Years ago, I longed for death. I even made two really good attempts to bring it on. I've written before about the odd circumstances surrounding my survival each time. Years later, I developed a pagan spirituality that I still hold albeit more loosely.
When my mother died several years ago, I wondered at my peace with her passing. My mother's relationship with the world was strained in the best of times. Her relationship with her children was broken. I wondered at the time if I was just indifferent to the death of a relative stranger. (Nice play on words, for my relationship with her.)
I had grieved the lost relationship with her years before she died. I was sad when she died, and I felt a great deal sympathy for my brother and sister who had a lot more contact with her than I did. But my grief didn't seem to follow any of the grieving patterns I had learned in my psychology classes. So I wondered.
Now my brother had died. When I was around 10, my brother was one of my best friends. He was 20. We would ride his moped all over the back streets of Redwood City, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto and, sometimes, into the Santa Cruz Mountains.
He loved me and adored me. But he was, until he died, limited to the developmental stage of about twelve. It made it harder to keep our relationship going. But it also made it easy to just pick up where we left off on each visit. In the last 10 years or so, though, he became increasingly irritable and ornery. Still, each visit was filled with Bill wanting to tell me everything going on in his life and to show me every new thing he bought. He wanted me to watch his favorite movies with him. It was just like visiting a youngster who is excited to see you.
The very best adult memory I have of my brother was something called a "dependent's cruise." At the end of a Western Pacific deployment, the US Navy will sometimes allow sailors to bring one relative on the ship to sail between Hawaii and San Diego. I was stationed on an amphibious ship which normally carried 1,500 marines. We left the marines in Hawaii, so we had lots of room.
Bill made that trip. He spent a lot of time on the Bridge or the Combat Information Center. He pestered the hell out of everyone just as a 10 year old would. My shipmates were kind to him, though. Even the Captain entertained my brother one day on the bridge. Bill got to steer the ship for about 15 minutes through some gentle turns.
He was thrilled. And he remembered that trip to the end. He could tell you the names of people that he talked with. I can only remember one name from that ship. That was a good week in my brother's life.
What does my grieving look like for my brother? Not much different than for my mother. The biggest difference is that I have many great memories of my brother coming to the surface. A nostalgic look at times that have are now forever secret. Times that cannot be explained to anyone adequately. It is the loss of the relationship that he and I had that I will now grieve. The end of one time and the beginning of another.
And for all that, I am at peace. Everything happens when it does. It is not wrong or right, good nor bad. It is not god's will or karma. It is simply the reality of the moment measured in form, distance and time. I will make it mean this:
My brother was gifted in many ways, challenged in many others. Through horrible times with horrible trials, he never gave up on people. Even when he grew his most cynical in the last decade, he still managed to believe and trust. And love. My brother was very good at loving.
I've made my peace with death. My brother had his turn around the circle and he left it more gentle, more caring and, for me, much sweeter.
I love you all. You are my family. You are whole and complete as you are. Whose life will you touch, move and inspire today?
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