Chips Off The Block Read online

  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 –

  I’m too busy trying to

  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

  and so cold.

  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