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.