Don't this say it all???

My Brother's Bones

The brother of my high school friend is dying. This man, the incarnation of the boy I knew so long ago, chose the hard road of living; the same road so many others in my town chose to walk. And now as he lived, so he dies; via the hard road. No calm, peaceful death of closing one’s eyes and passing over quietly and smiling, drifted away to another plane of existence while wrapped in the comfortable arms of sleep has been his gift. Instead, his leaving is a slow-motion forward stumble toward that final landing. Over this past week or so, my mind has been much on his children for whom I find myself praying will find peace and closure with their father before he leaves. My heart is really tied up in this death for so many reasons. The pain of my sister-friends as they take this final walk with their beloved brother; grief and sorrow for his mother as no mother should have to watch her child die. And there is also my own selfish sadness because this man was/is part and parcel of my childhood and with each passing over, those of us who lived within the town that built us are diminished and I always grieve at the death of one of our own.

My soul aches as once again I see someone leave because of the demons that haunt them. Because I do what I do for a living, I am there with some of these besieged warriors as they struggle to walk this road and try to win this battle. I ache because I have been there again and again as one by one they lose and addiction claims yet another for its dark hole. That demon took two people from my care last week - one to overdose, one to self-inflicted gunshot. These were good people, loving and loved people destroyed by their inner war and sent home with no flag draping their coffin to honor the battle fought and lost. And last but not the least, in this particular moment, the brother of my friend and his process of leaving this plane has triggered my own recently scabbed and healing wound.

A little over a year ago, my own brother lost his battle to the demon-god Addiction. Where this family goes, I have already been. When my husband and I went to say our farewells to my brother in June of ‘09, I remember sitting for hours by his side in a tiny cramped 1 room “independent living” apartment. A room which is dominated by the presence of the hospital bed, the oxygen tank and the glaringly yellow DNR order taped to the wall above the head of his bed. I sat by his side, chatting when he was awake; fidgeting while he dozed as he slipped in and out of consciousness and reality. I remember running my hands through his hair and helping to shift his body and feeling his skeleton with only the paper thin skin holding those bones together. I feel his weight or lack of as at one point I aid him to swing his addiction embattled frame of barely 50 pounds out of the bed and into the wheelchair so he could go outside and feel the sun on his face and the gulf breezes brush against his skin. I felt the desperate desire to hold him tight so he could not go, could not leave me behind.

And now, I remember standing at my mother's grave a year ago this coming week and pouring my brother's ashes across that green plot telling her that I had brought her son home to her. The disconnection from reality and the movement of time as a gust of breeze whipped through the falling stream of grey powder and wrapped my brother about me, across my shoes, into my clothes, through my hair as if he was giving me one last hug. The totally abandoned feeling as I saw small pieces of bones that had not pulverized and realized this was all that was left of the big brother who taught me to roller skate, to dance, to shoot a gun and put a spit shine on his shoes; the brother who so fiercely protected me and my "purity" despite the fact I was hell-bent on getting rid of it. I picked up a bone, bigger than the rest, somewhat recognizable as a part of the whole, yet still small. It was perhaps a bone of the hand that had so recently held mine and told me he loved me and I had no choice but to acknowledge that he was really gone - they all were – my family name stopped here and now in this small unmarked plot of land in a cemetery ironically carrying the same name as my married name. I was leaving my childhood dusted across that grass. As I turned to leave I looked down and saw the metal tag that each body is cremated with so they are "identifiable" and I reached down and picked it up, dropping all that was left of my brother into the pocket of my blue jeans.

I moved on, I kept going and I know my friend and her family and all the rest who love and care for her brother will move on and keep going as well, but in this hour of loss, in this moment of farewell; I feel their grief as if it were my own. For those who lived in the town that built us, it is our own. See you on the other side PK….tell my brother I love him.

~Kaj