How The Death of My Brother Made Planning My Island Wedding During a Pandemic Even Harder

Often in life, you don’t realize what you’ve been through until you’ve been through it. 

Okay, that sounds dumb. But follow me.

A car spins out on the icy road in front of you. Without thinking you swerve around it, your hands turning the wheel, your mind blank thanks to muscle memory. A second later, after you pass through the scene unscathed, and check the rearview to see the almost-accident end without collisions, you scream at the top of your lungs some iteration of, “WHAAAATTTTTT JUST HAPPENED”.

This is all to say that traumatic experiences may not feel traumatic – or what we think of as “trauma” – while we’re experiencing them.

For the past 18 months, I’ve only just realized, I’ve been swerving through traffic. The roads: icy, the storm so unending it no longer registers as a storm but a low rumbling in the background of the daily emergencies whose rising and subsiding we call, “life”.

It seems impossible but I truly did not realize, until it was over, that throughout the entirety of the pandemic I had been planning a wedding. And in the last two months of that wedding planning, I was dealing with the death of my brother. The car spins out, you turn the wheel without thinking…

Now, as those who have planned a wedding know, sometimes the planning is active (booking the venue was the first big sigh of relief) and sometimes it’s passive: just an ever-present, frustratingly vague sense that you’re not working on wedding stuff enough.

You might ask, so you’ve been planning a wedding on a deciduous island for 18 months and just realized it now? After the wedding is over? After the tent was erected and taken down? After the pictures, the cake, the epic dance floor that went an hour later than expected? After the guests arrived, and then departed the island, via ferry? A process way too many adults texted you about when they know very well that Google exists? 

And my answer to all those questions would be, “yes”. 

Kind of.

I proposed to my now-wife in late January of 2020. The night of the proposal I surprised her by inviting 50 of our friends and family to dinner as a sort of immediate engagement party. And it’s a good thing I did, because the scene I described at the beginning of this essay? That actually happened on our trip down to the site of my ambitious proposal, a bad winter storm caught us on our road to The Driftless. (I still question my decision to keep driving that night.) But the following night, chased the white-knuckle white-out memory from our minds.

It was a night out eating and drinking with our friends and family, and we started out towards married life on what we looked to be a solid, non-blizzarded path.

“This is our year!” we proclaimed more than once at the beginning of 2020. Ugh.

THE VIRUS

About 8 weeks after my proposal, and only 4 months into a new job, I was sent home to work where I’ve stayed throughout the entirety of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The trauma of the pandemic is multi-fold. 

For many Americans it’s the immediate, unspeakable pain of losing a loved one. For our healthcare workers, it’s showing up to a warzone every day. For most of us the pandemic is a dull, slow saw into our psyche; one we don’t notice every moment, but that nonetheless, affects us every moment.

To the latter point, the stress of planning a wedding is similar: when you’re not working on the wedding, your lowkey stressed that you’re not working on the wedding.

Planning a wedding isn’t necessarily difficult. The difficult part of planning a wedding is having to still-do-everything-else-in-your-life while you plan a wedding. 

And so my fiancé and I trudged on. We worked under the stress of a global pandemic, and then, more acutely, the death of a close loved one, planning a late -August 2021 wedding with the hopes that it would all somehow work out. And it did.

But after it worked out – after the crowds dispersed and the must-dos stopped flooding our mental inboxes day after day, crescendoing wildly in the final week – we had a moment to look back on what we had done and the circumstances under which we had done them.

Only now that we’ve stopped planning the wedding, can I really start to understand the dual-stresses I was put under for 18 months.

The spin out on the icy road has stopped, and now we’re screaming.

THE DEATH OF MICAH JOHN SANDVIG

If the steady anxiety that accompanies wedding planning is a low-grade fog, and the pandemic, the dark clouds above, the death of my brother was a lightning strike.

2 months before my fiancé and I were to be wed, my brother was discovered dead of an overdose. The preferred term: complications due to addiction. A term I not only prefer because it places the symptoms of addiction in the medical lexicon where they belong, and not only because “overdose” could mean many things (too much of one drug, too much of two drugs that were both taken knowingly, too much of a drug spiked with something else…fentanyl is the reaper’s scythe of my generation), but because it feels closest to what I am experiencing. “Complication”, “addiction”, “accident”, are words that feel true to me right now. With Micah’s death I’ve placed more value than ever on how things feel. There is truth in our pain and joy.

To be clear, my brother’s death is still something I am struggling to comprehend. The pain is something I’m working through on my best day and struggling underneath on my worst. It is not something I’ve processed enough to write about yet.

But what I can write about right now is this smaller subset of symptoms: the fog of grief.

Lisa Shulman, a neuroscientist who wrote a book about her own loss [Before And After Loss (2018)] paraphrased via April Reese at Aeon, says this about the “fog” of grief,

‘From an evolutionary standpoint, we are strongly hardwired to respond to something that is a threat,’ Shulman says. ‘We oftentimes don’t think of a loss of a loved one as a threat in that way, but, from the perspective of the brain, that’s the way it is literally perceived.’

In the immediate days that followed my brother’s death I would forget what I was saying while I was saying it. I would start 4 tasks in a row, finishing none of them. People would ask me a question and I would just look at them, my mind treading water through a murky blankness, as the pause increased in length to a length that could be described as “9 months pregnant”.

Aeon

Shulman via Reese, again,

In the weeks after a loss, the brain, like a stern nurse imposing temporary bed rest for itself, suppresses the control centres of higher functions, such as decision-making and planning.

‘Grief takes up a lot of bandwidth in the brain,’ Shulman writes in her book. ‘Odd behaviour and incoherence are expected consequences of the brain’s protective responses following emotional trauma.’

My day job is an IT Project Manager. I make a plan, I tell people that plan, I push them to stick to that plan, and when it’s all done, I get to start making a new plan. Yay.

My job takes a lot of the same skills that planning a wedding does. It’s logistics on top of logistics on top of deadlines on top of people’s personalities. The amount of questions I’m asked, and therefore spend brainpower answering in a day, can be literally mind numbing.

DECISION FATIGUE

Besides “grief brain” as April Reese described it in the same essay referenced above, there’s this thing in psychology called Decision Fatigue. 

The theory goes that a human brain can only make so many decisions per day before it becomes unduly stressed.

10 minutes of actual “work” time might have cost you an hour’s worth of your mental resources. The time it takes your brain to switch between various tasks can be tremendous when you’re talking about high-level thinking.

Entreprenuer

The shared pop-consciousness of America appears to believe humans make 35,000 decisions per day.

Not sure there’s enough time in a day to make that many decisions (about 1 decision every 2.5 seconds) but once you consider that every action is a decision to do something and not do 10 other things, hey, maybe they grow exponentially. 

Steve Jobs famously wore the same outfit every day so that he never had to think about what to wear. Tim Ferriss eats the same (healthy) meal for breakfast every day so he doesn’t have to think about what food to prepare. And President Barack Obama limits his low-priority email responses to “Agree,” “Disagree” or “Discuss” to simplify the mental burden of his small decisions.

Regardless of the exact amount of decisions we make each day, whether it’s even possible to measure them, or whether a billionaire’s boring wardrobe decisions are just a cop out for men who see fashion as about as worthy of investment as their staff’s salaries (that is, not at all), decision fatigue can result in all sorts of negative side effects: impulse purchasing, impaired self-regulation, or in the case of my wedding, decision avoidance.

I believe I helped in the planning of my wedding. I wasn’t a sideline husband-to-be. I talked aesthetic with my wife, I helped inventory the very many pieces of DIY-wedding fare we purchased (chargers, placemats, bespoke chair and table coverings, ferns, oh the ferns), I worked with the venue and day-of planner about as much as she did.

But overall I was not able to attack the plan of our wedding the way I would’ve liked, the way I do at work on my best days.

And this was because of decision avoidance.

After a long day of planning IT projects I was faced with a never-ending list of to-dos for the wedding. 1 to-do, of course, equals anywhere from 1 to 45,872 decisions. And the tricky thing about to-dos is that completing one often leads to the creation of another. 

Just thinking about the action items due for the wedding I could feel the energy drain from my body. And so, more often than I would’ve liked, I elected to endure the lowkey anxiety of not working on my wedding over the stress of using more brain power to complete it’s next steps.

When my brother died, the fatigue of decision making became all the more overwhelming, hit me that much sooner in the day, and shortened my progress on so much other life-work that adults are responsible for, but which corporate America has trained us not to think of as “work”.

I didn’t work on the yard, I didn’t keep up with the laundry. Doing the dishes after work exhausted me to the point I needed to lay down. I ordered takeout even more than I did before (no regrets there, actually). 

I certainly didn’t have time for keeping up with my blog to which I had posted a new essay every week for 2 years. (Maybe that had a little to do with my mental fatigue, huh.)

3 months after my brother died and I still can’t do math as well as I did before. A lot of my day job is budget management. I’ll look at tables and numbers and I’ll remember doing this exact work much quicker, much more precisely, even a few months ago, but even as I recall that fact, as I’m looking at the numbers before me, my brain just says, “no…we’re not doing this. I don’t know what this is….well, I do but…I’m not gonna tell you. The amount of work it would take for me to remember this and tell you is just not gonna happen right now. You should eat some melted cheese”.

MARRIED LIFE

And so now that the wedding is over, and we finally got pictures posted on social media 4 weeks after the ceremony, our brains are starting to come back to us.

I cleared some brush in the backyard last week. We pee-proofed our basement from our cats, something long overdue (by the way, PEE PROOFING is not a task that lends itself to being overdue). 

We’ve had time on the weekend to see friends again. We’ve had time to just do nothing (not enough time of course, it’s never enough). We just took a day trip to Duluth to see the leaves change color as we passed through them from the vantage of our vintage, train car seats. 

We still haven’t made good on our mid-week fantasy of ditching the gym for the local corner bar, but it’s a dream that feels realer than it has in – checks Covid calendar – a couple years.

And of course, after all that wedding planning, we’re married now…

My wife changes the channel as we mindlessly watch some terrible Bravo show. Our to-dos shrink to a normal-adult-amount of 145 new ones per day. I dip a carb in a bowl of melted cheese. The fog is slowly lifting, the leaves are changing colors.

The grieving for my brother doesn’t end, I don’t expect it ever will, but there’s more space for it now.