Things

Of course, it doesn't make sense. There is no sense in it.

If this were someone else’s thing, their life, there’s little doubt it might have gone this way. There’s little doubt that the twenty-five year old boy would have succumbed to all the demons he’d met.

How fitting would have been that funeral, then. How easily canonized the pretty day, the hand-in-hand walk from the grave back to the church.

I process all of these things, now. They are all a part of this, and yet still wrong. Grief delivers all things wrong, to me. It makes an uncommon family phone call portentous; it turns the crystal around my neck into a life vest.

In short, I feel the need to ward off everything. I feel myself descending to a place where life is a warning, a line cobbled in stone, a last breath.

The ordinary fact of it is that I ache for my father. A hurt I can’t believe. I ache for me, and for all of us. All of us who had this boy—this magnificent boy—as our care. We could have done better, I have thought. Because somewhere, there’s an outcome—a purely rational outcome, I think. A boy who didn’t die.

Reality, however, is where we all fail. It’s where we grieve and suffer until our throats go numb. It’s where we find how much we loved, are loved; qualifiers so often measured not in major events, but in moments. And in things.

I gave my brother two items of note in the last few years. One, a framed picture: I held him, a child sleeping in a rocking chair. The other was a modest silver cross I’d found in our mother’s jewelry box. I was, for some silly and perhaps not-silly reasons, convinced that it protected me. And I’d told him to wear it.

Objects. Baseballs, and trophies, a worn leather belt. T-shirts and wallets. Just little remainders. These are what I have, what I keep. But, still, they work like amulets. They feel like some kind of power.

Funny thing, though, is the power that we are. That thing that is living, alive and unbroken. I can hold this baseball—I can wear these jeans, this sad little scarf—and I will. But these are nothing so much as an afterthought. A longing.

The day my brother died, there were two things of consequence on his nightstand. One, the picture—an almost blurry, candid shot of his sister holding him in a rocking chair. The other, a tarnished silver cross.