by Thomas White
The light shining through the stained-glass windows refracted a barrage of color, slicing down from a multitude of angles, dissecting the chapel into segments. I categorized each segment as a separate era of my life: blue, when I was a child at church; mixed with yellow, when I was a blushing bride standing next to the man I thought I would love forever; mixed with green- a vibrant green that reminded me of the lawns where my children ran after we escaped from church.
And now, a different color, I can’t quite quantify it, but it is the light that illuminates the casket sitting in front of me.
A family friend is playing the acoustic guitar softly off to the side. His sorrow rings out as each note lovingly says goodbye to his friend. People are filling the little chapel, each with a look of disbelief painfully etched on their faces. They avoid eye contact, knowing there is nothing they can say.
My brother, Aaron, has died. It wasn’t a sudden death, it wasn’t an unexpected death, but it was a real death.
The fact that he would die has been surreal to me for the longest time. Not until the fourth year of his illness did I consider it possible. I’m not really sure what made me accept the inevitable, and to be honest, I can’t say that, as of yet, I have. I still reach for the phone to call him and expect to hear that laugh bouncing off the satellites and brightening my day.
He deteriorated over time, as the disease ate away at him, bit by bit, robbing him of his vitality. He lost his ability to walk because of the tumors on his spine. His skin went pasty, nearly transparent, and his veins would gesticulate when he talked, as though the bass section of his life was underscoring his speech. Each time I saw him, I had to remind myself of who he was. I had to remember that the way he looked did not alter the person he had always been.
Until then, I had never considered his death a possibility. I have been alive these forty-four years, and I have seen some things. I am not without experience; I’ve been married twice; I’ve experienced childbirth, three times; I’ve become a grandmother; I survived my parent’s house. And yet with all this life experience, I had never considered the reality that one day I would no longer find my little brother anywhere on the face of the planet. I had never thought that I could travel all over the globe and not find him alive, anywhere. I would never hear him laugh, listen to him sing, or hear him comfort me from afar.
He would be gone, forever.
The finality of that phase seems inadequate. There should be a better word to describe the loss, the pain, the void, a word that is more menacing than ‘forever’. ‘Forever’ reminds me of the fairy tales where they lived happily ever after; ‘forever’- always a pleasant connotation, never a foreboding one.
Death is a very uncomfortable topic, I realize. People don’t like to talk about death and dying. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote a series of excellent books on the subject, and the only people who ever bought them were those who knew their death was imminent. You’d think that would put her on top of the best-seller list wouldn’t you? After all, everyone dies, yet I don’t recall her name atop the L.A. Times book section. “Kubler-Ross at #1 for 159th straight month!” She had the misfortune to offer a lot of helpful advice on a topic that no one wants to discuss.
Death is unlike any other ‘first’ that we ever experience. We have our first school bus ride, our first day of high school, our first dance, first crush, first kiss, as we practice making our way through the mystery of life, critiquing ourselves without mercy along the way. We find that perfect mate, our first time. Our first marriage, which leads to our first child, and the angst we live with from then on. We then live our lives mulling over our mistakes and seeking redemption from ourselves for our ineptitude.
And we find the means to do it time and time again. Tomorrow is another day! The sun will come up tomorrow. If at first we don’t succeed, then we try, try again. Always a second chance to succeed.
But death is different. Death is a one-time deal. There is no rehearsal and there is no choice. It comes fast, slow, painfully, easily, brutally, silently, or mercifully. Regardless, it’s still death, and there is no second chance.
Five and a half years ago, my phone rang. It was Aaron, my little brother, the one saving grace in a family that redefined the term ‘dysfunctional’, calling to give me the news. My little brother, the only member of my family who laughed regularly, made me understand that the rest of the world was different from us, and that made me know that it was okay to be ‘normal’ and leave them all behind. My little brother called and told me he was sick.
To be honest, I’ve always had a bit of a problem with that ‘little brother’ stuff. My husband always told me it was like Fredo in The Godfather, “You’re my little brother, Mikey. I’m supposed to take care of you!” That made me laugh. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Aaron was the sage. Aaron was the one who understood, on the simplest level, what was happening at our dinner table. He made it all bearable.
I remember distinctly an afternoon growing up in the Bay Area of Northern California; Aaron was thirteen and had just hit two home runs in the Mendocino American Legion playoffs. The second one had won the game and they advanced to the semi-finals. When the game was over and all the cheering, high-fiving, and backslapping had slowed, Aaron heard a horn bellowing from the parking lot. Looking over, he saw our mother gesturing to him from behind the wheel of her ten-year-old Chevy Nova, urging him to hurry up. Not wanting to upset her, Aaron grabbed his gear and ran to the car. When he got in, he said, “How cool was that? Did you see how far that ball went? I can’t believe I hit a walk-off homer in a playoff game!” He was so very excited, the way only a thirteen-year-old jock could be. His long brown hair bounced under his green baseball cap as he smacked his fist into his mitt, too excited to sit still. Our mother, with her mousy hair and her extra thirty pounds, looking like Judi Dench after a horrific bender, backed out of the parking spot and, not bothering to look at him, said with unveiled excitement, “Whatever. There was a sale on eye shadow and mascara at K-Mart, so I went there right as you started.” And she drove Aaron home, not only having missed his moment of triumph for the futility of beauty, but missing the opportunity to experience it with him a second time.
When they got home, he told me all about the game, his five at-bats, his three hits, his game-winning home run. I could see him at the plate as he talked me through each pitch. An inside slider that he almost swung on, a called strike that he swore was low, and a curveball that seemed to hang there for an hour, so he plugged it into the big kids game on the diamond across the park. I was thrilled for him and wished that cheerleading practice hadn’t kept me from going. I was genuinely bummed because I had only missed two games all season, and one of them was that playoff game where my little brother was the star!
Then he told me what our mom had done. It was so typical. I started screaming that she was just a bitch and that she had never cared about anything any of us did; it was always about her. Then he stopped me. He reached out his hand, took my wrist, and made me sit down. Then, my little brother said the most incredible thing to me. He said, “Michelle, you can’t expect her to react the way a normal person would react. That’s not who she is. You have to accept her for the way she is, not the way you want her to be.”
So there I was, sitting on the floor of my little brother’s room, a kid who I was supposed to hate at this point in my life, him being the caricatured, annoying little brother, and it hit me.
He was different. He was rising above the cold, aloof environment that my parents had created, while I wallowed in it, responding to each and every slight with a vengeance.
I’ve always reacted emotionally to most situations. My first reaction to most of the circumstances I find myself in is an outburst of one kind or another. It’s either extreme joy or extreme anger, never anything in between, always dramatic and intense.
Aaron understood those situations for what they were. I never saw that far into them. I championed our self-centered and heartless mother as an excuse for my life. Aaron barely noticed and did what he felt was best for himself, unaffected by her indifference. He could process these things and I couldn’t. If I were involved, it had to be dramatic. In my life, it was never enough for a man to say ‘I love you.’ He had to say, “I love you … despite the fact that your ass is too big, your tits are too small, you talk too much, and you are so much smarter than me.” I had to attach drama.
I was blessed with an above-average intelligence and cursed with a totally dysfunctional family. In matters of school and intellect, I did well. Okay, I’m being modest, I-am–a-stinking-genius! I graduated #1 in my class by a large margin and received scholarship offers to fifteen different schools. I chose Stanford and would have graduated a year early and had several doctorates by now if not for my inability to process life. Looking at a calculus problem of any magnitude never phased me, yet talking to my mother left me frustrated, infuriated, and most times, crying. Unfortunately, that trait crossed over into my relationships with men. I was smarter, tougher, and more motivated than anyone I had ever dated, and yet, I was also incurably subservient, ridiculously insecure, and constantly begging for attention. Why?
Why do you think? My mother.
At least it’s easy to blame it on her.
So, being the rebel that I was, I got pregnant at seventeen (that showed her!), married and a mom, at eighteen. I was out of school, and instead of dissecting calculus problems with the finest minds on the West Coast, I was breastfeeding and trying to make dinner for a husband who was no more ready to be married than I was.
We moved from Palo Alto back to my parent’s house, because my new husband, Bob, was trying to start a business. It made sense for us to live with them while we went through this transition. It would be silly to be nonsensical at this point, wouldn’t it? They would be around to help with the baby, help with our financial support, and criticize everything that we did—home sweet home.
Looking back, I guess I was just so scared about the baby, my marriage, and myself that I didn’t want to leave the house. Being in a familiar environment helped me to work through what I had let happen to me. Better the devil I know than the devil I don’t, I always say. Actually, it was my mother who always says that, but that’s not the point. And, of course, Aaron was there as well.
Aaron. What would he have said had he been here? What would he have sung? He’d started to perform in high school. He was a natural. He could sing, mimic, and had a great sense of comic timing. Whenever there was a get-together of any kind, Aaron inevitably got up and told jokes, sang, or just made people laugh with his mere presence.
He would sing to my daughter, Connie, whenever she would cry. The memory of him holding her in his lap, singing “How Deep Is Your Love?” is one that I will relish forever. Hmm, there’s that word again. Forever. Even attached to a pleasant memory, it has a vile connotation for me because he will never sing to Connie again. He won’t sing at her birthday, at her wedding, and he won’t be singing to her child, my grandchild, ever again. But forever I will see him holding my little girl, the love in his eyes glowing like a beacon, singing Bee Gees songs until she falls asleep.
When he was young, Aaron was always running somewhere. He had sports practice or rehearsal of some kind, perpetually. Baseball, football, basketball, soccer, he played them all. And then, the theatre! Rehearsal after rehearsal, no one could keep up with him.
It was that same determination, the same obstinate persistence, that kept him living as long as he did.
When his diagnosis was first confirmed, I cried for two days. His wife, Christy, went cold and launched a worldwide internet search for the potion she believed would cure him. But Aaron, he just took a deep breath and said it was time to figure out how to beat this thing. He was the one who got on the phone and called his closest friends. He talked with each of the many people he loved and explained the medical facts and what he intended to do.
David, his closest friend, told me afterwards that when Aaron called, he sounded almost as if he had to go to traffic school. Dave did the best impression of Aaron, “Now look, Dave, I don’t know any other way to say this, so I am just going to come right out with it, I have to go to traffic school. Now, based on what we’ve learned, I have anywhere from three to five years, but I can tell you now: I’ll beat that ticket. I was only three miles an hour over the speed limit, and they can just go to hell”.
That made me laugh.
Aaron and Dave, Dave and Aaron, they were quite a pair.
David made me laugh through the entire ordeal. I think it was because it was easier for him to laugh than face the truth that his friend was going to die. Who could blame him?
And I’m not one to knock it; between him and Aaron, the laughs made it so that sometimes I was able to forget that my little brother was sick. Before Aaron was too weak, he and Christy met David and his wife, Shawn, in the Napa Valley wine country for a weekend. They were only a few miles from us, so we joined them for a day of wine tasting. After several stops, I come back from the bar carrying six glasses of red wine. As I passed them around, I said, “I’ve lost track of which glass is which. I don’t suppose it matters; we’re all friends here.”
Never missing an opportunity, David took a tiny sip, squished up his face like he just ate earwax, and said, “Who has the melanoma?” Aaron had cabernet coming out of his nose.
David, of all of my brother’s friends, was his closest. A surrogate brother, Christy always used to say. “David makes up for the brother he really has.” (Our real brother is a much more involved story, and we will skip it for now. Suffice it to say that where Aaron had escaped and I had fought back, Adam was sucked into the vortex that was my parent’s fantasy world.) When Aaron and Dave were in the same room, there was a constant stream of comedy. As an audience, we never knew where to look.
The funny thing was that they were not really alike. They were, however, perfectly matched, like any great team throughout history. They accentuated each other’s strengths and compensated for their faults. Dave was five years older than Aaron, just a year older than me. They had met when Dave cast Aaron in a show years earlier. From my understanding, it was love at first sight.
Dave saw the world differently from Aaron. Aaron was loud and boisterous and tremendously extroverted, as was Dave in certain circumstances, but he didn’t have Aaron’s talent. He couldn’t get up and stop the room with a rendition of ‘Danny Boy,’ and he was rarely seen stopping strangers on the street and engaging in conversation. He was a tougher nut to crack. Anyone could get to Aaron, and he made friends wherever he went. David was not quite the same; you had to seek him out. However, if you did, you took to him in exactly the same way.
Of the many odd things that happened when Aaron got sick, the one I was most grateful for was that Dave and I became friends. Aaron was an oxymoron in terms of terminal illness. Most times, when someone becomes terminally ill, people disappear from their lives; they run for the hills until it’s all over. Once it’s over, then the throngs appear, from well-denied hiding places, their scrawny necks popping out of their holes to be sure the contagion is gone. They show up at the memorial service and cry and mourn as though they never had the opportunity to enjoy the deceased while they were alive.
Aaron’s friends were different. They hung around all the time; they planned parties, set up poker games, and were constantly taking him places and doing things for both Aaron and Christy. Aaron made friends after he got sick, he didn’t lose a single one.
Dave had lived near Aaron and Christy for many years, but moved his family to the Pacific Northwest several years earlier. They’d been gone for almost two years when he got the call from Aaron. It was tough on him being so far away, and he made a concerted effort to spend as much time with him as he could, often sleeping on their lumpy couch while I took the spare bedroom with the fold-out sofa. It was during these times that we started to talk.
The last eighteen months of Aaron’s illness would often send him to bed early and Christy would go along to help. While she was downstairs, Dave and I would watch movies, talk about the world, Aaron, some sports and Aaron. I was always surprised to hear a family story that Aaron had told him, repeated to me. It gave me tremendous insight into how Aaron really felt outside the family structure. And, to be honest, I’m not dead; he wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Not that I would have ever done anything about it, but it was fun to have a little flirtation at that time in my life. My husband, Bill, is a great guy. I love him very much, and he thinks as much of Dave as I do. Dave’s wife, Shawn, is the best, a neurologist who helped Aaron so very much in the final months. Dave is madly in love with her, as are we all. So, NO, nothing ever happened. But when your brother is downstairs dying, and there are empty Chinese food containers and wine bottles in front of you, you sometimes need a harmless fantasy while someone rubs your feet.
Through the final months, we all turned to Dave at one time or another. He and his family drove all the way from Washington to be with Aaron for what we all knew would be his last Christmas. There were snowstorms and a flood, and two kids, and the combination transformed into a great story on his arrival. Shawn spent most of the day with Aaron, massaging and stretching him in ways none of us would have dreamt of, and it took away the pain for a little while. That was all anyone could ask for at that time. It helps to have a doctor in the house. Dave’s two daughters, who looked at Aaron as their best friend, both wrote cards and sang songs for him.
Dave and Shawn had only been home a few days when Aaron passed. He was the first one we called.
Dave flew back the next day, offering to help in any way that he could. Of course, my entire family was there, for the first time, together, and he wasn’t prepared for that reality.
I tell people repeatedly, and they believe that they’re ready for the disaster that is my family, but until the wind breaks and sends its foul stench all over the room, you just don’t know.
I have no intention of this becoming about my parents, but let me just say that my mother has only gotten worse over time, and I resent my father for putting up with her. While their youngest son was at a funeral home and they were draining the blood from his body, replacing it with embalming fluid, my father was talking income tax stories with Aaron’s friend, Mac, and my mother was singing under her breath as she did the dishes.
Christy, well, Christy was doing the best that she could. I had lost my brother, but she had lost her light. She stayed in her room from the moment he passed until she heard that Dave had arrived. She came upstairs, stoic and prepared to do business, which was the only way she could survive. She kissed Dave hello, sat him down, and asked him to stage manage Aaron’s funeral. She laid out what she would like to happen and said, “Can you do this? You stage-managed my wedding, so I guess you’re the only man for the job.”
I could see Dave’s eyes fill with tears. He just said, “Done. Not to worry.”
And it was, and I don’t know how. Two days later, there was a video setup, an audio setup, and everyone in the right place at the right time. All Dave said afterwards was, “Hey, it’s what I do.”
Dave spoke at the service and spoke for all of us. He spoke not only about the Aaron everybody knew, but also about the Aaron that the few of us knew. He talked about his soul, his sensitivity, and his deep love for his wife and his friends. It touched Christy and me deeply. I could never thank him enough for that.
About four months prior to Aaron’s death, I had an idea. I thought it would be great if all of Aaron’s best friends got a tattoo commemorating him. I knew it would be something that Aaron would love, the ham that he was, and I thought it would be a great way for us to remember him. That afternoon, Mac, one of Aaron’s many close friends, and I snuck off to the Devil’s Den Tattoo and Piercing Parlor and had tattoos painfully applied to our right buttocks. Mine was just below the hip and beneath the critical part, under the bikini line, I guess, would be an appropriate description, but I can tell you that is irrelevant, as my bikini days are long past. There was a poker game that night, and I could hardly wait to show my brother how much I loved him and how much we all loved him. We had decided to unveil our backsides just before the game started.
As the players started to gather around the table, I stood up, with Mac at my side, and dropped the right side of my pants, showing my brother my new tattoo. Mac followed suit, and everyone roared. Aaron loved it, and everyone wanted a closer look. (I assure you that it was the tattoo they were looking at, not my middle-aged, saggy ass.) As the excitement faded, I saw a look on Dave’s face and realized he wasn’t quite thrilled with the whole event. I questioned him about it, and he said, in a very dejected voice. “I can’t believe you did that without me.”
He wasn’t mad; Dave was hurt.
The next day, Christy and Dave, after a few shots of tequila, headed out and came back a few hours later with the tattoo: a green shamrock with the letter ‘A’ emblazoned in red in the center. Dave had his on his ass, Christy on her ankle.
By the time Aaron had passed, eight people had entered the Shamrock Society. My youngest daughter went a bit overboard and had the shamrock enlarged to the size of a tennis ball. The rest of us opted for a more reasonable size, about two inches in diameter. The shading on some is different, but they are basically identical —a green, three-leaf shamrock with a capital ‘A’ rendered in red in the center—a tribute to my brother and his love for Notre Dame football.
Christy insisted that we all gather up front and show our tattoos at the service. My God! I had to change my dress plans immediately and switch to a pantsuit. No way was I hiking my skirt up over my ass in front of a congregation of mourners. The day was tough enough.
The chapel is now empty. The service concluded, and everyone moved to the gravesite. I chose not to add that to my memories of this day.
The sun has moved across the sky, and now it passes through the stained glass at the back of the chapel. The light still dissects the segments of my life, but now it has a new color: red. The red that represents my eyes as they well up at the thought of the day. The reality that this has happened, it has really, truly, happened, deadens me. I can’t move. I am having trouble breathing. I have no idea how I will get through this, but I know that I have no choice.
Aaron, I love you. I always will. You have made my life something I can enjoy. You taught me how to move on, how to forgive, and how to truly love. You will be missed every day.
( A side note to this story. About a week later, I was in an airport on my way to visit my mother. As I was sitting at the bar, in one of the lounges, I was regretting my decision to visit with my mom. I really didn’t want to deal with her just yet, but felt that it was something I should do. I was just about to change my mind when I heard Aaron’s voice yelling at me. Literally, he screamed, “Why are you just sitting there?” It was so vivid, so real, I jumped in my seat. Looking around, I saw a TV right above my head. Before Aaron had gotten sick, he’d shot a commercial for an insurance company. His commercial was on the T. My baby brother was screaming the tag line of the commercial, “Why are you just sitting there?” I have to admit, it scared the crap out of me. Needless to say, I went to see my mother.)