Ghosts of Christmases Past

He is three. He didn't want the tree taken down at all. Yes, all kids love Christmas, and not only did he love it; he hated change of any kind. I look out the kitchen window and I see him out there. He is dragging the top of the tree back to the house. It is bigger than he is. His face is a mask of determination and his breath puffs out on the cold January air. Mother has kept up as long as we could stand it because he loves it, but he is devastated when he wakes up from his nap and it is gone. He has retrieved his love. Triumphantly he places it on the back porch in a bucket and Mama gives him some old ornaments to put on it.

I want to hug that little boy one more time. Or the baby that he was. Or the man he became. I just miss him so much...

a not-so-happy birthday

I first met him 22 years ago on this day. Memories...they can hurt so badly. In a way I welcome the hurt. If I hurt, it means he was here. If I hurt, it means he was loved. If I hurt, it means I haven't forgotten him. I dread the day that the pain recedes. I was thinking about my sister the other day, on her birthday. While I still miss her in a nostalgic sort of way, it is nothing compared to the ripping pain that is with me every single day and especially on this day.

He weighed five pound, ten ounces. He was 21 inches long. He was beautiful. I remember taking off his little bitty socks to look at his feet. I remember holding them in my hand. I remember that magical smell that came off him. The smell that is equal part the sentient fragrance of brand-new human and that incomparable scent of baby. I had no idea, as I stood there and held that tiny little scrap of a human, just what he would come to mean to me...that I would come to love him as I love these two I gave birth to...nor did I realize the horror that love would suffer in less than 22 years.

I assumed he would be with me as I passed from this world. I assumed he would always be a part of my life. I assumed that on this day, August 21, 2009, I would be able to say, "Happy birthday, Blake. I love you".

Squirrel Is One

He used to visit me at work. I had my own office and he would come in during his lunch hour. Usually it was because he needed something, but I didn't mind that at all. I was just happy to see him. So when I was pregnant with Ryder, I had doctor's appointments usually in the late morning. I went every week just about the entire term, so there were always new ultrasound pictures to show off to everyone at the office...and of course to show to him if he came in that day. I remember once that he came in on a "picture day" and he looked at the sonogram and said "he looks like a squirrel. that's what I'm gonna call him...Squirrel". I informed him that no he was not about to call my precious son a rodent. He laughed and said "yeah I am too". And he did. I called him from the hospital when I went in to have Ryder. I said "are you gonna come?" He said "soon as I can get there, Jenny. I love you". He wouldn't hold him. He said he was too little. By the time Ryder was about 4 or 5 months old, Blake's fears about dropping him had eased enough that he was holding him. I have a few pictures of them together and a video clip that's 2 seconds long. Abby meant to take a photo and hit the camera button instead. Why don't we ever take videos of things that turn out to be the most important?? I watch it over and over just to see him "alive" again.

My son will turn one year old in 10 days and he will do so without the uncle that would have been a huge and positive factor in his life...his would-be hunting and fishing buddy. Blake already loved Ryder and Ryder so would have worshipped Blake. My son will never know what he is missing...what the cruelty of life cheated him out of. I will do everything I can to give Ryder a good life and to surround him with love but there will always be a shadow that looms over our lives, a sort-of emptiness where the sun should shine and it does not. That shadow stands about 6'4" tall.

Bad

Those were his intials...how ironic...he was anything but.  I digress...it has been really bad lately.  To the point that I would have gone to see someone for professional help if I thought there was any use.  I am not a talker.  I am a silent griever.  I bottle it up and sometimes it gets loose and I feel like it is going to kill me.  I found his baby book.  I have it because it lists the details of his birth...details out mother didn't want him to find and read.  His parentage, in other words.  I wish she had just told him.  I wish I had told him when he was grown.  I wish I had told him what a gift he was in my life.  I wish I had told him he was mine in a way that the siblings I am genetically related to will never be.  Again, I wander off subject.  When I found that book and read passages that I, myself, had recorded about his first days and years, it broke me in a way that I cannot describe.  Those words brought back memories of the baby he was, the little boy he became and they stabbed my heart in a blatant reminder of all that I, all that everyone who loved him, has lost.  In my life, there has never been grief to compare to this.  I have lost my father and my sister, yet never have I felt so broken as this has left me.  

a visit to his grave

I finally worked up the nerve to go.  Can you imagine what it's like to stand beside a grave and read on the marker a name you filled out in forms from pediatrician's offices to school registration to his first bank accounts?  It is heartbreaking beyond what there are words to describe.  I took him lilacs from Mama's front yard, so he'd have a piece of home with him.  I know how simple-minded that sounds.  But it was/is all I can do for him now.  I miss him.  I'm mad at him for taking himself away from me and from my children.  I wish I could just call and talk to him.  I miss the sound of his voice.

It's almost spring and I...

...remember how much he loved to be outside.  It's almost spring and I think about catching "lightbubs" with him on warm evenings.  It's almost spring and I think about his Easters...his baskets, his egghunts...It's almost spring and his favorite burger joint will be reopening for business.  It's almost spring and Mama would have been making his favorite wilted lettuce salad.  He and I could demolish an entire bowl.  I will never eat it again...not without him.

It's almost spring and my heart breaks for my little brother.

pity

I do not write about him to cause anyone to pity me.  I do not write about him to call attention to myself.  I do not write about him in seeking comfort.

I write about him purely for my own benefit.  I write about him because to speak of him is torture.  I recently had someone who very magnanimously made the effort to talk to me after sort of dropping me as a friend because she deliberatley took things the wrong way.  She boasted to to others about how this somehow proved she was a good person.  Let me clarify that I have real life people who would be more than willing to hear all this.  I do not want to speak it.  Spoken words, except to those who loved him like I do/did, are cheap shadows of feelings.  They mean nothing.  Cheap human platitudes for feelings that defy description.  Okay, that's all I have to say about that.

The ice storm came the day after he was buried.  I mentioned how fortunate it was that we went ahead with the plans for that day.  Someone told me 'well, they could have preserved him'.  AAAAH!!!!  Oh my dear Father in Heaven!!!  Please do not say things like that.  He was not just a body to be preserved.  He was my little brother.  All during that historic storm, I thought about him out there in the ground.  In the cold.  I felt like I had just abandoned him to the raging elements.  He caught colds so easily and got this railing cough, had since he was a little boy.  The James Russell Lowell poem kept running through my head.  "The snow had begun in the gloaming..." I know how silly that is.  I know his days of fever, coughs and colds are done.   But there will always be that compulsion to look out for him.  Nothing I can do about it.  Except push it down and tell that feeling to go away.  I can't do anything else to take care of him.

a picture

I came across a picture of him and I at my wedding.  He was the only member of my family there.  Says a lot about our family, right?  Says a lot about him, too.  He hated frou-frou stuff like that, but he was there.  He came to my baby shower.  If you knew him, you knew how crazy that was...but he did it.  For me.  Because I asked him to.  I loved him.  I love him still.  I will love him as long as I draw breath and I am sure one of my last cohesive thoughts as I leave this plane of existence will be, "are you there, Blake?"  I hope to see my brother again.  I hope to hug him and tell him how very much I have missed him.  Please God...someday...

One Month

Today is the one month anniversary of his death.  There is so much sorrow in that sentence that it leaves little else to say.  A month...

"Goodnight, sweet prince...

"...flights of angels sing thee to thy rest".

~Hamlet; William Shakespeare

This was the last thing I whispered to him.  I kissed his cheek and quoted these words and had to let him go.

"You either die a hero or...

...live long enough to see yourself become a villain."  This was ironically one of Abby's favorite quotes from the movie Dark Knight (which she loves).  Her own personal hero is gone now.  She loved him from the moment she became cognizant of his presence.  Before she could run after him her eyes followed his every movement.  They practically grew up together...we spent so much time at my mom's when she was a child.

We should all be so lucky to be someone's larger-than-life.  If I know, if nothing else, I know that he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loved him with every fiber of her being.

That was his fifth birthday and she was almost five months old.

  

This was his eulogy...written and delivered by me...

Today we lay to rest the boy I thought of as my first baby.  How do you say goodbye to one you loved so much?  How do you lift up your soul from where it shrinks inside you to pour out your heart unto a page and onto the ears of those who would hear your tribute to your beloved?  It is a task I feel ill-equipped for, yet the magnitude of this day demands that I must.

I close my eyes and I see him. I see him at one day of age.  I see him at three.  I see him at 10.  I see him as I saw him last.  Vibrant, towering and vitally alive…I see him waving to me from the lobby of my workplace after a long day.  In silence I hear his voices.  I hear his baby cry.  I hear his first words.  I hear him shout “I have the power!” in his best, most ferocious He-Man imitation.

To some he was a friend.  To some he was a son.  To at least one little girl, he was a hero.   He was all those things and ever so much more.  He taught a little dog to sing while decked out in a bonnet and dress of his own creation, and he made a little baby laugh through a childhood filled with the trials of a life-threatening illness. He taught me that great love defies labels and definition.   He was pure potential and I believe with all my heart he could have done and been anything.  For you see, he was a piece of my heart, a part that no one else can ever claim and I bury it with him today.  He was sensitive and kind.  Babies and young children loved him instantly.  He had a sense of humor as gigantic as he was.  He loved to laugh.  He was very moved by the suffering of others.  He asked for little for himself, but would do anything within his power to spare the suffering of those lucky enough to be loved by him.   

“It’s de-light, Mama!  Time to wake up!”, he would exclaim as a toddler when the first morning sun touched his window.  He is walking in sunlight now that never ends.  He is eternally young and strong and I hope his face is forever lit with the spectacular light of his smile.