for my daughter, for someday
When I was eleven my sister Kathy died, she was five years older, born sick, a leaky heart valve that tapped her strength and turned her blue, and my role as brother was to fetch for her, and I ran up and down the stairs with colored pencils, teacups, Scrabble tiles, wires, beads, I never minded, she was a kind girl, she thought I was funny, she loved to draw horses, and before she died she won one of those matchbook art contests, with a charcoal of a black Arabian, and a year later the art company sued us for back tuition, and won, and that was our luck in those days, I remember disgracing us three times the day of the funeral, first I insisted on wearing a wite straw hat with a turquoise feather my Uncle Jack bought at a turnpike plaza, and making a scene when they wouldn't let me, second I broke into a horrible grin when I saw my friends in the pews at mass, and finally, I was caught throwing eggs at the parked cruiser of the police escort at the reception aterward, and watched the dripping yolk reach down the car window and door like raked fingers, and while people downstairs ate ham I fell on my bed and argued with God it was all a joke, and fantasized how scary it was to be you, carted off in a litter from the house, blue hand clutching the sheets, asking mommy am I going to die, and all because you never lost your baby teeth and they were rotting in your head and a dentist did his best and made us sign a release but something broke, some vessel inside you that led to your brain, and you lived three more days in a hospital in our little town, and what was your life but a box of notebooks of horses and letters to Elvis and the play you wrote and put on in the garage with the boy down the street who grew up to be gay, and the taunts of your classmates for being that way, and did you awaken in the night in your bed and wonder like me if the presence spooling in the dark would collect your life from you like a subscription fee, for I saw your death as a sign, a palmprint on a piece of paper that says everone dies and rather than become afraid I became hard and lived my whole youth that way, and I suffered because I wanted so to replace you but it was the last thing I could communicate, and when God decided to answer my prayer in the goodness of time and I married your mom and became father of you children, and you blessed my life with your beauty, it began again, the dreams, and I cry more than ever sometimes at the thought of a sick child hurt and dying and confused, and the hole it blasts in the mother and the father, in my mother who cannot talk about these things thirty years later, she became an amateur genealogist, I think because the dead do not disappoint, or my father, who left for California to slam his grief and failures behind him, there are craters of flesh opened in all of us, kids, there is war behind every painted fence, and I have learned no wisdom that can make this not hurt, we are unfortunately stuck with it like we are stuck with one another, all our lives and beyond our lives, crybabies like sand hollering at the water to stop, so let us have our cry and wipe our noses and forgive me my sadness and mixing you up in my mind, but you once had an aunt, a blue young girl who looked like you, who won a ribbon for riding in Pioneer Week, six months before she died, and posed in the glory of jeweled paste, black harnesses bearing the name Jaye, her rayon cowgirl blouse shining blue in the lens like aluminum foil and the glass teeth bared, a photo of weakness but how strong she was to survive this life, and live on in my heart, that is how strong we will have to be, courageous as children are carried away, and have to trust the carrier, because those hands are all they have, that a life sometimes takes many lifetimes, to learn and laugh and know, perhaps some mighty victory is growing in you now.
August 1988
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