Endings

March 13, 2005.

I was with my roommate Haley. We had been in Austin. We bought Jack Johnson and The Fray at Waterloo, got in the car and for some reason took a detour to Haley's old neighborhood on our way back to Waco.

The phone rang.

The phone rang and my whole world changed.

3 of my brothers (the family that adopted me when I went to college 10 years before) were on a mission trip in Juarez, Mexico. My youngest brother, Jeffrey, collapsed and was rushed to a hospital.

You don't remember dates of when people make it. You remember that they made it. He did not.

The phone rang and it took my baby brother.

For a year it felt like every beat of my heart screamed with the pain of thousands of shards of glass shoved in every available space. The nest year it was a pulsing pain, when hit from the wrong angle, screamed. Last year it was a dull ache. This year... it's this empty hollow, like when you have eaten and you are still hungry.

My little brother. My constant companion. He is who I ate Taco Cabana with at 11 at night. He is who always needed my car, who ate my left overs, who laid on my couch and watched TV at my house instead of his own - because it was more comfortable. I loved the back of his hands covered in freckles, and the way his head felt after it had just been shaved. I loved that at our other brother's weddings he was my guaranteed sarcastic relief from the otherwise very serious affairs. I loved when he would come into my office and sit and ask me questions about life that had been weighing on him. Or when he called me because he needed to know the name of a good bail bondsman... and also how to get the car back from being impounded. I loved that when he was little, he thought I hung the moon, and never stopped. He knew I adored him and he didn't mind. He was the moon to me.

And then he was gone. In a moment. There were three of us on campus at the same time, within three blocks of each other. Stephen and I never regained our rhythm. We knew how to do three, but two was just wrong. It wasn't until he graduated that we ever recovered from the black hole that was Jeffreys absence on campus. But then there was Stephen's wedding, me dancing alone with our nieces, the weighty absence of the one who always joined me in making things fun hanging around me like a wet blanket.

And then there is now. I have lived an entire portion of my life without him. I left home and came here and I know people that have never met him, that have a one dimensional idea of this person who is such a part of my heart. They are people that don't know that March 13th is a fight for me. They are people that don't know that when I move I get depressed because I am used to my brothers moving me. I loved listening to them complain... After Jeffrey, I just hired people. And now I look at this new furniture that he would hate and I ache. A dull hungry ache.

So tomorrow I will wake up, and it will be March 14. No less sad that today, just less of a stigma. I will move my boxes, and his picture. And the rock I took from the ground where he is the morning I left for here. Because I needed something with me. When I was home I could go there and sit and let the wind blow over me and stare at the big carved stone that screamed reality to me. HE IS NOT ON A TRIP. HE IS GONE. GONE. GONE.

I miss him more and not less. More. Even more.

Time does not heal pain, it teaches us to cope. 13.3.05 I remember telling Stephen I didn't know if I could live without him. Now I know that I can and it as even more difficult than I imagined.

As I walked toward my flat for the last time tonight I thought about endings. The end of the beginning here. That because of my faith I believe that somehow Jeffrey's end was in fact a beginning. But I decided that I hate endings. Mostly because I don't know what's ahead. And it rarely works out like you think.

I miss him.