I was standing at the kitchen counter when my body started to shake. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and I had just come from the bathroom, where a positive pregnancy test lay on the sink. I picked up my phone to text my best friend, but I could hardly see the screen; my tears overwhelmed my field of vision, like heavy rain on a car windshield.
“Are you up?” I wrote.
As I waited for her reply, I thought: “I am officially losing it.”
It was bound to happen. A month prior, I had lost my sister to an accidental drug overdose. A musician with fierce talent, her community of artists and fans embraced me and my family wholeheartedly once news spread. The support allowed me to soldier on amid the grief, and I managed to throw a celebration of life that was attended by hundreds of people both in person and virtually from around the world. Music played for almost 12 straight hours that night in Brooklyn.
The next day, things got quieter. As people boarded planes and packed up cars, I could feel their arms loosen from around me as they slowly stepped back into their life, their issues, their sisters.
When I found out I was pregnant with my second child, my heart sank at the idea of him or her never knowing my sister, who was the type of aunt who got on all fours to play and colour, and turn up the volume on the stereo to dance, and jump after waves in the ocean no matter how cold the water. My best friend called me back and cried at the news, my husband and mom, too.
Two weeks later, I miscarried. The doctor told me I would start to bleed after seeing my plummeting progesterone levels, but I prayed she was wrong. The hormones and physical pain accompanied by that surge of red was nothing compared to my mental state. I took to bed. I stopped showering. I stopped playing with my three-year-old daughter. Once again, life had slipped through my fingers. And once again, I felt responsible and alone.
The next days and weeks are still a blur. I somehow went back to work, began to manage my sister’s estate, closed on my first home, packed up my family’s life, and moved out of New York City – my home for 17 years. Introducing myself to new neighbours and parents, pretending like I was some kind of whole person, was a joke that left me feeling sick to my stomach.
I also somehow managed to have sex with my husband in hopes of getting pregnant again. It felt wrong to make love to him, but I did it. I did it because a big part of me knew that life had to go on, and a small part of me believed that perhaps my baby would be born with my sister’s spirit.
My sister, jaimie branch, was larger than life. A trumpet player, composer, improviser and vocalist, jaimie (who preferred her name lowercase) toured the world with many groups, most notably her avant-garde jazz quartet, Fly or Die. A band leader and community activist, she commanded the stage like a sorcerer; her horn held high like a staff, she’d pace up and down in backwards hats and swooping kimonos screaming about racism and begging for justice and “singing her soul” through her trumpet. She was, as The New York Times recently said, “a real one”.
Her triumphs were great. At the age of 39, jaimie had released three records as a bandleader with Fly or Die – not including the recently released, chart-topping posthumous record, “fly or die fly or die fly or die ((world war))”, via International Anthem. She also released three LPs with her electronic duo Anteloper and is featured on countless others as a recording artist, most recently for the hip hop producer and rapper Madlib and rapper Talib Kweli. jaimie’s battles were great, too. She, along with an estimated 16 million people around the world, suffered from opioid use disorder. She fought hard for her health for well over a decade. I fought hard for her, too.
Five days after jaimie passed away, I got a voice message from the saxophonist and composer, Jarrett Gilgore, a good friend of my sister. The message said that he was on retreat and doing pilgrimage in Kathmandu, Nepal. “I’ve been coordinating with some very accomplished llamas and yogis to do pujas and after-life Bardo practices for jaimie,” he said from his camp, which was set up next to Boudhanath Stupa, one of the holiest sites for Tibetan Buddhists. “According to them, she’s in a very good place right now.”
In Tibetan Buddhism, Gilgore later explained, after someone dies, they go to an “in-between place” for 49 days called the Bardo. For the first few days, the person doesn’t know that they are dead. Since they don’t have a body, just a mind, and they are not bound by time and space, the thinking is that they can be in New York one minute and Nepal the next. The purpose of Gilgore’s ceremonial offerings is to help bring jaimie to a better place.
I’m not a religious person, but two days after jaimie passed away, close to 100 people gathered in jaimie’s neighbourhood on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn to sit and listen to her music. The New York Times wrote of the night in her obituary: “From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in phantom collaboration.”
Three days after jaimie passed away, me, my husband, Will, and my daughter, Sol, took a walk as a family. At the time, we lived across from the Atlantic Ocean in Far Rockaway, New York. We were making our way to the boardwalk when suddenly Sol shouted, “Look, footprints!” She had just turned three and loved to play make-believe. We asked, in animated voices, “Whose footprints?” She answered, “A dragon! Let’s go find him.” She ran a few steps more before stopping and pointing ahead. “Look, there’s Tía! Tía, wait up!”
And 11 months after my sister jaimie branch passed away, I gave birth to a boy who had big blue eyes, just like she did when she was little.
My son, Benjamin Riis Yakowicz, was born one month early. At six pounds, four ounces and 19 ¾ inches long, he was “small but vigorous” said one nurse, affording him the ability to bypass the NICU and come home with us two days later. Now at three months old, his warm body nestled on me as I type this sentence, he is cooing and smiling. I often catch him smirking at me. He sleeps longer stretches when I need it most. I swear he kisses my neck when I hug him. He’s sweet, easy – Breezy is his nickname, after jaimie, whose stage name was “jaimie breezy branch”. He seems to be aware of everything; a trait I once wished he wouldn’t have, worried my grief would be too toxic for him, like it was for the unborn baby before him.
Children choose their parents because of their journey, not in spite of it, says Lida Ahmady, an acupuncturist and board-certified Chinese herbalist who is a founder of the wellness center De’Qi Health in New York City. “Children are really connected to the spirit world because they just came from it.”
In my third trimester, I started seeing Ahmady, and separately her husband, Junod Etienne, a clinical hypnosis therapist who works often with patients who are grieving. He helped me get a lot of sadness out of my body quite literally. In sessions, tears and fluid would pour out of my eyes and nose and mouth.
Etienne also told me the one thing I desperately needed to hear: “You shouldn’t overlook the fact that it’s very possible your sister was involved in the selection of this soul coming to you.”
It was a Monday night in August when jaimie died. Sol was asleep in her crib. Will was doing dishes in the kitchen. I was sitting in the living room on the edge of a children’s trampoline folding clean laundry.
Will had noticed a missed call from jaimie’s roommate. As he dialled him back, I looked at my phone. Three missed calls and a text message: “Please call me. It’s an emergency.”
That’s when everything fell silent for me.
I saw Will’s lips make out the words, “Oh my God.” I felt his embrace. I tasted the tears that ran down my face. I didn’t move or speak until: “My mom.”
Will offered to go, my mom lived next door to us at the time, but I knew it was me who had to tell her.
I crossed the driveway and stood outside the door of her apartment. I found her down the hall in her office. We met in that room’s doorway, and I took her hand and looked into her eyes. She fell to the ground. Her head dangled as if disconnected. She cried with her mouth open, yet I couldn’t hear a whimper.
At the time, I was acutely aware of this absence of sound, likely because my sister’s entire purpose on earth was dedicated to sound. And now she was gone.
jaimie’s final record for Fly or Die begins and ends with the sound of a church organ. She had nearly finished it, with only final mixing, artwork, liner notes and a few title selections left. Two days before she passed, she and I spoke about it for an hour over the phone; later that night, she forwarded me an email with the most recent notes she had sent to her engineer. Ten days later, the band and I, along with her label, set forth finishing the record to the best of our abilities.
On it, jaimie sings phrases such as “I wish I had the time,” and “The future lives inside you,” and “Don’t forget to fight” on “burning grey”, a “snaking nine-minute punk conga line”, according to Slate. On “baba louie”, which largely celebrates our Latin American heritage, and really my mother, who is Colombian, there are joyful rhythms and dubbed-out grooves as well as, for some, the most telling message of all: “Shoot to score / Should I score? / Shoot, I scored.” After cleaning out her apartment, I found these lyrics scribbled in her notebooks along with other messages like, “When you want to use, play music instead.”
My sister was often quoted as saying, “All the music that ever was and ever will be is here now. It exists in a cloud just above our heads and when we play, we pluck it out of the ether for a lil while before sending it back up.”
Perhaps the silence I heard this past year wasn’t silence at all, but rather her sound playing at a higher frequency, one that isn’t necessarily audible but instead energetic, that doesn’t resonate in headphones but rather the chamber of the body, that can’t be turned on or off but just is. The idea, whether true or not, has helped me listen deeper to myself, my children, and jaimie.
The other day I realised, even after working on my sister’s record intimately over these last months, that while it begins and ends with the sound of a church organ, there is another instrument that gets the final say. In the last seconds of the last song on the album, jaimie jangles a Fisher-Price bell from the ’70s. Called a “Happy Apple”, the wobble chime toy is red and marked with a smiley face. Today, it sits atop my bookshelf in my new home, waiting for Sol and Breezy to ring it again.
