D and I were cleaning all day, so we decided to treat ourselves to a nice, relaxing dinner out. After working and sweating all day, it felt great to shower and get all gussied up for my man. However, on the way to the restaurant, I was recounting the very odd dreams I had last night to D. Other than one of me setting off a toilet bomb with my pregnant student teaching host teacher, I had one about my late brother, A, and woke from that dream crying. It seems so strange to say it, but yes, I was actually crying when I woke up. Tears in my eyes, streaming onto my temples and nestling into my hair. Of course I wasn't sobbing or hiccuping like one does during a hard cry, it was more like the silent type of cry where just a few tears stream down your face and then you regain control. I woke this way in the wee hours of the morning, so after wiping away the tears, readjusting my pillow, and hoping for a happier dream, I fell right into a dreamless sleep.
As strange as this sounds, this is not the first time I've woken up crying. Most every time I dream of my brother, I'm crying in my dreams because I miss him or I've lost him again and when I wake up, the tears are real. I've never experienced pain like this loss before and think it speaks volumes about how badly I miss him that the pain in my dreams can become a reality before I even open my eyes.
Needless to say, my weepy ways ruined our dinner plans. D sped by the restaurant and took me home to watch old home movies where I could hear my brother's laugh until I cried out what seemed to be every ounce of water in my body (yet I'm still crying as I write this). He took care of me, even though there was next to nothing he could do for this type of pain. I know it always throws him off when I get upset about my brother because he's a fixer and there's nothing he can do to fix this pain for me. Still, he did a great job, collaring me so I wouldn't have to worry about anything else tonight, holding me, and setting me about the cathartic journey of writing out my sadness of the loss of A.
A died almost four years ago and I still get this way sometimes. I have accepted his death and moved on (after a year of depression and therapy), but I still think of him every day. Most are happy memories or just a reminder of his inspirational spirit, but every once in a while the pain of his loss rips through me like a tidal wave I never saw coming. I guess the memory of my pain this morning triggered what should have happened immediately because I lost it. I torture myself with the fact that I'll never see him again, that he won't be there when D and I get married, and that my future children will only hear stories about him.
My brother had a degenerative muscle disease, and it was only a matter of time before his lungs or heart stopped working. When he went into the hospital for a hip replacement after a freak accident that caused him to slip out of his wheel chair and break his hip, his weakened lungs never recovered from the anesthesia. He developed pneumonia and was on life support for 10 days. He was heavily sedated most of the time, but we were able to wake him up once in a while to talk to him before the drugs pulled him once more into oblivion. I apologized to him for the two things I did to him in our childhood that I truly regret. He smiled...I think that was his way of saying that I was crazy for even remembering it, let alone apologizing for it. But I needed to tell him. Still, those incidents plague me and I am ashamed of the way I treated him at those times.
A had a living will, but my father was fighting the doctors to keep him going, praying for a recovery. When they finally said there was nothing more they could do and his condition was declining, we decided it was time for A to take control of his fate. My father, mother, sister, and I piled into the room and my dad gently shook A out of sedation. He opened his eyes and looked at all of us with a haunting emptiness. "A," my father asked, with tears in his eyes, "do you want to keep fighting?" He closed his eyes and slowly, yet unmistakably, shook his head "no". The tears that were streaming at that point came more freely after that because we all knew it was over. We looked back and forth to each other, seeing our own pain reflected in each others faces. With his eyes still closed, A opened his arms to us, an embrace his silent and final goodbye.
I was with him while he died...an experience I will never, ever forget. I wanted him to pass knowing how much we all loved him. I don't think I've ever prayed so hard for a miracle. And I'll never forget seeing one of the young nurses crying for us as we exited the room after he took his last breath.
I know my horomones are making me overly emotional right now and that's why I'm extra weepy. In a week or so perhaps I'll write a hilarious story about A (which I have tons of), but this needed to be written. I have been wanting to write a novel about A's life for the longest time, and maybe this is just the beginning, even though it was the end. Still, the end is not really the end, because A will live forever in my heart.
AJC - 01/25/84 - 07/25/08
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