In going through a box of assorted extra household stuff I had at the crash pad, recently I found some old photos of Big Bro and I. I had shared this one with you all where he's watching over me, like always. Note how seriously pissed off I look to be wearing a dress and those shoes. There's another, sitting on the table at the crash pad right now, at Christmas. I'm on the floor, wearing another hated dress with some doll stuff. He's next to me with this giant fire truck. I am holding the doll stuff as if it might bite me, looking over at him and the truck with a look that definitely says "I was ROBBED!".
Then, there were later ones, this one an adventure with a raft we built with our next door neighbor and Bro's best friend since they were toddlers, C, pictured there on the right next to him.
Here it is in all it's glory as we prepared to take it down to the lake for some secret soldier exercises. The transport medium was my roller skates which I leased to them (being the good military contractor that I was) for 25 cents for the day. Note their Rat Patrol style hats. We watched Rat Patrol a lot, to the point even now, in heavy traffic, with idiot drivers, I daydream of a Jeep and an M2 50 cal.
Good times, though too soon they were grown up, Big Bro, growing like a weed to where he was as tall as C. Soon everyone was off to the military or other adventures. One sidebar there, C.was TERRIFIED of flying. It only stands to reason that when he had to take his FIRST flight on a plane, a transport, guess who the Skipper was? I still remember him, with a look of horror on his face when he found out who was in the front left seat, blurting out to the amusement of all on board "Oh *@(!, I helped teach her how to drive!"
He survived, and all these years later, he's still Big Bro's best friend, there for him when I can't be.
I didn't expect Bro to remember my birthday, but he did.
But Big Bro always remembers my birthday, even if a day or two late, with a funny card with a drawing of him being abducted by aliens, somehow explaining the delay. There are other holidays, and sometimes no occasion at all, as he remembers me, just a note that shows up in the mail, cards when I come back West to visit. I'm not sure exactly where it started, perhaps with the whole Pez dispenser collection that he also started giving me little "M and M" stuff, including a candy jar in the shape of one, I keep on my desk.
I realize from talking with my friends that not all sibling relationships are this close. A lot of kids grow up almost strangers, with personalities and interests so divergent they wonder how they're related. They get along as well as can be expected, playing politely at family gatherings, bound together only by being the children of the same people. I consider myself lucky to having a sibling who I would have wanted to be pals with, even if we weren't related. (who else find his Sis's original Christmas stocking and fill it with chocolate and ammo).
I remember him letting me tag along his paper route, not being ashamed of his little sister as most of his friends would have been, but teaching me the perfect curve ball of paper onto a porch.
I remember road trips where we would playfully bicker and play with toy soldiers in the back of the car, mine in my chubby little hands, his, more grown and nimble, moving on to my side of the station wagon seat with his troops, setting camp until I yelled "MOM". And we'd be told to be quiet, for at least 15 minutes, and we'd sit, in perfect stoic silence, shooting looks back and forth to each other, as if dueling with foils, plotting, planning, waiting for the laughter to burst out because we just couldn't hold it in.
I remember all the Sundays we went to Church, even those earliest memories of Service on Easter Sunday. I'm sitting as still and as tall as I can, but I can only see the backs of heads. When I was really little, Mom would give me a tiny little bag of cheerios, so if I got hungry and fidgety I could eat a few, one at a time. My feet hurt and my new dress itches but I know mostly to behave, acting up only earning a brisk march outside for a swat on the bottom, as even Jesus looked down from the wall in the vestibule with an expression that said "you shouldn't lob a Cheerio at your brother".
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Easter Sunday. he traditions rarely varied, we'd get up to find a small basket outside our bedroom door containing jelly beans and candy, and for me, one early Easter, a stuffed bunny. Oh how I loved that bunny, dragging it around everywhere, Mom occasionally having to wash it and hang it up on the clothesline by its ears to dry. Over time, most of his fur was worn away, he lost his plastic eyes, his nose fell off and his ears were beyond floppy. But I still loved him, keeping him even into adulthood, even if I couldn't always keep him safe from harm.
I didn't much like the early hour or wearing a dress on those Easter Sundays. But even to a child, there was something magical about the music, the organ straining with the sonorous tone of a parent, while the choir, voices freed from parental caution to play quietly, rose up in in a flurry of joy, heartfelt in their gathering volume, assuming the shapes of angels to my small form below. I'd actually sit still for that, as the their voices faded away into the still air, as clear and delicate as struck glass.
I remember road trips where we would playfully bicker and play with toy soldiers in the back of the car, mine in my chubby little hands, his, more grown and nimble, moving on to my side of the station wagon seat with his troops, setting camp until I yelled "MOM". And we'd be told to be quiet, for at least 15 minutes, and we'd sit, in perfect stoic silence, shooting looks back and forth to each other, as if dueling with foils, plotting, planning, waiting for the laughter to burst out because we just couldn't hold it in.
I remember all the Sundays we went to Church, even those earliest memories of Service on Easter Sunday. I'm sitting as still and as tall as I can, but I can only see the backs of heads. When I was really little, Mom would give me a tiny little bag of cheerios, so if I got hungry and fidgety I could eat a few, one at a time. My feet hurt and my new dress itches but I know mostly to behave, acting up only earning a brisk march outside for a swat on the bottom, as even Jesus looked down from the wall in the vestibule with an expression that said "you shouldn't lob a Cheerio at your brother".
Easter Sunday. he traditions rarely varied, we'd get up to find a small basket outside our bedroom door containing jelly beans and candy, and for me, one early Easter, a stuffed bunny. Oh how I loved that bunny, dragging it around everywhere, Mom occasionally having to wash it and hang it up on the clothesline by its ears to dry. Over time, most of his fur was worn away, he lost his plastic eyes, his nose fell off and his ears were beyond floppy. But I still loved him, keeping him even into adulthood, even if I couldn't always keep him safe from harm.
I didn't much like the early hour or wearing a dress on those Easter Sundays. But even to a child, there was something magical about the music, the organ straining with the sonorous tone of a parent, while the choir, voices freed from parental caution to play quietly, rose up in in a flurry of joy, heartfelt in their gathering volume, assuming the shapes of angels to my small form below. I'd actually sit still for that, as the their voices faded away into the still air, as clear and delicate as struck glass.
After that it was Sunday as usual. Normally our folks made Sunday a family day of board games and books and music, but hyped up on Easter candy sugar, Mom was willing to forgo that to let us run off a little steam, so we donned our cowboy holsters and six shooters and headed out. Big Bro gets out the door first and point his firearm at me with a stern "you'd best get out here you lily livered coward" to which I simply stuck my tongue out at him through the screen. It tasted like dirt.
He didn't look at all scared.
But somehow the play always evolved into us being on the same side even if all we had to be the "bad guy" was the neighbor's cat or a menacing shrub. I took more than one "bullet" for my big brother, even if I could barely keep up with him on my little legs. More than one knee was bloodied in my battle to save him. the scabs a Bactine infused mark of my sacrifice.
But it's hard for kids as they grow up, to keep the cohesion we had living in the same house. We are bound together by family, but often scattered by distance, dealing with our own tragedies, things much worse than a failed model contest, keeping it in and not saying much. Perhaps it's the Scandahoovian in us, perhaps it's the sense of protecting the clan.
As is inevitable, we did grow up, he leaving for Submarine Service when I was still in school
I missed him. I remember walking in the woods with Dad's old Savage and seeing an elk crash into flight from a stand of small trees, the sound curving around the whole earth it seemed. I couldn't move, frozen by the sound. I simply stood, open mouthed, gun at my side, incredulous as to how big he really was close up and all the thoughts flowing through my head, turning to follow his now invisible running. For lack of any other response to his leaving, I picked up a rock and threw it hard and deep into the forest in which he ran, the stone, glinting like a knife, disappearing into the last copper ray of sun before it dipped behind the trees.
"I don't want you to go" was all I could say, as I stood there in the fading light, sounding very small and alone.
But he came back; he always came back. And he'd call me when he could and I'd tell him about school and my misadventures in physics, both in and out of the classroom, and we'd laugh. We always both laughed, easily and well. We didn't worry about politics, or budgets, or deadlines or knowing that sometimes keeping your mouth shut had to be the better part of valor. Even as I entered adulthood, we could still laugh and say "it's five o clock somewhere" as I raised my first glass of amber liquid in a toast to endless oceans and skies. It was a golden time, one in which we hadn't fully learned to look at everything in a critical eye of war or loss.
When he got married I was there at his wedding near the Naval base in California, wearing a lime green bridesmaid thing that I would not have worn for the Pope, The Queen of England or Marshall Dillon (though given how Miss Kitty dressed, Marshall Dillon would have liked it). But I wore it for him.
Soon, he and I were both grown, no longer to have imaginary gun battles with toy pistols. But he knew as did I, that either of us would give our life for the other.Though those early gun battles among siblings and friends were only child's play, they will be played out years later for many of us. For there will come times of fighting, of blood and prayer, of plunges into the deepest waters and ascents into unknown skies. Moments where we approach nearest of all to God, just as on Sunday we drew nearer to Him, there in the peace and the fury that is both the promise and end of all faith.
With my Big Bro no longer living under the same roof, but always looking out after me, we charged ahead, mindful only of our duty, to protect, to uphold, minds and hearts purged then of sins that lay behind, summed and absolved by the formal fury of a ministers intonation from the pulpit, moving forward, sacrificing ourselves as need be, so that somewhere, someone can live for a little while beneath the safe, warm exhalation of faith and trust.
As the morning of Good Friday dawned, I was thinking of him, just as I was thinking of this upcoming Easter Sunday. For it's not bunnies and eggs that Easter is all about, but a memorial to the death and resurrection of one who gave the ultimate sacrifice, laying down his life for us on an ancient cross. That Roman cross was a cruel tool of death, an aberrant form of capital punishment, a tediously painful process designed to magnify every last splinter of pain and abasement before death's relief.
Yet Jesus took up His cross and carried that burden, nails pounded through his feet and hands, his body clothed only in our reproach. Easter is that memorial to that sacrifice for love, even when not deserved. It's a love that never faltered when He saw us struggling with sin, simply loving us beyond it, beyond what we were capable of bearing. It's a love that never ended, was never rebuked, no matter how battle scarred we got.
Some of us got more battled scarred than others, Big Bro battling Stage Four Esophageal cancer, with chemo and radiation. He never complained,though he himself said he looked like a concentration camp victim ("and not even the guy on top of the pile") and with no disrespect to what those souls went through, no one argued with him.
We recently spent a week together, he and I, not one that I talked about, but one that was important as we know he might only have a few months left. We stayed up late each night, raising a glass of amber liquid and talking until he nodded off in the easy chair. Each time, I didn't know if I'd hear his voice again, quietly saying as his eyes closed, "I don't want you to go", as I have uttered silently to someone else not long ago. Words quietly released in that quiet tone of slow amazement, as if I had not known, until I uttered them, the depths from which those words came.
But he has gone, leaving us on Good Friday, right at 5 P.M. as if "it was five o'clock somewhere." I'd gotten the call a couple of hours prior that he had collapsed while taking out the trash for Dad and was on the way North towards O'Hare trying desperately to get a flight to say goodbye, when I physically felt him leave me. We'd been through foster care, adoption, the whole "mom caught us taking the TV apart", to an adult life spent serving our country, still as bonded as we were as small children, flung out to the wolves together before being saved. Minutes after I felt his leaving, a trembling in my chest like a released harp string, there and gone, the phone rang. It was Dad's next door neighbor and friend, letting me know he had passed, there in that minute I felt him. I could only lift one hand up from the steering wheel for a moment towards the sky, a toast in tears.
No regrets, no anger. From the very beginning we left it in His hands, one way or the other. That time comes for all of us where we cease to be, where "is" becomes "was", where those we love must weigh our empty body down under stone, as what we "are" is lifted up to Heaven. That wooden box that calls for all of us is too small to catch all of the memory of courage and love and so it spills out upon the ground to be gathered up like golden leaves. But that box is still big enough to be a shadow over what remains if we let it. We did not, enjoying every bit of love and laughter as was possible til the end.
Bless you all, who have been here for us. On this Easter Sunday, I will say a thanks for you, for the blessings I have, and a big brother who may not have been a saint, but was often my savior.
- Brigid
