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...