Recently my two sisters
have mentioned our brother,
who has been dead for
going on sixteen years.
He was younger to one
older than another
younger than me
but then I’m the eldest –
they’re all my junior.
But that those two sisters
just happened to mention him
within two weeks of each other
is the sort of thing
that means something.
But what?
He’s been dead
since autumn 1997
which now is a while ago.
Not a long time
but not only just.
He’s been gone for most of my youngest daughter’s lifetime
although she remembers
sledding with him
in December 1996
in Britain.
She was four, he was twenty-four.
Less than a year later
he was gone.
Now in 2013
1996 and 1997
aren’t quite ancient history
but I don’t think about those days,
unless someone brings it up.
We had just moved to Yorkshire
in the spring of 1996
and while both of my brothers shared our first English Christmas
only one visited in 1997
and again in 1999.
But in 2013
that’s been years ago.
Now it’s water under the bridge
(unless someone mentions it).
Yet, thinking about it
(about him),
what does it mean
to consider a life
water under the bridge?
Does it mean I didn’t love him,
that I’ve blocked him out,
forgotten him…
No.
It means
I’ve moved on
(not without tears and gnashing of teeth).
It means
I accept that
shit happens
but good things too
(Romans 8:28).
It means…
Sometimes people are lost along the way.
It also means I have four siblings
three living
one dead.
I can’t hack him off
like a diseased limb
(although at the end
he was a mess).
I also can’t
bring myself to mourn him endlessly.
But that sounds callous,
as if he meant nothing.
He meant a great deal
yet in that absence
his life has taken on
a deeper meaning
exacerbating
how fragile
we all are.
It’s a wonder
any of us
manages
to make it
one more single day.
But some of us
were meant
for longer distances
to be traversed;
the elder of those two sisters
posed this query –
what would he be doing
if he had lived
(if he hadn’t taken himself out)?
Would he be ranching with Dad
would he be…
I smiled, but
said nothing of significance.
He was an insulin-dependent diabetic and
a meth addict.
If he hadn’t
died when he did
it was just a matter of time.
Yet she spoke
of his death
like it was a freak car accident
or that lightning had struck him,
like he was as firm on his feet
as the rest of us.
Her questions
revealed more about her
than the answer she was
rhetorically seeking.
She’s not a sentimental type,
she can be hard as nails.
But the loss of a little brother,
no matter how fucked-up he was,
tends to leave lasting scars.
Tender were her inquiries
made while walking around a mall
as if that site
was innocuous enough
to bring it up at all.
My reply was pithy,
like our location,
the perfect setting to say
he wasn’t meant to live long
like he’d wasted years
as a mall rat.
She took it without incident;
maybe she just needed to say it
and the surroundings were
safe.
Easy to bring up the black sheep of the family
far away from home
at a mall.
Easy to think about him
with many years
dangling in the interim.
Then out of the blue
less than two weeks later
my other sister,
the youngest of us all,
sent an email
about that brother.
Again I smiled
as if he stood behind
my computer chair
tapping my shoulder
(the little creep).
The gist of her note
wasn’t the root –
more was the timing.
It’s not that we don’t talk about him anymore
but it has been over fifteen years ago.
I don’t wax lyrically
about events from
those days –
sort out life in 2013.
But he wasn’t wiped from our
collective memories, he didn’t
vanish from existence.
My now nearly twenty-one-year-old
still recalls that day in the
English snow
at the top
of a small hill.
She sat in front of him,
held tightly,
then was told –
Here we go.
She just mentioned this,
but it came on the heels
of me sharing the elder of her two aunts’ queries.
Yet, even my not-so-baby girl
recalls that uncle.
Her uncle,
our brother,
still deader than hell
(the little bastard).
I’m not bitter,
just acknowledging
the waste.
Yet, he’s not the only one.
And neither are we.
Hearts are broken
all the time.
And many years later
we still think of him,
wondering what he might be doing.
Curious as to the effect of
his life,
but more importantly,
what influence his death
has had on
our lives.
Which brings me
to the crux of this poem:
who I am today
is chalked up to
a myriad of
occurrences
from my entire past.
And hands-down,
like bestowing
a blue ribbon,
my brother’s suicide
three days’ shy
of his twenty-fifth birthday
is the winner
of the
Life Changes on a Dime
Award.
Meeting my husband
and birthing our children
hold other top honors.
But if I want to be honest,
and I do,
when that beloved little brother
for whatever r
eason
shot himself in the head
my world turned
from the moment my father called to tell me
in the middle of the night,
UK time.
But while existences
can end
by a bullet
traveling faster
than science can say
other alterations
occur just as quickly.
Not the cessation
of immediate grief
gut-wrenching
Suddenly
as he no longer breathed
my inhalations
had changed,
as if living
for two.
As if all my subsequent
actions
mattered more.
As if I too stood on a precipice
but instead of jumping off the ledge
I stepped up.
Sometimes
in the aftermath
of brutal tragedy
a brighter fire burns.
Yes, I fell some rungs
yes, I wept long and hard.
But years later
he doesn’t hurt
(me or himself).
He’s alive
(behind veils)
loitering in malls
and in emails.
He’s not the agony of old
because seconds aren’t static
(thank God).
Thank God I wasn’t trapped in
the autumn of 1997 –
he wasn’t either,
although he’s not ranching with Dad,
or recklessly harming himself.
He’s… an angel,
believe it or not.
Well, that’s what I think.
How can he not be,
how can he be anything else?
(Romans 8:28)
How else could my usually
emotionally reserved sister
just happen to mention him
at a lousy Southern Californian mall?
How could my youngest sister
who was so devastated
she couldn’t even go to his funeral
name her firstborn
for him?
How could I write this
unless I was fully expecting
to catch up with him someday,
flick him upside the head,
then hug the stuffing out of him?
How could any of us
think back to how we learned the news
losing our minds and
our hearts
as a part of our souls
had to be
extricated
without anesthesia
as if on a
battlefield.
Recently my two sisters
mentioned the most
altering moment of our
collective lives.
Sometimes things don’t come in threes
and sometimes they do.
This poem is the third,
because as the eldest,
I get the proverbial
last word.
He’s an angel,
’nuff said.
Various Little Birds