The day I turned 42, seven years after my brother’s death, it broke my heart, because I never wanted to be older than my big brother. That was 13 years ago, and it still saddens me to think of.

Semi-related, but my dad died when I was in my late teens and I’ve dreamt about him a fair amount (usually it’s me getting to say goodbye ‘cause I didn’t get to in real life) but he’s always exaggerated or distorted in some way. He’s taller, has different glasses, more hair, darker hair. It’s him, but it’s not.…

Her experience of losing her brother is different from yours because she lost her brother due to a system of white supremacy. That’s just a fact. You can certainly commiserate, but you in fact DO NOT know exactly what she has felt. You have no idea what it would feel like for your brother’s life to be devalued, for…

I don’t have the vocabulary to fully articulate how close to home this beautifully written piece hit. All I know is that this part:

My Godbrother was murdered over a decade ago. We were 6 months apart and it’s so difficult not to think of the life he should’ve had.

Not the place for #notallwhitepeople. I heard a young BLM organizer say it so succinctly just last Monday: “If this were happening to any other group of people it would be considered an epidemic. And something would be done to stop it.”

This comment would make sense if she was fucking talking about middle class people in general, but clearly she was talking specifically about white, middle class, educated people. Don’t project your inability to separate class from race onto her.

You’re right. I’m sure she absolutely meant to write

Hey commentariat - please, for the love of everything good, please resist the temptation to argue with the stray hateful assholes trying to shit up this post, okay? I’m sure their stupid attempts at cruelty come from some bottomless hole in their own selves that they can’t manage to fill - but all the same, please,…

Sometimes I’m stunned at the pain people walk around with every day and still manage to function.

Though I have not lost my loved ones to violence, I lost my father and my sister to heart attacks, at young ages. This articles speaks to me on so many levels. I have incredibly real dreams about both of them all the time. I wake up crying every month or some from them. I remember about a year after my father died (in…

I’m sorry for your loss, Melissa. All of it. I wish you peace and happiness and fulfillment.

My brother was murdered in New York in 2009. I think about him every day. Thank you for what you wrote.

Sometimes, I’ve felt guilty for my family surviving and doing well. There were so many American Indian families that weren’t as lucky as mine. We’ve had our troubles but we still been able to manage. A lot of American Indians are still struggling. I’m not. I was able to get a good education and a good job. I felt a…

When a family member dies its always hard but I think when the death is related to a crime especially one that remains without a face to associate without blame. But when it is political there is another layer of suffering and another layer of unresolved emotion. Whilst black peoples lives are still lost due to…

I hope that you know that you deserve to be happy. You matter. Your pain is very real and that your brother would want you to live a full live that are an active participant in. The ghost of someone close to us who died in a terrible way far too young can be crippling. If the situation was reversed would you want him…

thank you, melissa.

Wierdest thing when my brother shows up in my dreams is I am so much older than he was when he died, but he’s still my older brother.

When I was 15 one of my best friends was killed. I was supposed to be there, but by fluke went to a different gathering that night. Your story brought back so many of those feelings from those first years, and made me wonder how much I still hang on to that is now just hardcoded “surviving”. And then I thought of my…

I don’t have words, just <3 <3 <3