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Maria Zorn | Longreads | February 24, 2026 | 3,328 words (12 minutes)
There were two days per year devoted solely to thinking about my brother—the day he was born and the day he died. My son was not supposed to arrive on one of these days. He was due eight days before Tomm’s birthday, but this didn’t concern me. I was naively certain he’d come several weeks early. I’d been throwing up for months and was desperate to believe anything that would get me through another day. Despite my doctor’s assurance that curb-walking and chugging red raspberry leaf tea would do nothing, I maintained a daily ritual to coax the baby out. It didn’t occur to me that he could possibly land on July 24th until my induction was scheduled for the night of the 23rd, after my due date had come and gone. Out of 365 days, why this one? I was afraid Tomm would’ve resented sharing the day with his nephew, or, worse, that I’d collapse their souls into one.
I had told my mom she couldn’t be in the room when I delivered the baby—I wanted it to just be me and my husband, Jack. But when I learned I was going to have him exactly 34 years after she had Tomm, I decided I wanted her there. The nurse assigned to me had curly blonde hair, like mine, and a tanned, pretty face. She came in regularly to check on me and adjust the sensors strapped to my belly. On one of her visits, the nurse asked my mom if she had any other children. My mom is always candid when strangers ask this. I also have a son who is deceased. A half mile of concrete opens between her and the asker, a manicurist or an acquaintance at a wedding making small talk. Her eyes get smaller when she says it, then they find a streak in the paint on the wall upon which to hyper-focus. It reminds me of when I hear a grocery store cashier ask the customer in front of me how they are and they answer honestly. Just lie! I want to shriek. But this time when my mom answered the question, I found myself blurting that it would be my brother’s birthday tomorrow. When the doctor came in an hour later, she said, “I hear we want to have this baby tomorrow on a very special day,” and I felt misunderstood as well as betrayed by my nurse, like I’d been duped into being vulnerable because I looked like her anemic sister.
“No, no, I mean ideally I’d like to have him tonight,” I said. She looked confused. I’d ruined this special moment we were all supposed to be having, plus it was 9 p.m. and I was only three centimeters dilated. I glanced at the IV bag of Pitocin, then back to her. She gave me a conciliatory smile. “We’ll see what we can do.”
R was born at 5:13 a.m. on July 24th. My mom stood next to Jack, eyes shining, and said, “Now you know how much I love you.” Every cliché I’d heard about motherhood became true right away. Your heart will feel like it’s literally going to burst. I nestled R’s slippery body into the crook of my arm and we locked eyes as he extended and retracted his tongue like a lizard. I felt sure that I knew those eyes, that I had known them forever. Not because they were my brother’s—because they were his. My love for him filled every pore. I forgot it was Tomm’s birthday.
I had been worried about postpartum depression given past struggles with my mental health, but the early days with R were blissful. When Jack watched him so I could nap, I couldn’t fall asleep because I was too excited to hold him again. He would snuggle under my collarbone for hours while I watched the first season of True Detective with a bag of frozen peas stuffed between my legs. But a week or two after coming home, my thoughts began to loop in dizzying circles. I became terrified that someone was going to drop the baby and the soft spot on his head would hit the corner of the coffee table. I’d watch it pulsing and see how close he was to perishing at any moment. Jack would try to reassure me, and I’d remind him that Tomm died. “The worst thing can actually happen,” I’d tell him. And what could he say to that? I counted the steps out loud when I carried R downstairs every morning, convinced I wouldn’t slip as long as I was shouting numbers, so tired I always forgot about four. This wasn’t the kind of mother I’d hoped to be. I knew what I was experiencing was a shade of normal, but I felt embarrassed. I found excuses to cancel plans with loved ones so they wouldn’t see this feral version of me who would body-slam them if they so much as looked at R without washing their hands. I wept onto my baby’s fuzzy head because I loved him so much and the overwhelming flood of emotions reminded me, weirdly, of how it had felt to lose Tomm. Every cliché about grief had also been true. Your heart will feel like it’s literally going to break.
On May 30th, 2025––the 10-year anniversary of my brother’s death––I was 33 weeks pregnant. My mom and I usually travel somewhere for the occasion, but we decided to spend the day at my home in Denver since I was ill—my morning sickness came at six weeks and never went away. The peonies in my yard were blooming, spurting really. There was nothing more alive in the world that day than the peonies and the baby in my belly, and Tomm felt completely fuzzy. He usually visits on May 30th. My mom and I once went to Rintintin, a restaurant Tomm loved in Nolita, and halfway through dinner noticed an Alex Katz print of a slim figure wearing a floppy sunhat and dark glasses that looked just like him, tucked away on a back wall. Tomm had a tattoo of a black balloon on his arm. The year we drove to the mountains to spread some of his ashes, a lone black balloon fell from the sky as we passed through Glenwood Springs. It bounced across the street right in front of our car, halting traffic. He showed up another time as a dancing lobster in an Alice in Wonderland burlesque show in Bushwick, a nod to the matching lobster earrings we once wore out clubbing. I had thought he would be especially vivid last year, but he was nowhere to be found. Did the baby’s livingness make Tomm’s deadness louder? Maybe it was just the nausea. But it was the first time I considered that he might feel farther away in this new chapter of life.
Tomm didn’t typically enjoy kids because kids can’t drink and they don’t appreciate dark indie cult films and they were liable to spit up on his Yves Saint Laurent tote. When Tomm envisioned being an uncle, he pictured Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous. I wonder what he would make of R, of my frumpy new-momness. He once told me I looked like I owned a bead store and we cackled because it was mostly untrue. Now that I do look like I own a bead store, he would be gentler with me. Probably he’d say my breast-milk-splattered sweatpants look chic, something about how baggy is in. I used to watch videos of Tomm regularly so I could remember the sound of his laugh, but I don’t know where my headphones are and I keep forgetting to look for them between the baby’s naps.
Out of 365 days, why this one? I was afraid Tomm would’ve resented sharing the day with his nephew, or, worse, that I’d collapse their souls into one.
I spend hours every day with R sleeping on my chest. Recently I looked up a friend’s address on Zillow, found out who the listing agent was, then googled the woman to see what she’s like. I’ve spent so much time on my phone while the baby naps on me that I’ve already seen everything interesting on the internet. All that’s left is this. I don’t have social media, so to look at an Instagram account I use a site called Imginn, where I have to watch 30-second ads for the Jackpot Go gambling app before viewing a single post. This has taught me more about patience than parenting. Sometimes I pull up Tomm’s contact on my phone as though I’m going to send him a message. I want to share what Barbara the realtor in Lakewood is up to. I want to let him know that cigarettes are back in. He’d be thrilled. I got an ad for Kelly Clarkson’s Vegas residency last week and felt offended that the Algorithm thinks I would be interested in this sort of thing just because I’m a mother now. I fear it is a premonition. Do not let me get cable, I want to text him. I might accidentally start watching The Kelly Clarkson Show.
Often while the baby naps, I think about what he’ll be like when he’s 4, what he’ll look like when he’s 6. Will his eyebrows stay the way they are now, angled upward so he always appears slightly surprised? When he was first born, I told Jack that R looked like my grandma. (“When she was a baby?” he asked. “No, currently,” I said.) But when his wrinkles faded and his complexion—red from scraping against my tailbone on his way out into the world—turned fair, we started to see Tomm. The resemblance isn’t so near as to be alarming, but right now he looks more like Tomm than Jack or me. His eyes are round and blue like my brother’s, and he has the same full lips. He reminds me of Tomm most when we’re outside, when he’s squinting his big eyes from the brightness.
I watch my mom play with R and she ages in reverse before me. I see her in her late 20s with feathered bangs and an oversized button-down, passing Tomm the cloth diaper he carried around like a blankie. She was our volunteer night doula in the early days. The baby wouldn’t sleep in his bassinet, so she sometimes sat in the corner of our room and rocked him for three hours—from 2 to 5 a.m.—so I could sleep. She filled our freezer with chicken sheet-pan meals and lentil soup and something called Mississippi pot roast, a recipe that called for two full sticks of butter. She did a load of laundry every day and YouTubed how to fold R’s footie pajamas so they stacked perfectly in the drawer. Being with the baby was making her reminisce about her time as a new mom. Tomm was early to talk, but late to crawl, she told us. His favorite stuffed animal was Littlefoot from The Land Before Time. He took Littlefoot everywhere, even after his neck broke and flopped limply to one side.
When I was pregnant, my mom brought over a gigantic container of Tomm’s and my Beanie Babies. We were more into them than I remembered––there were over a hundred. She’d tried to sell some of them at a garage sale and when there were no takers, she kept them all. I had thought it was an excessively sentimental thing to do, saving so many, and plopped the container in our shed with the intention of eventually thinning out the herd, keeping only a few favorites for when R is older. I brought the bin out on one of our endless evenings lazing on the living room floor with the baby. Sorting them would be an enrichment activity for Jack and me.
Tomm and I played with Beanie Babies until we were old enough to create ornate backstories for them that involved bank heists and drug problems and marital affairs, all scenarios we’d copped from the soap operas my mom watched. Which is to say, we played with them for far too long. At the end of our Beanie era, Tomm would only play with me if I gave him five dollars, but I’d find the money I paid him on my desk later that day, proof he secretly had fun too. I hadn’t thought about that pile of crumpled one dollar bills when my mom dropped the toys off.
Jack and I decided we’d only hold onto the number of Beanies that would fit in a small storage basket. The rest would go to Goodwill. But how to choose? We organized them by category: bears, farm animals, marine life, rodents. I took a photo of Jack surrounded by the Beanies, all seated upright in a semicircle, looking like their deranged cult leader. As if we were preparing to board Noah’s Ark, we each selected one Beanie per category, deliberating sometimes for minutes. When the basket was full, I loaded the rejects back into the container, but found I couldn’t part with them. I kept seeing Tomm as a boy, the way he jutted his chin out and waved his arms excitedly when he told me a Beanie’s story. There was Pounce the cat, who lived in a halfway house made from an empty box of Cheez-Its, and Neon the seahorse, who had stolen $10 million from Wells Fargo. Who would Pounce and Neon be to R? I tramped through the snow to put the bin back in our shed. When I got back inside, I asked my mom if she still had Littlefoot.
“Of course,” she replied. “I’ll bring him next time.”
My mom and I went for a walk one day with the baby, gliding through the neighborhood in lockstep. She said, “We should walk on the left side of the street so we can see cars coming, but if we’re going to cross an intersection without a crosswalk, we should go to the right corner, because if someone makes a right turn too fast onto your street, they might not be able to see us if we’re on the left side.” The sleep deprivation was making me so stupid that I had to repeat what people said to me out loud in order to comprehend anything. Left side, right corner.
I raised my brows. “Shit, I didn’t think of that.”
Her vigilance had a narcotic effect on me. She would swivel her head in all directions and scope out danger. I could relax. As we walked in comfortable silence, I thought of the time my brother spent in Paris, two years before he died. He was supposed to be studying art history, but really he was maxing out credit cards and getting blackout drunk. He kept falling and requiring stitches. First in his chin, next in his eyebrow. He blamed the falls on his genetic clumsiness, on the platform loafers he’d raised so they were six inches tall, on the rickety spiral staircase in his apartment that he had to sometimes descend in a floor-length pencil skirt. Occasionally, he’d phone my mom, drunk and crying, and then hang up and ignore her calls for hours. I remembered how much weight she lost during this time, before she was able to coerce him into going to rehab. I had been soothed by the idea that my anxiety about R’s safety would be short-lived, that it was just my hormones assaulting me. He lived inside me so recently. Of course the world felt treacherous in comparison. But maybe this was just motherhood.
“It never goes away, does it? The worry, I mean,” I said.
“Well, it definitely gets easier. They get more sturdy. You’ll stop being so afraid of someone dropping him.”
“Unless he starts dropping himself.”
My mom lifted her chin to track a Cooper’s hawk overhead. She understood what I meant. “He’s not going to drop himself.”
On the way to the post office later that day, I saw a man walking down the street carrying two clear plastic trash bags full of packing peanuts. He was rail thin with dark, curly hair. The image of him has stayed with me. Maybe he was a determined environmentalist, attempting to sniff out a special recycling center where he could dispose of the Styrofoam. He realized he bought way too many peanuts. At a certain point, they weren’t going to make the fragile thing he was packing any less likely to break.
Every morning, R and I take a house tour. We place our hands behind a fiddle-leaf fig tree and watch the early light turn our fingers into shadows on its waxy leaves. We touch the gauzy white curtains in the dining room and turn the kitchen sink on and off again. We look at a painting on the wall that Tomm bought a few years before he died. It’s black and white with a wine glass and shapes. Simple and high-contrast, perfect for a baby. I say to R: “This was your Uncle Tomm’s painting. You have an uncle Tomm. That’s how you got your middle name.”
I will make sure R knows Tomm. I’ll share how much we hated it when my mom left us when we were young, how we’d lock ourselves in the bathroom and refuse to come out until our babysitter drank a concoction of our choosing: ketchup, ranch dressing, oyster sauce, a spritz of Diet Squirt. I’ll teach him how to fling his flip-flops across the park on the swing set, our greatest and only athletic feat. I’ll give him the black and white painting when he moves into his first apartment. But it will never be enough. I don’t want to resurrect Tomm through anecdotes. I want him on my living-room floor, cross-legged, with R’s tiny hand wrapped around his long pointer finger. I want R to go stay in New York for two weeks every summer with Tomm and his husband named Ben or Elliot, who mocks him gently for being ridiculous but still caters to all his demands. Tomm would still wear platforms and likely still make fun of people who order honey-mustard dressing or dip their fries in mayonnaise, despite my admonishments that we don’t do skinny girl humor anymore. But he wouldn’t be the reckless 23-year-old who accidentally overdosed. I so often forget that he would have kept aging with me. He would be R’s 34-year-old uncle. Maybe he would have gone to therapy. Perhaps he’d be sober. He’d change the dinner reservation from the swanky place he wanted to go to somewhere that supplies crayons. He’d be tickled to share his birthday with R.
I felt sure that I knew those eyes, that I had known them forever. Not because they were my brother’s—because they were his.
Tomm and I did like the one Kelly Clarkson song, “My Life Would Suck Without You.” We’d drive down the freeway with the music blasting, headed to buy velvet hangers to make his closet look more beautiful. He’d have one hand dangling a cigarette out the window, one balled into a fist to form an imaginary microphone in front of my mouth, no hands on the wheel, swerving while attempting to drive with his knobby knee.
The loss of Tomm seems, impossibly, even bigger now. I knew motherhood would increase my capacity for love, but it has also increased my capacity for sorrow. And yet, somehow, my life doesn’t suck without him. My grief has faded, most days, to a manageable hum over the last decade. I have returned from my postpartum fugue state. I’m beginning to recognize myself again. I think of Tomm every time the sunlight shines on R’s face. He is not Tomm’s replacement and Tomm is not his shadow. My son has added to the pile of glimmers that make me remember my brother. We’ll celebrate both birthdays every year: 35 and 1, 47 and 13, 55 and 21. They’ll keep growing older together.
Maria Zorn is a writer who lives in Colorado. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, West Branch, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She is currently working on a novel.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
