When you lose someone that lives on the other side of the country - or a person that has not been in your adult life but shared your childhood - as you try to explain your grief there are many folks who simply cannot understand why it would affect you so deeply. You hear things like ...
"Why are you so upset? He lived so far away."
"I don't understand why this is hurting you. You had only seen him once in decades." "But you weren't part of each other's life anymore."
"I don't get it - this isn't a big loss when you wanted nothing to do with him for so long."
A deeper truth was, "Were you close?"
"Yes, but we didn't know it then."
Jimmy and I grew up together. We lived in my maternal grandparent's house. Our mothers were sisters and we were both babies birthed out of wedlock. Since I was born in January of 1962 and he in February of 1964, coming out of wombs that were embroiled in the deep Bible-belt South, our mere existence as bastardized children cemented our relationship eternally in shame. I have often wondered if this label and living in its constant shadow was the ultimate reason that he struggled his entire life as a drug addict. He seemed incapable, as an adult, to choose another path. While he never purposefully hurt another soul, he continually damaged himself, as if he never realized that he was worthy of so much more.
It's true that I cut him out of my world.
It's true that I made the acute decision to never talk to him again or allow him to know where I lived. There were so many valid reasons at the time that this made sense to me. Seemed like the most rational and sane choice all those years ago. He was an addicted felon who just could not stop himself from repeating the same offences. Jimmy spent most of his life behind bars. To most, he was an expert con man. At the time, I heartedly agreed.
On the 28th day of August, not quite a month ago, his roommate found him unresponsive. They pronounced him dead in the emergency room that evening. I do not know what caused his demise. About a year earlier, according to my mother who was the only family member that chose to keep a relationship with him, he lost control of his truck and crashed into a tree. His leg was so mangled that they had to cut him out of the vehicle. Doctors tried for months to save the limb, but after many trials and errors, they cut it off above the knee.
My mother, despite her own decline and diseases, visited him and changed the dressings on his leg. She was a nurse for almost 30 years and never stopped tending other's wounds. At the time, she was on oxygen and struggling with COPD, congestive heart failure, and stage 4 kidney disease. But it wouldn't do for any of us to try to stop her from making the trip, even though she couldn't drive any longer and had to ask for someone to take her to visit him.
I heard these stories during the nightly conversations I had with my mother. Despite living across the country from her, and the three hour time difference, we talked every evening. She stayed up late. Always had, I suspect from years of working the 3-11 shift in hospitals and nursing homes all her life. Mom once told me that she was always so hyped up from caring for patients and the elderly that she couldn't go right to bed. It would sometimes be three or four a.m. before she'd retire. Since we shared a tiny bedroom in my grandparent's home until the time I was 9 years old, it seems perfectly reasonable now that my sleeping patterns follow suit. But, it helped us keep a nightly schedule on the phone, now that we both lived different lives.
Every evening between 8 and 9 o'clock, I either picked up the phone and dialed her number or it would sometimes ring in my hand before I could get all the numbers punched in. We had a synchronous and silent thread between us, one that came instantaneously with my birth. I heard her tell people, sometimes complete strangers, that she had me so young that we "grew up together." It's a profound truth and underscores the sometimes indescribable connection we had with each other. So, I continued to be a part of Jimmy's life vicariously through my mother's stories.
But, this news did not come from my mother. Only a few months before, I had flown the close to 3,000 miles home to be by her side as she took her last breath. When I heard the ding on my phone, I was standing in a grocery store, determined to find something that my appetite-less body might eat. I had just finished an 8-week 'Grief Recovery' class and was struggling to keep my head above water, acting as if I had somehow mastered the enormity of living in a world without my mother in it. The news came in a text from another cousin. It was brief and not-on-purpose cold, "Wanted to make sure you knew about Jimmy. His service is Wednesday evening. Sorry kiddo."
I think I gasped out loud. I know I made some type of verbal noise, because I remember looking around at the other shoppers meandering through the aisles of produce as if the world had not just tipped (again) and then righted itself, leaving me to grab at anything to steady the trembling in my limbs. I looked down at the tiny basket I was cradling, a few vegetables and pieces of fruit staring back in return, and simply placed it on the floor, moved towards the exit, and walked stone-like to my car. It was as if there were two people in that vehicle. The child who was still wailing for her mother and the woman who couldn't stand another minute of sorrow. Enough, already. Enough.
Even I asked in my head, "Why am I so upset?" All of the comments that people spew out in this type of situation were identical to the very questions I asked too, sitting in that grocery store parking lot with the car windows rolled up to mask my hysterics. "Why does this hurt so badly?"
Obviously, it's because I was so horrifically close to the death of my mom. Any fool could understand that. But, I knew there was something so much deeper going on. It didn't take too long for me to realize the magnitude of what was tearing my guts out.
My brother died.
Maybe we were not siblings by blood, but brother and sister, no doubt. Sitting in that car, a deluge of memories came crashing down. Jimmy was the one witness of my childhood.
We were always together. My earliest recollections of life are wrapped up in him. We ate breakfast together. Sat at the same table every night for dinner with our family. We went to school together every morning. Our birthdays were so close that as toddlers, our mothers celebrated with one big party. Every Christmas Eve. Every Christmas morning. We walked side by side each Halloween in costume and later counted our candy on the floor of the living room, trading the pieces we didn't like. As teenagers, we partied together, we fought each other, we talked into the night.
Jim was my partner in all the sports we loved. Being a tomboy and active participant on different playing fields, all my summers were tied in knots around him. Our grandfather nailed a basketball net onto the front of our garage, an open two-bay wooden structure with a rock floor. We shot hoops until the sun went down. We marked out all the required bases in our graveled driveway by taking one foot and swiping the pebbles away until we reached dirt, making a triangle shape to tag as we ran singles, doubles, and homers until dark. Jim and I roamed the woods behind our house, ate apples from the orchard nearby, picked berries off the vine, stole concord grapes from our grandfather's crop (whippings earned), swam in creek beds, and pretended to be the Beatles while we played their 45 records and sang our hearts out. Jimmy was always Ringo and he pounded an imaginary drum set with sticks he found in the yard.
When I'm home, everything seems to be right When I'm home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah.
It's been a hard day's night...
My brother died.
He was only 55 years old.
Just a few weeks earlier, his son rolled him into the church for my mother's memorial service. I was talking to people but caught him out of the corner of my eye. When I turned towards him, his undeniably mischievous and contagious smile lit up the room. And he simply said my name and held out his arms. I walked over, melted into them, and wept. He was trembling, partly from the pain of just having lost his leg weeks prior; partly, I suspect, from the emotion of the moment. He clung to me as if he were trying to hold on to something that was slipping away, like the slow-motion of a car accident as it happens right in front of you. When I finally pulled back and looked into his eyes, bright with tears, I felt something shift inside me. All the anger that I had held towards him for decades, the disappointment and rage, melted with a heartbeat. The love he had for me burned so brightly that it washed over me like a waterfall. I was shocked by the enormity of his compassion. And also was so moved that his first hello, after years of my silence, was to simply embrace me without a single bit of hesitation, clearing the path for my own heart to open wide.
We talked together after saying goodbye to the woman we both knew as a mother, living together under one roof. Jimmy never once asked me why I pushed him away, why I stopped taking his calls, why I refused to receive his letters. He made me laugh, recalling all the crazy moments of our youth. And just before his son wheeled him out of the church, spent and exhausted and in pain, he took my hand in both of his and said, "I'm not gonna be here much longer, Janet." I tried to dissuade him from thinking such a thing but he insisted. "No, I can feel it. I won't be around soon." As I hugged him goodbye, I wept, not knowing that he was right, that holding him would be for the last time.
"Were you close?"
Yes.
But we didn't know it then.
~ In loving memory of James Cecil ~
February 16, 1964 - August 28, 2019
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