialize on the page. Picture him: Dark, brooding, smoldering unhappiness. Montgomery Clift? No, more James Dean, except my brother was a Rebel with a Cause. He spent his elementary school years railing against the yeshiva education my parents had insisted upon. As a girl, I was allowed to attend public school. We slept in rooms next door to one another's. But we lived different lives. My Saturdays were coed parties; his were shul with my father, until the Rebellion and then he davened at a pool hall in Flatbush.

I began writing about my brother's life and mine and the ways they intersected, many years ago. His unhapiness had eclipsed the joy I was able to find in the world. I buried my thunder, put out my light. I vowed to not embody my life, until Jack embodied his. My brother never knew it, but I raged at my parents and the damn yeshiva, too. How could he know it? I did it as I did everything. Quietly.

There was a sibling line I wouldn't cross, and so I didn't publish my work about Jack and myself. I found my writerly voice--or at least my publishable voice--writing about my parents, who were Holocaust survivors. My relationship with them--conflicted too--was my entree onto the pages of newspapers and magazines with a Jewish readership. It was the engine behind all my creative work. 

After my father died (my mother had passed eight years before), I needed to write; there were so many reasons. Mostly, I think, I needed to make sense of my parents' lives. And too, my enormous love for them that had often come out all twisted. Through words I righted us, tweaked us this way and that. 

Then, last summer my brother died. He had suffered from alcoholism, and his body gave out. All the mixed feelings that I had carried for half my life--they didn't make it to the page. The stories about the yeshiva and the pool hall--meaningless. I was in a place unimaginable, yet real. The last one of my family. The last. Free from trying to solve our conflicts, make us better. Bound in sorrow, knowing I can never make us better. And free, to let myself shine.

This would be a good time to take to the page. But, I can't get started. I tell my students, "Writing can help you figure yourself out."  I believe that; but for today, my grief unfinished, I want to fill myself on life not words.

I can write essays, articles, lesson plans. I can lose myself in many creative projects. But my most creative endeavor will be figuring out how--and allowing myself--to finally and fully embody my life.  

Thanks for Reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Sandra Hurtes, Guest Blogger

Sandra Hurtes' essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers and numerous other publications. She's the author of the essay collection On My Way To Someplace Else and the chapbook, RESCUE: A Memoir. She holds workshops in Manhattan in creative nonfiction and is an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College, CUNY. Her website is www.sandrahurtes.com.  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor