The Ghost in the Machine

To my mom, should you stumble upon my website I just ask that you skip this one.

After my brother died, I immediately shut down.

I stayed home. I didn’t eat. I simply processed.

I processed what was happening. Is it really so easy for someone to die? Is it really possible that the person I spent my entire life lookin up to and trying to impress was no longer there? The cameras remained, but the reason I ever picked them up in the first place was gone.

I consider myself lucky to have been living by myself at the time. I was able to openly expel all the negative feelings in my own way. Whether it be through writing or the sudden and unexpected flood of tears.

This is not made-up. The tears come without warning. I was working at an Arby’s at the time. I found out he had died, and went to work the very next day. They allowed me three days off to attend the funeral. How kind of them.

Imagine you’re having a complete and total emotional break down, surrounded by “the meats”. The only reason I was able to shake the overwhelming sorrow was the rush. A couple hours of non-stop work that forces you to focus on that instead of emotions.

Weight melted off me like I was “the meats”. I lost 30 pounds in a couple weeks, which is not a healthy weight loss. I was depleted of energy constantly. I needed a genuine outlet for all these negative emotions.

I decided Over-The-Counter Culture would be the outlet. All day and all night I would busy myself with editing photos. I edited. Re-edited. Deleted and edited from scratch again. I edited probably 400 images in a couple days. It wasn’t enough.

I began writing on paper because I knew what I was writing was so dark that it would raise concerns about me if anyone else were to read them. They were written, read, then burned. The only other person who has seen any of these writings is my cousin who also had her brother pass away. She understood that what I was writing wasn’t me writing what I wanted, but rather what I didn’t want.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want my brother to die. I didn’t want a pandemic. I sure as shit didn’t want to be working at an Arby’s during all of this. Insanity is the idea that the same actions will yield different results. I’m not insane, so I began to make immediate changes.

I cooked everything I ate (for better or worse) from scratch. I had worked in restaurants my entire working life, so I figured I’d might as well cook since I wasn’t at Arby’s.

This led to me learning and caring about what foods I ate. I learned what energized me and what did the opposite. I took careful notes on what foods made me feel and how long that feeling would last.

I began drinking nothing but water. Lots of water. All day. If I got a little bit thirsty, I’d drink an entire glass of water. Eventually I sank into a pattern of drinking a regular amount of water throughout the day. I still do that to this day. It really paid off considering I moved to a desert where water is pulled right out of your skin.

I had smoke cigarettes up to that point. I decided that must go as well. I ditched the cowboys killers for the Nintendo digital nicotine inhalers aka the Juul. The Juul was a ridiculous contraption. I tried the tobacco flavored pod and it didn’t taste like tobacco or cigarettes. I found it to be more addictive than cigarettes. Where cigarettes have the limiting factor of having to go outside to smoke, the vape did not. I could smoke all day every day, and I did. I wasn’t able to totally quit cigarettes until I moved to Vegas and all the triggers I had built around cigarettes were gone. I haven’t touched a cigarette in three months. Haven’t wanted to either, so I guess I have broken that addiction.

What is the last addiction? Social media. When you’ve completely fallen back into your own world, it is incredibly easy to rely on social media to fill the void of human interaction. It is not the same. 

I received an influx of messages sending me their thoughts and prayers. I’m not a religious man, so this did very little for me. These were people that knew my brother and I from a very young age. People that had not spoken to either of us in years. This is where the phase of anger begins.

I was mad at every single person that went out of their way to comfort me because in the cloud of depression I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as attacks. Why are you telling me this? That’s all I could think. It all felt like such charade.

“I know what you’re going through.” You absolutely do not know what I’m going through. Luckily I’m not someone who thrives with anger. There are some people that feed off anger and it drives them to achieve. Think Michael Jordan who would take everything personal in order to drive him to a great performance on the court. That’s not me. I thrive off happiness and fun, so I knew I had to get out of the sad as quickly as possible.

During the 5 stages of grief, you can not skip a step. Let’s go through each step and discuss how I handled them. I was fortunate enough to have studied psychology, as that was what I wanted to do for a bit. I was familiar with the Kubler-Ross Grief Cycle.

Denial

When I woke up I saw a text from my aunt saying she was sorry for my loss. At this point I had no idea I had lost anything. I saw that text and had a strange feeling. I knew exactly what had happened the second I saw that text.

I felt that if I stayed in bed, I would never have to know if I was right or wrong. Then my mom called. Any denial I may have had was immediately wiped away. Hearing my mom say he was dead and painting the picture in my head made it more real than I wanted.

In the movies, someone hears about a death and everyone cries. It’s dramatic. That’s not the reality. I couldn’t speak, much less cry. I don’t remember a single thing said in that phone call. I just remember the mixed feeling when it ended. I wanted to talk to my mom but also didn’t want to talk to anyone.

This weird place of wanting to talk about it, but also not wanting to talk about it persisted for days. The flood of messages began flowing in and the anger grew.

Anger

I was mad at everyone like I had said. Most of all, I was mad at myself. I had done nothing to help in months. He had asked if he could stay with me during the quarantine and I said no. That tore me up for weeks. That guilt was overwhelming.

However, I had a sound reason for not wanting him there. The last time he had been there, it had ended in a fight. The police had to be called, and I didn’t need that happening during my finals.

It is easy to say I did the wrong thing, and in hindsight I did do the wrong thing. Hindsight will kill you if you get stuck in it. In the moment, I made the right decision. I put school first and finished it. I had no idea that would be it.

The night he died, I wanted to ask him the name of a song he used to play when he’d take me to school. He was a senior when I was a freshman. This is where my taste in music comes from. Kid Cudi’s “A Kid Named Cudi” mixtape had just come out and just like that I was ahead of the music curve. “Man on the Moon” would come out to great acclaim in the high school world, and I had already heard most of it before it came out. I never fell behind on music again.

He’d also play music that only makes sense at the beach. We were not at the beach. We were in a used Jeep Grand Cherokee in Knoxville. One of these songs starts out with a very catchy drum break that I wanted to sample. I was going to text him and ask if he remembered the name of the song. I saw it was past 10, so I’d just ask him in the morning. Well, that morning never came. The fact I will never know the name of that song made me angry too. Now that months have passed, I hope I never learn the name of that song. I’d hate to learn that the song sucks.

The writings made during the anger phase were some of the darkest, most bizarre writings I’ve done. Strange musings on death, including one piece about Death and what each song on “Sergeant Pepper” means to him. My brother liked the Beatles. I still think they are over-rated, but I’ll listen to them now for the connection to my brother.

Bargaining

This is the phase where you reach out to others. I reached out to my cousin, who has proved to be a great help. I wish her the best of luck in everything she does. She helped me guide and focus the tsunami of emotions onto the paper. We exchanged writings and poems. I suck at poetry and you will never see it posted anywhere, but she helped me improve it.

After deciding poetry wasn’t the route for me, I spent a whole day writing prompts on post-its. I filled a whole wall of my one bedroom apartment with prompts. Some were ideas for short stories, some were challenges, some were just the set-up for jokes without punchlines.

Every single day I’d wake up, pull a prompt, and write it. This is where the Still Life I wrote on here. The prompt was to write a story without a single word spoken. I also wrote a one-page script without using a single word twice. When I didn’t know which prompt to choose, I’d let my very small following on Instagram decide which I’d write. They’d choose the prompt, I’d write it, then post a photo of it as proof I had written it.

This tiny communication and interaction with people fed me. I pulled and wrote every single post-it on that wall.

One day a great friend mailed me a box of snacks. She did not know I hadn’t eaten in a week. For a whole week, I only survived off these snacks. I never told her, but those snacks were the only forms of food in my entire apartment.

This was the moment I realized that the people I was mad at only meant me well. They were trying their best, and it was time I tried my best. Unfortunately, I had another phase to go through.

Depression

I was on Instagram and it had some people that it recommended I follow. People I knew in high school, or had met in college. It also thought I may know my dead brother. This is what sent me into depression.

This is the ghost in the machine. The record of emails we sent to each other. The texts we sent. I have my family members saved as “My ____”. This is because, in the case I have a seizure whoever finds me will know exactly who to contact. Every time I text My Mom or My Dad, My Brother is right there too.

I made the decision not to delete the number. I wanted to get used to seeing in it. I wanted to get comfortable seeing his name, number, and picture. I figured it would help me when it came time to go to the funeral. It did not.

The funeral broke me. I cried a majority of the time, despite telling my friend I would never cry. I never got to see the body, because I had to work. I never got the closure until the funeral. I was coming to terms with the loss of my brother in real time in front of an audience. This is a pain I don’t wish for anyone.

Before you ask, no. I didn’t make a speech or say anything of value at the funeral. I’m sure this would be a great disappointment to my brother, but maybe he would understand that I’m a terrible public speaker. I would’ve just stood up there and continued to cry, without the ability to put my head down.

The last time my brother had visited me, he gave me a Wu-Tang Clan hat. I wore this to the funeral. It made sense at the time, but in hindsight I’m sure I looked very disrespectful. Without that hat for comfort, I wouldn’t have made it through the funeral.

The funeral is also the time where people decide it’s acceptable to ask me for things that belonged to my brother. “It’s what he would’ve wanted,” they’d say. People were asking for his shoes, his comic books, and even some of his ashes. I know my brother, he didn’t want these people to have anything. There aren’t more than 6 people he would give any of his stuff to. Those 6 people were treated as family, because for that day they were.

The panic overwhelmed me. The crushing reality was all over me, and it was inescapable. I wanted to be there for my mom, but I couldn’t. I said Arby’s had given me two days off, so I had to go back to Murfreesboro for work the next day. This was a lie. My mom knew it was a lie, but she allowed me to leave anyway.

Acceptance

I stood in his room for a moment. He had died there. You could feel it looming. Although I was inside, there was a metaphorical cloud over that room.

In the years leading up to the death he had really gotten into comic books. He always showed me them and wanted me to read them. I never got into comics or graphic novels. For whatever reason they never could grasp my attention.

When he’d talk about comics I’d listen. He’d get excited and tell me all about the people who drew the pictures and wrote the words. I couldn’t care less, but I did care that my brother found something to make himself happy. I really wanted him to be happy. If that meant sitting there pretending to care about comics, so be it. I’d give anything to hear him talk about a comic right now.

When I was in his room, I saw his crate of comics. I decided in that moment, I would make sure nothing happens to those comics.

I took the crate with me back to Murfreesboro. I thought about trying to read them, but came to the conclusion that I will never open them. I will keep them in the exact condition they were in when he last saw them.

The only alterations I will make to this collection will be completing some of the collections that weren’t finished before he died. Even that is just a maybe. What if he didn’t want any more?

That’s the burden of death. I will never know what he wanted. Coming to terms with that was the hard part.

The final part of acceptance is creating a plan to move forward. My plan was to move to Las Vegas and begin the long arduous process of starting a company.

Over-The-Counter Culture is that company. Las Vegas is where I currently live. The follow through matters now.

The hardest part about moving forward is something that doesn’t really seem to matter, but means everything. Was Sven my brother or Is Sven my brother?

I can say with absolute certainty that Sven is and always will be my brother. The comic books I have are still his, as far as I’m concerned. If I lose everything, someone will have to take those comics from my cold dead fingers because money comes and goes. Relationships come and go. Even life comes and goes. However, brothers are forever.

I still see Sven’s accounts on social media. I still have to pass his phone number to call my parents. Now that I’ve gone through the whole process, I don’t see this as a negative anymore.

Sven has died, but the ghost in the machine lives on.

For,

Sven Holberg

8-29-91 to 4-24-20