A month is a very long time

It has been a month since my brother passed away.
In our family we celebrate a mass on the thirtieth day of someone's passing and so they had a mass Saturday. A friend had sent pictures and my sorrow was renewed seeing a picture of my brother with a garland-don't they do that for dead people? But how can it be?
The realisation that he is gone is always there. I wake up everyday and if I don't think of him in the first five minutes ,I do in the next five.
I listened to the John legend and Meghan Trainor song about loving people like we are going to lose them and all these days it was just a song and now it seems to hold more poignant meaning. The last time I saw my brother was in 2015,July 12th.If I had known that that would be the last time I would be seeing him, I would have forced him to stay longer, chatted for a while more. But I have that memory, it lingers in my mind's eye and I cherish it.
Yesterday we did stations of the cross and at one station we prayed for people we have lost and I remembered him.Usually you kind of sift through a list of people you've lost-like grandparents and in my case, my beloved ayah, but this time there were tears in my eyes as I thought of my brother. Far too young...
My life will always have a pivot now-before Dinni and after him.Anything momentous will be measured by him having been here and not being here.
I barely saw him twenty times in the twenty years since my marriage and subsequent settling down in the US, so in a minimally comforting way, I can delude myself that he is still around, its just that I don't go to India that often or that I didn't get to see him this time.
With my supposedly progressive thinking, I had come to the conclusion that the afterlife is a mystery-after all no one's ever come back and enlightened us on what happens after death right?Like is there heaven, or are we reincarnated...
But my catholic upbringing seems a lifesaver now-we believe in heaven!We will meet again !And that life is everlasting-there is no separation-you live with your loved ones eternally!What more could one ask for?
Ofcourse, Dinni made it to heaven-the sheer volume of his physical ailments was purgatory enough.
But its me I need to worry about-I need to clean up my act, if only to hear him call me Kavithakka one more time! See,Dinni brings out the funny in me!
One of my close friends who also knows Dinni lost her mother around the same time-we share our sorrows-it was sudden and unexpected and I knew her mother and now I understand the bottomless sorrow you feel in the aftermath of such a loss and for once I can tell her,"I know how you feel".
Rest in peace aunty and Dinni.We are bereft without you, but we will plod on, we will hold your memory dear and we will meet you again and in that world, we will never be apart.