Fulfillment

For My Brother Michael

When I pulled the Fulfillment card in April, I didn’t rush to interpret it. I let it sit. Propped against the mirror on my dresser, it watched me come and go, morning after morning, night after night. I caught it in my periphery while searching for earrings, putting away clothes, and collapsing into bed. Fulfillment felt like a word meant for later, a word with a lot of distance built into it.

Because I’m in my twenties, my life obviously feels unfinished. I’m mid-becoming, mid-learning, mid-mistake. Days stretch forward, unformed and crowded with possibility. Fulfillment, by contrast, sounded like a verdict. Something declared once the story had settled. It didn’t feel like something I was allowed to claim yet. It felt like something you realize only in retrospect, once enough time has passed to name what it was.

So the card gathered a thin layer of dust. I told myself I would return to it when I knew more, when I had lived enough to earn it.

Spring moved into Summer. The light changed. Time passed quietly.

And then everything broke open.

Months passed.

My brother passed.

Michael died in June 2025, and his absence shattered everything in an instant. He was my baby brother. My best friend. Losing him created an immediate and massive hole in my life. One that, in a single phone call, dismantled the structure around it.

I saw Michael nearly every week. We lived in the same city. I would drag him to CorePower classes with me, where we struggled through hot yoga together, and afterward he’d Uber Eats us an absurd feast. He’d call me just to give me a spontaneous history lesson, something he’d been reading about, some obscure detail he couldn’t wait to share. He spoke quickly, like ideas were racing his mouth to get out. We laughed about anything and everything. That was our rhythm. That was my normal.

Grief didn’t arrive as a feeling so much as a condition. Like a diagnosis you don’t fully understand yet, only that it changes everything and it won’t go away. I felt it when I was awake enough to feel it — a heaviness in my chest, a constant low-grade ache — but mostly, I slept it away. Sleep became the only place where I wasn’t actively missing him. Waking up meant remembering again.

Michael passed peacefully, in his sleep.

There is a part of me that believes a divine hand reached out and told him he was needed somewhere else. That it was time to come home. As if he had completed what he came here to do.

I imagine something like a conversation with God or the Universe or his higher self or whoever that happened long before I knew him. Before any of us did. An offering. A life full of music, sports and laughter. A big loving family. Friends who would become brothers. A life where success would arrive early. A world that would open easily to him. Love in real abundance.

The only condition was time. Twenty-six years.

I don’t know if this is belief or bargaining. I just know it’s the version that lets me breathe.

Fulfillment felt like a cruel word. Too complete. Too neat. Nothing about grief is complete or neat. Nothing about losing someone too soon is fulfilled. It is unfinished and jagged and unfair. It leaves you unwhole in a way that resists repair. I couldn’t reconcile that kind of rupture with any idea of a full life.

But grief has a way of widening your vision, whether you want it to or not.

You get inducted into a a fucked-up, unchosen club with people who have lived through a similar, unbearable pain. Everyone wants to help. Everyone has something to say. Most of it misses. “He’s at peace now.” “When I lost my dog, I couldn’t sleep either, but you learn to move forward.” Things people offer because they don’t know what else to do. Because they’re afraid of saying nothing. And in my opinion, saying nothing is worse.

I learned to give them grace. I learned to smile and listen, hoping that maybe one percent of what they offered might land. The truth is, even though death is something every human being will eventually face, it feels wildly unnatural when it happens. Grief makes you feel profoundly singular. Yes, I have the most wonderful family and friends to lean on. But most days, it’s just me alone with my thoughts, crying over old conversations, replaying my most cherished memories, fighting my own brain.

When you miss someone, you’re not just missing the person. You’re missing the version of yourself that only existed with them. Michael brought out a side of me that felt uniquely alive. We were partners in crime from the beginning. We played every game we could invent, pretending we were spies like Kim Possible, booby-trapping the house like Home Alone. One of his favorite movies was Disney’s Robin Hood, and we rewatched it so many times that even as adults, it still felt like ours.

As we grew older, we became equals. Even though he loved to joke that he was my older brother, we met each other eye to eye. I loved the version of myself he pulled forward — unapologetically bro-ey, for lack of a better word. Goofy and fun-loving. Mischievous. A little chaotic. Unafraid to take up space. That version of me doesn’t come out as easily now. I grieve her, too. The self that only Michael could call into the room.

I learned to give myself grace too. Slowly, with time, I stopped thinking of fulfillment as something you arrive at once you’ve done enough, become enough, or lived long enough. Instead, I began to recognize it as a pattern. A way of moving through the world. The very shape of the life Michael lived.

Michael lived with an awareness of time that felt instinctive, not anxious. He moved as though he understood that nothing was guaranteed. That presence mattered. That if you loved something, you showed up fully for it.

He didn’t just listen to music; he played it, studied it, mastered it. He attended Berklee College of Music. He gave himself to the discipline of learning. He didn’t just work; he built a company of his own and then led it to real success. He didn’t collect friends; he turned them into family. He made rooms warmer just by being in them. He embedded himself in communities, leaving imprints everywhere he went.

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” - Marcus Aurelius

Michael lived the way Marcus Aurelius wrote — with integrity, presence, and a refusal to half-commit. Marcus reminds us that life is fragile and fleeting, that we could leave it at any moment. Michael shows me what it looks like to live as if that were true.

His life wasn’t full because it was long. It was full because he lived it awake.

When someone lives that fully, their absence is loud.

Grief doesn’t arrive that quietly. It moves through rooms. It finds you in places you didn’t expect, especially in sound.

At Michael’s memorial, the room filled with music.

It didn’t feel right to call it a funeral. Michael didn’t live in black and silence, so we didn’t send him off that way. We gathered in a botanical garden instead, surrounded by green and open air, and asked everyone to wear bright colors. There were flowers everywhere, growing things, light filtering through leaves. It felt alive. It felt like him.

I’m still struck by how many people came. People from every corner of his life — childhood friends, teammates, classmates, colleagues, neighbors. People who knew different versions of him, all gathered in one place. So many of us talk about fulfillment in terms of milestones or achievements you can point to. But after experiencing his community showing up for him and us, I understand it differently. A full life reveals itself in the love that remains. Fulfillment is not an achievement. It’s a resonance.

Music carried us through the afternoon. A soloist sang On Eagle’s Wings, her voice rising and settling over the room like a blessing. Then Seth Bernard, Michael’s mentor, picked up his guitar and played Fire and Rain by James Taylor.

The songs filled the space completely. We asked people to sing with us, and they did. Friends, family, voices overlapping, imperfect but earnest. Music has always been a connective tissue in my family so this felt right. Like Michael was singing with us.

Fire and Rain is a song about loss, but it’s also about the burning brightness of connection. About memory’s persistence. About carrying someone with you even as the world keeps moving. Standing there, surrounded by voices, it struck me that just like love, music does not end when the notes do. It reverberates. It lingers in the air, in the body, long after the sound has stopped.

As if to prove the point, we played an unreleased song of Michael’s that he wrote while he was still in college.

In it, he actually sings about death. He was so ahead of his time.

Hearing his voice fill the garden sent chills through me. It felt impossible and perfect all at once. His sound still moving through us. His presence still there.

People gave beautiful speeches that day. Michael’s best friends. His business partners. People who loved him deeply and knew him well. Others repeat their words back to me now, like borrowed memories.

Honestly, I barely remember the day itself. I was there, technically. Physically. But I was submerged in a kind of emotional undertow. Moments came and went without attaching themselves to my memory. Sounds blurred. Faces softened. Time moved weirdly, like it does when your body is busy surviving something your mind can’t yet hold.

What I do remember is the light and love.

We held a Celebration of Life that night at one of our favorite local bars. People stood up and told funny and generous stories, ones that made the room swell with laughter and ache at the same time. At one point I looked around me and saw that my friends had formed a physical circle around my seat. Not to trap me, but to hold me upright. I felt carried without having to ask.

Love showed up everywhere in those weeks. Neighbors we hadn’t spoken to in years dropped off food and flowers and handwritten notes. People found ways to be near us without demanding anything in return. The world, which had just taken something unbearably precious, also revealed how much had been given. Sometimes when you are in deep darkness, light will flood in.

Fulfillment does not end when a life does.

Michael’s life didn’t ask to be measured in years. It asked to be measured in presence. In how fully he entered rooms. In how deeply he committed to the things he loved. In the way people felt more themselves when he was near.

Loving him, and missing him, is now part of how I learn to live. It shapes the way I show up: to love, to music, to work, to the people in front of me. I try to meet my life the way he met his — awake, generous, unafraid to give myself fully to what’s here.

Maybe the reason I didn’t rush to interpret the Fulfillment card is because I wasn’t meant to define it. I was meant to witness it.

Michael’s life continues to move through mine, asking me to pay attention, to participate, to choose presence.

And for now, I let that be enough.

Fulfillment Affirmation: My projects become the perfect fulfillment of myself in harmony with the universe. I believe in myself and in my potential as a creator. I make my dreams come true. I fulfill myself through my daily actions, through unconditional love, faith, wisdom, and positive thinking. So be it.

---

Mystic Memoirs is an essay experiment inspired by my oracle deck.

I pull the cards not to predict what’s coming, but to anchor myself in what’s already here. Each card offers an idea or theme, and I pay attention to how that idea moves through my life.

The process is simple: draw a card, sit with its message, and let life take its course. I notice what memories surface, what patterns repeat, and what experiences begin to feel charged with meaning. From there, I write. Eventually, an essay-ish thing forms, a small truth. When it’s finished, I publish and pull again.

This is card #4.