Breaking Open Your Spirit

Eric's twin brother, Ryan, says he too was broken open by Eric's death. "The way I see it is that there's this picture on the wall of what you think your life is and where you think your life is going. And you take that picture and you pull it off the wall and you smash it into a thousand pieces all over the floor, " Ryan says. "For a while you just sit there and look at the pieces, and there's no way to put them back together. For a long time I was stuck looking at those pieces."

Ryan, an engineer, says his inability to solve the problem in his life was eating away at him. "For the longest time, I thought, 'I'm never going to stop feeling this way,'" he says.

Finally, Ryan realized this was one problem he wasn't responsible for fixing. "It was somewhat of a spiritual experience for me," he says. "I got a release that said: 'Stop. You really don't get it, Ryan. You just don't understand what's going on here, and you're not going to solve this problem, and you need to stop.'"