Melissa Hammond
Loss of Brother, Skyler, to Leukemia
Hi Melissa! Tell us, what’s your story?
Hi, my name is Melissa. I reside in Olympia, Washington. I love the Pacific Northwest and moved a lot before calling this place home in 2008. I paint abstract art and love to garden. Winter is my least favorite season but I love being outside year round. Thank goodness for rain jackets. Food is love and I like cooking for others. I learned to bake sourdough in the pandemic too which is very meditative, although I eat very little of it. My kiddo sure likes the new skillset. I manage and co-own a bar but recently got sober. It has been a game changer for me. A different kind of loss. I enjoy writing poems, laughing, and most intentional movement practices. Trapeze is my new favorite!
Let’s talk about your loss. Can you share about your life leading up to it and your relationship with your brother?
I have experienced a lot of loss actually. It seemed to compound for years. I had moved back to Olympia to start over. I was pregnant and was making a go of it alone. It was a safe space and I had family here. Shortly after moving, I lost the pregnancy at 5 and a half months. It was the worst experience but one for another time. I stayed on my mom's couch for 2 months. I did nothing, I had nothing. My sister was there, checking in and so was my little brother. Their small acts of kindness went a long way in those raw early moments. I didn’t find a lot of joy in that healing process, I just mustered through but eventually joy came and found me. I ended up getting an apartment and moving forward. I met a guy and we had a whirlwind romance. My little brother was always there, whether to help me put together Ikea furniture when I moved in with my partner or get a project down around the house. We were building a better relationship. We were half siblings, with different moms. We didn’t grow up in a traditional setting and weren’t together most of the time but our bond was strong regardless and the love was overflowing.
Years later, when he told me he was having a baby of his own, I was thrilled. He was nervous to share the news, thinking it would bring up old wounds but his news filled a hole that had been lurking in me. I couldn’t wait to meet this little person. I was happily partnered, loved my job and community, and was living a life I had created after such heartache. I was just beside myself with joy for my brother and the start of his family.
You told me your brother, Skyler, died of Leukemia. Can you share about the diagnosis and his cancer experience?
I was on holiday with my partner when I got the news. My brother had been sick before I left for this particular trip and I told him to go to see a doctor because it had been too long with no improvement. He rarely listened but this time he went in and they told him to go see an oncologist. I was going to fly home to be with him but he said he was okay and would connect when he knew more. He seemed so nonchalant about it, like he didn’t understand the implications of cancer. Nobody knew what was coming but he was supported by so much family. He was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and started chemotherapy soon after. It was a cancer in the blood and it was fast moving. He was diagnosed in Jan of 2014 and died April 19th 2014. It was rough to watch him deteriorate. He was tired and weak. He became frail which was not in his nature and he hated it, always trying to do so much. I would get frustrated because he wasn’t resting enough and still smoking cigarettes and drinking cans of Monster. I know he was struggling with his baby’s mamma and was trying his best, he wanted to be around for his kid. I still can’t wrap my mind around losing him so fast. A blur really. He was in and out of the hospital at UW medical center for treatment and the Cancer Care Alliance for checkups and then at my dad’s in Puyallup.
I was still working and going up to see him regularly. I should have visited more often. I paid his bills, helped with paperwork, and tried to make his life as easy as possible so he could just focus on beating cancer. I would sit with him in the hospital and he would tell me stories of being a kid. Some happy memories, some sad ones. He talked a lot about his mom. You see she had committed suicide some years earlier and he found her. I never think he had space to process it and it poured out of him in those moments together. So much poured out of him in those final months. He was a brilliant kid, about to turn 21, with so much life ahead of him. I sat and listened and held space, I tried to absorb his pain and fan the flames of his dreams. We laughed and cried together. We talked of all the things we would watch his kid do after he beat this. One of our last conversations was a disagreement about his kid. He had shared so much heartache around the relationship with his baby’s mama. It had been hard for years and they had actually broken up right before he found out he had cancer. It was a toxic relationship. I was worried that the birth-belly was not making great choices for herself which would translate to not good choices for the baby either. It only made him angry and sad. I promised I’d look out for his kid no matter what would come and reassured him he was going to be okay so he could be the father he wanted to be.
How about the day Skyler died? Can you talk about that day?
I remember the cold blueish color of the light and the way it illuminated the hallway, kinda like a zombie movie. Everything felt slow in the hospital while the whole process of his cancer treatment had felt so fast. I had been there with him, but left for coffee on another floor. I don’t know exactly what happened but he was intubated, which means he would have died but they saved him and stuck a tube into his lungs to help him breathe. He didn’t want that though. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. I’m not sure how the miscommunication happened. My dad was next of kin and had to make the decision to remove the tube. I remember tears streaming down his face as he told the nurses. Skyler had blood cancer, so it had moved into his brain and was causing pressure in spots it wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know the technical terms but he was going to die.
They said it would probably be a few hours before he passed and that we could sit with him. It ended up being 12 hours before he took his last breath. I held his hand. It got cold. Watching someone die is hard. It doesn’t feel real but is all too real at the same time. It was like watching a machine run out of gas, everything slowly getting slower. His eyes would twitch or his body, the reptilian part of his brain firing. Early on, when I squeezed his hand I swear I could feel him squeeze back ever so slightly. He was heavily drugged so who really knows what he felt or could understand. There were machines all around beeping and numbers going mostly down. We waited in a room full of people, some came and went, most stayed. The machines got louder and a nurse walked in. For a split second, I thought of carnivals where it gets loud when you’ve won something, like squirting the clown in the face with a water gun. Lights going off and buzzers. I had many fair memories with him. I felt like such a loser though and then I blinked and the nurse said something along the lines of you got 5-10 mins before we had to leave so they could remove the body. I guess he had been on a lot of drugs for the treatment and it wasn’t going to be pretty after that. I kissed him on the forehead, told him I loved him, and walked out. I told my dad I had to go but would call him tonight. I remember thinking as I waited for the elevator that I didn’t want him to be alone in the morgue. That I wish I could just go sit with him until they came to burn his body. I hate our death rituals in this country.
I got to my car and lost it. I ugly cried. I hit the steering wheel. It didn’t feel real and I couldn’t breathe. No way did my little brother just die, could I have been mistaken, was all this a dream? I pinched myself but of course he died, I had just watched it happen. I started my car to leave and when I went to get my pass out I was shaking. The attendant knew something must be wrong. He gave me a bottle of water and said not to worry about finding my pass. He said he was sorry for whatever I was going through and to drive safe. I choked back tears. His eyes were so kind. I was driving with all the windows down and the music turned up because I felt on fire. I shouldn’t have been driving but I was. I cried and cried and cried. I must have gotten home but my memories blur after the drive. The next few days a blur too.
How did you cope in those following days and weeks?
Somehow life felt more fragile and less fragile at the same time. I helped plan the funeral and picked out his urn. I put one foot in front of the other and just made it through the days. The funeral was surreal, like most are. I tried to be there for my dad. I drank more than usual. My partner was there for me but peripherally. He told people so I didn’t have to and that helped. I didn’t want to hear, “I’m sorry” or “how's your brother?” Being a social creature and having a network of people who care for me felt challenging because most people don’t know how to hold grief or space for heartache. It also felt nice to have support and feel love .I felt so alone. Someone told me that the hole would never go away but that I got to find new beautiful things to put there. I was seeing my niece more often, like every few weeks for days at a time, to help birth-belly who was not coping well. That little one was a bright spot and reminded me of him. He was 10 years younger than me so I remember him coming home from the hospital and being little too.
What was a specific low point or struggle you experienced?
Losing a sibling is tough. I had this tiny human that filled that space though. About a year after he died, I was not allowed to see my niece. Birth-belly was not making great choices and I had brought up some concerns. She got mad and stopped contact. There was nothing I could do. I went from seeing and caring for this little person to not having contact for almost a year. It only brought up all the feelings I had pushed aside when my brother died and intensified them. It made everything hurt twice as bad. I was actively worried about the little one’s safety. I reached for things to avoid the hole so nobody knew how hard it was. I put on a good front because who likes the sad girl? Grief is not linear. I was living a beautiful life that I felt should have been thankful for but at times felt so disassociated from it. Both things were true and grief is a lonely place. I wrote this poem about it :
Grief is a beast
that doesn't have a heart.
It pushes and pulls you
and tears you apart.
the sorrow, the numbness
the constant heartache
that demon will find you
and leave you awake
It slips in and takes you
it gets in your bones
It creeps in your ear
then it wanders and roams
I'm lost in its darkness
and can't find my way
If I stay here too long
I will surely decay
All the while going about my days. I was just learning to hold two truths at once.
How did you manage to find joy in those low moments?
I don’t know. Some days there was no joy, only faking it. I had a beautiful life. I traveled to a few different countries with my partner and friends. I started a gratitude practice that I still do today. I started writing poems. I tried to stay present. I planned my wedding. I took any attempt at joy, any reach for something that could fill the sink hole in my heart. It felt like autopilot at times, just going through the motions of what I thought everyone else wanted me to do. I felt guilty though, for having a good life. Joy was easy to find but hard to stay in. I came to believe that grief and gratitude always go together, the same thread just different ends.
You adopted your brother’s daughter after his death. Can you share more about that decision?
I wasn’t planning on it. I just wanted to have them back in my life. I wasn’t sure what would happen. I got married but didn’t change my last name because our last names are the same, Hammond. A year after not having contact I got a message from a grandparent saying all my fears were right. Birth-belly was not making great choices and abandoned the child. The grandparents had actually been caring for my niece for months. My partner at the time and I did everything in our power to keep that little person safe. We worked with the grandparents and went to court for Third Party Guardianship. This allowed us the ability to make decisions for this little person that were in her best interest. There was a no-contact order put in place. It was 10 months of looking for birth-belly with no response. She didn’t show up to any of it. All the while I was raising this little person who was having night terrors and trauma responses. Their life had been filled with instability and neglect. It was such a joy to know that this person was safe but also it was a lot to bite off. I promised my brother that I would look out for his kid. I meant it with my whole heart. We got the tiny human in play therapy, we started them in preschool and we kept going. As time went on, they started to heal a little and we all grew. My partner and I realized we wanted and needed different things. Long story short, We got divorced but stayed friends and business partners. I loved being a mom but with that gift life changed. There was a sense of loss in that too. Losing a life I had wanted and built, for a life I had no idea I was meant for. There are no mistakes, only lessons to help us on the paths we didn’t know we needed to take.
How do you live life differently from before?
I think about death more. I realize everything is fleeting, even the good moments so I try not to waste them but not always being busy or productive, more like going slow and staying intentional. I tend to savor more and work towards less rushing. I’ve had to redefine my definition of success and be okay with it. My gratitude practice has deepened. Maybe that comes with age though, or being a parent. It's probably a mix of all three. I try not to take things for granted and I say thank you and I love you way more often to the important people in my life and sometimes to strangers too.
What do you want others to know about grief?
Grief tints you. It gives a slight pigment to the way you see the world forever. Not good or bad, just different. Grief is so closely tied to gratitude. I love being a mother and that joy sits in the belly of my grief for my brother. I am still learning to hold two big truths at once with a mouth full of honey. I try so hard to stay from a place of love so I don't need to reach for it but it is a forever practice. The outcomes are less important than the experiences.
How can a person best be there to support a loved one who is grieving?
Everyone is different. Hold space. Listen more than you give advice. Invite and include even knowing they’ll say no or nothing at all. Show up and engage in whatever ways feel accessible, sometimes just knowing a person cared was calming to my nervous system.
What would you tell others who are going through something similar?
It doesn’t get easier but you’ll get stronger. Be gentle with your heart but lead from it always. Sometimes the hard road is your road to take and the only thing to do is keep moving. I don’t know anybody in my situation. Becoming a mother by losing a brother is a lot to navigate and I still struggle with it at times.
If you could go back and spend one more day with your brother, what would you do?
I would want to laugh with him. He had such a sense of humor. We would wander in the woods and listen to the birds trying to mimic the sounds. I would want him to see his kiddo and be in awe of all that this little person is becoming
Any resources that were helpful for you that others might be able to utilize?
Pema Chodran, When things fall apart
When I felt outta sorts, I took long baths, hot ones and cold ones. It felt like a hug for my nervous system and made me get super present in my body. Movement helps me stay present too.
What brings you joy now?
Simple things really; Hot coffee on a cold morning. My kids' laughter and their art. Sunshine on my skin. Anything that brings sensation into focus. I enjoy having rituals for important things and getting out of my comfort zone. I like the feeling of accomplishment but sometimes that just getting the laundry pushed through but other times it’s writing this article or finishing a painting. Staying fluid to what comes because it’s all fleeting.
Anything else you’d like readers to know?
Thankful for the chance to share and hope it helps someone else.
Want to learn more about Melissa and her story? Follow her on Instagram @Melissa_random_ .