Morgue

Sometimes still, after all this time, it is too much.  I sit and can't understand what happened, how he could really be gone, and how I am never going to hear his voice again.

To make it real I inevitably think of seeing his body, which is horrible.  Horrible that it was a body, that it was my brother's body, and that my mind goes there because that was the most real moment of his death.  It was a nightmare out of a poem that we stood in the morgue on Father's Day and looked at his face hovering in front of us on the closed captioned TV screen they now use for next-of-kin to identify bodies.  We knew cerebrally he was in there but before the screen flipped on I know our souls were screaming for it to be a mistake and to see some other young mans face appear.  It was Brendan, unmistakeably B with his messy curly blonde hair.  He had a bruise on his cheek, his mouth was slightly open, as were his eyes.  He didn't look asleep, as processed bodies almost do, he just looked dead.  You couldn't see the bright beautiful blue-gray color of his eyes, but they weren't cloudy or creepy.  They just weren't anything. 

I had to eventually ask the old sad man who was working alone in the morgue on Father's Day to please turn it off.  I was crying and I said something about yes it was him and what were we supposed to do and please turn it off, and I remember feeling like I had to because I was the only one not sitting on the couch in the room and I could feel my family crumbling behind me.  Later in the car my mom said she though Brendan looked like a picture of Jesus on the screen, because his hair formed this gold halo around his face.  He did.  He'd laugh at me for saying that.

I don't know what my first memory of my sister is, but I like to tell people it's the time when I was still a baby and she, a toddler, was holding me on her lap, and she leaned over as if to kiss me but instead bit my ear.  (She describes it now as if she meant to show me, her baby sister, affection, but was overcome by a wave of jealousy that somehow manifested into an ear bite.)

Megan is two years and twenty days older than me; she was born on my parents 10th wedding anniversary and I like to think many of her personality traits reflect the manner in which she was conceived:  planned, organized, calculated, logical...  (She will think I'm teasing there, but really, they are traits that I wish I carried more strongly.  Or at all.)  My growth spurt and puberty hit not long after hers did (I think because I was always trying to catch up and play with the big girls, maybe my body took a cue) and I used to make people guess who was older, and giggle with glee when they guessed me.  In reflection, I shouldn't have been surprised many years later when after a couple bottles of wine my sister mentioned casually how much she hated me in high school.  

Megan didn't go to college right away; instead, she went to South America and worked with orphans, learned Spanish, ate lots of street food, and got her first tattoo.  Then she went to college, which included a year in Africa as well as a return trip to Bolivia to research her undergraduate honors thesis, and graduated about six months before I did.  The years between then and now included two in the Peace Corps, three getting two masters degrees from an ivy-covered school in the Northeast, and lots of travel.

If Megan and I hadn't had Brendan to balance us out I think we may have actually hurt each other in middle or high school.  He was often a little shit, but he was our little shit, and we loved him more than anything, and that was often the one thing we knew we had in common.  The morning that Brendan died, and I called my sister after hanging up with my parents, knowing she already knew and dreading what we had to do, I remember holding on to the phone and listening to her sob and telling her I loved her over and over.  We knew from that moment that the only way to survive was together.  It still is, and we are, and we do.

Last Friday at 5 a.m. my parents and I put Megan on a bus to Chicago to get on a plane headed to Indonesia.  She'll be there a few months certainly, most likely a year or two, or more. She's in Jakarta now, I've gotten a text and a couple emails, and all is well.  I miss her terribly. 

I got my Valentine's Day package from Mom and Dad today...

And it reminded me of a few things...

Love is scratching out the "I" on the Valentine's Day card you send your children so it says "We", because it's from Mom and Dad.

Love is sending candy for every Halloween, Valentine's Day, and Easter, no matter where your children are in the world, no matter that postage costs more than the goodies inside.  (It's also, for that matter, sending Girl Scout cookies even though the daughter says she doesn't want them because she's getting fat.)

Love is leaning over your adult daughter as she cries in her bed, not asking why, and touching her hair and saying "You are loved."

Love is parking at the airport, walking your daughters into the airport, and then waiting outside the rope at the security line just so you can wave until they are through.