AfflictionAteHer

I heard someone sneeze at work, yesterday; a sneeze that sounded a bit like my brother’s sneeze.

My brother’s nose figured prominently in our childhood. He had a way of smashing it flat with the palm of his hand and then moving his palm around in a wet, vigorous circle while he pressed down on it, cartilage crunching away. He would do this, and I would say, “Oh! Ug! Stop!!!” when he did, probably because I, personally, found it too painful to mimic. Our noses were always itching inside because of our allergies, and this motion was his unique way of dealing with his itch. I probably just stuck my finger up my offending nostril. We were very itchy kids.

Grief is such a strange and wondrous thing, if what you feel when you miss someone who is dead is grief. I heard this sneeze, it sounded familiar, and the bottomless longing engulfed me. I became paralyzed, like I always do. Immobile, fingers hovering over my keyboard, thankful I wasn’t talking to a customer, terrified my phone would ring, a deer in the fluorescent headlights of work. What am I saying? I wasn’t terrified the phone would ring, though I was briefly glad I wasn’t talking to someone. “You’re almost right here,” is what I thought, what I always think. “You’re just out of reach.” “You’re missing.” “Why can’t I just call you?” “Why did you die? Why you? Why me? Where are you? Is this, could this, can’t this be a dream?” My eyes misted over. I gulped. My lower lip quivered. I gulped again. Got up from my chair and pretended I needed to go to the bathroom for a few minutes so I could collect myself and stop missing him.

My break came up about an hour later, and I stood outside near the curb and smoked. I was thinking some profound thought about death, something to do with how I wished I could walk upstairs and say, “I have to go home and cry, my brother just died, this is going to take some time to get over.” I thought about how I couldn’t do that when he died, and about how I had known at the time it would be like this, these episodes, overtaking me, for years to come, and how resigned I’d felt to that. How secret you have to be about it when it hits, even though you’re talking about it being your only brother who died. Any person in their right mind would say, “Whoa, it’s been nearly seven years. You should’ve gotten over this by now. You’re mentally ill, eh?”

A girl I’ve seen around but don’t know walked outside for her own break and came up to me. “Are you ok?” “Oh sure, how’s your day going?” Instant mask. I am sunny and cheerful. You must have misunderstood me. Flash back to the plane ride to Dallas the morning you died, the steward walking up the aisle, kneeling next to my seat, placing his hand around my own, asking (quietly), “Did someone just die?” Me nodding because I couldn’t speak (because I would’ve starting crying). Him nodding back. “A close family member?” Me, hesitating, wanting to say (loudly) “My only fucking brother, oh fuck, oh my God, just hold me, please, just put me somewhere nobody will see or hear me, for God’s sake. Sob, oh Sob, oh Wail Wail Wail.” And just nodding. Pleased that someone had noticed.

The girl from work started talking about a call she’d taken earlier in the day, and I waited for some way to interject in to the conversation, “I was just thinking about my brother. Someone just sneezed like him. I am overcome with longing. Do you think it would be wrong to go home and cry? Do you think they’d give me an incident for it? If I get another incident they’ll have to put me on verbal warning.” And then she would hug me in a silent, comforting motion. And I would take a deep breath. And the missingness would pass more quickly. Instead, the skinny girl with the platinum hair and the very hip haircut walked up and they compared horror stories about the first girl’s weekend salon visit. And I pretended to be part of the crowd, but I wasn’t really. So I just finished my break.

I figured the kind of opportunity to tell someone about it, to tell someone my brother is dead, and to tell them about the sneeze, would probably come up. And it did, this evening, like a small, red-headed blessing. The guy who sits next to me told me his parents are both dead, of cancer, and told me about their last days. And then he asked me if I have any siblings (because he and his sister are the only ones left), and I said yes. I told him about the sneeze, and I said, “Because I have a very wonderful view of the afterlife, I feel that he’s with me all the time, except for when I really need him to be.” And he nodded, not too solemly, and said, “Sometimes it’s just so weird that my parents aren’t here. That it’s just me.” And then I told him how John Larry died. We are all so young to have lost so much. And neither of us became morose. We went from that to his last visit to Japan, to teaching school for Army kids, to “Engrish” translations he’d taken pictures of. Sweet relief.

I don’t know if he ever thinks to himself that these secret moments of engulfing, drenching, confounding missing are sweet. Are the most intimate reminder of the role you no longer play in this world, and the role that was just for you that someone else used to play.

My brother and I were itchy kids, and we sneezed all the time. Even though I have a painful lump in my throat just from writing this, the memory of feeling so close I could almost touch him is like that itch. Like that sneeze. So odd. So persistent. Our sneezes were quite satisfying, when we were kids. I miss him very satisfactorily, I think. Or maybe I just miss him.

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My brother was born big-hearted.  I don’t mean to say he was particularly magnanimous, or that he walked around with his arms open to the world.  I mean to say that he was open to all the big emotions.  Excitement.  Love.  Anger.  Rage.  Sadness.  Exhilaration.  A typical day in his life might begin with me waking him up.  Grumpy and annoyed, he would stumble in to the den and plop down in front of the TV, thumb in his mouth, index finger twirling in his hair, to wake up.  I must have awakened him this way so often because I was an early riser, myself, and because I craved his company.  Most often we fought over television shows and cereal, toys and territories.  Still, I started every day believing that we would settle in with each other in comfortable agreement and pastime.  Cloudy days, days soft with rain and dim with dark clouds, were easier than others.  Those days, we passed the quiet time together in harmony.

I mostly remember his playing with his race cars, or with his friends.  I picture a little boy in striped, bell-bottomed pants and a t-shirt, sitting on the floor, making vroom-vroom noises and crashing sounds as he raced his matchbox cars through the air.  I picture the same little boy in the same outfit, plus a blue windbreaker, flying down the sidewalk, legs pumping madly, straddling (just barely) the banana seat of his first bicycle.  I remember walking down the street with him past the Goodyards house.  Going to a neighbor girl’s birthday party with him, with his hair slicked down with water, in his red dress shirt and black tie, when he was 6 years old.  And then there was his first football uniform, red jersey with white lettering and helmet.  I picture him running as fast as he could but never seeming to gain as much distance as I expected him to.  And then his next football uniform, this one gold.  I picture him at 12, his long hair burnished with gold and swirling around his head when he ran.  And then 13, racing his first BMX.  And 14, winning another race, in his young man’s body, broad shouldered, lean, growing tall, left hand on his hip, right foot in front of him, green eyes narrowed as he surveyed everyone around him over his cup of ice.  And 16, a shit-kicker, partying with the cowboys and working every macho job he could find.  And 17, howling in fury, fists flying as he attempted to fight my father through our living room and out the front door.  And 18, too thin, with horrified eyes, his face filled with a rage that seemed to overtake every other expression of his personality for the next few years.  And 22, muscles pumped up on steroids, hair in a perm, trying in a desperately sweet way to talk his girlfriend into marrying him instead of having an abortion.  And 25, standing in the shambles of the first place he ever lived with a girl, the girl accusing him of hitting her, and him sobbing and swearing he didn’t.  And 27, wild, unbrushed hair ranging over his shoulders and down his back, furiously intense and threatening, burning up all our mother’s spoons on speed.  And I remember the utterly exhausted man who arrived back in our parents home at 31 following his first hospitalization and diagnosis of bipolar disorder.  And 32, defeated in a way that left me speechless, still at home, working on his college degree, afraid to live by himself.  And 33, trying horrifically hard to fit hopes in to the same cramped space with his fears and defeats.  And 35, smiling bravely at each question about his future and his love life and his health.  And 37, vomiting in the bathroom, bloated from medications for everything from bipolar disorder to asthma to an intestinal blockage to high blood pressure to high cholesterol to two slipped discs in his back.  And that is my last memory of seeing him.  I would say he was always anything, but he wasn’t, really.  He was quite changeable.  Maybe most children are.

I regret all the watching of my brother I did. I wish I’d paid attention to him, instead.

I can’t seem to write about our childhood, or my childhood, without falling back on gross generalizations and guilt.  The big hearted emotions that so defined both of our lives.

Maybe its just that our differences, and our reactions to our differences, were naturally going to cause a lot of guilt, and an ultimate inability to ever really come together, like two magnets facing each other with the same polarity.  But I will tell you that I longed for him until I was 18, and that I hated him after that.  And I think it was the opposite for him:  hate, and then longing.  With him gone, the longing is back with me and this one always I know will always be:  I will always long for him.

And I think that’s really the most important thing.  It isn’t what I suppose he thought or felt about me, and it isn’t all the mistakes I made, or the things about me that might have pushed him away from me (and probably did).  The guilt probably isn’t important.  What’s important is that I loved him, and I was, and remain, convinced that he loved me.  Probably.  Hopefully.  Honestly, I’m not sure.  I’m afraid the most he ever felt was guilty but I so much wanted him to love me.  I long for him to have.  I long to have another chance to earn that from him.

If only I knew more about what was going on in his head in between those memories I have of him.  If only I remembered his own personal timeline, or conversations we had, or things we did together, or people we both knew, experiences we shared beyond those few that I hold in my head.  If I did, I could write about him.  I could tell his story to the world.  I could better understand the big picture, and my own part in our relationship, with more calm than I can muster now.

Oh how I wish I could express it:  those memories, real and true, and not just the emotions I surround everything with.

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