March 11, 2020

Last week, after I posted Wednesday’s Words, I spent the rest of the morning trying to prepare myself for the day ahead. On February 29th, my brother, my only remaining sibling, passed away. Last Wednesday, March 4th , was the day of the “visitation”. There would be no funeral. There will be, later in the spring, a celebration of his life. But for this one day, there would be an afternoon and then an evening reception of family and friends.

Losing loved ones is the hardest thing we, as humans, have to endure. My entire life has been shaped by loss. When I was eight and a half years old, my father died. Until it happened, I don’t think I understood that the death of a parent was even a possibility. I had already been forced to be apart from my father, when he was in the hospital. He’d had a heart attack, and in those days—in the early 1960s—they didn’t allow children under the age of 12 in the hospital to visit. The best I got was to wave to him, from outside and several floors down.

That early loss shaped me, and the possibility of losing those I loved was like a silent, black cloud in the back of my psyche. Several months after my dad died, my mother had back spasms. This was something that I later learned happened to her from time to time, but it was something I’d never witnessed, something I hadn’t been aware of before. There was my mother, flat on her back on the sofa, in a great deal of pain.

I remember asking my big brother if she was going to die, too.

For years afterward, while I was growing up, if my mother was late coming home, the fear that she’d been in an accident and killed would bubble up. I couldn’t control that. Then, when I was twenty-one, she died suddenly, as she was relaxing in her bedroom. My parents both died young. My father was 47 and my mother 57. And I was a twenty-one year old wife, and mother…and an orphan.

I remember in those early years of adulthood, my brother shared with me the belief that he might live to be fifty, if he was very lucky, but not much more than that. After all, our paternal grandfather died at an early age, too, in his thirties. It seemed the logical assumption, and my brother was nothing if not logical.

Losing loved ones does not get easier with time. My brother was seventy-five when he passed, five months ahead of his 76th birthday. His name was Charles. His wife, and friends would call him either Charlie or Chuck. Mom always called him Charles, and yes, I did, too. He was named for both of our grandfathers, as both had shared the same first name.

He had the family sense of humor, and in his early to teen years, I was his favorite foil. The parades on Canada Day, he had asserted, were for him, as that was his birthday too. I believed it when I was four or five, because he was my big brother. He played a few pranks on me, and got a bit of a comeuppance twice, that I recall: the day that he told me to stay outside until I caught a bird. I did, releasing it into the house about ten minutes before our parents were due home. And the time he fashioned a noose beside my swing, and I, being a stupid nine-year-old child, tried to use it, thinking it had to be a trick and wasn’t any danger to me at all. I don’t know what mother did to punish him, but she saw the whole thing, so I’m guessing it was fierce.

We had a bond, a closer one than I ever shared with my sister. He suffered a stroke last June. He never fully regained his strength from that, though he was walking with a walker, and talking, and his mind was still sharp as a tack. And then he had another on February 16th—which was also the 105th anniversary of our father’s birth. It was a devastating stroke, and he never regained consciousness, though he was slightly responsive in the first few days that followed. While visiting with him, I spoke to him, and I stroked his hand. He reached out and closed his hand over mine.

No, losing loved ones does not get easier with practice. But it does bring you to a sense of inevitability, and for me, it’s brought me to a place where I can achieve some perspective and some peace. My faith tells me this life is not all. It’s not even most. For the here and now, I tell you truly that we would never really know joy in our lives, if we did not first know sorrow.

And as long as I can keep the memories alive in my mind and in my heart, it really isn’t a case of goodbye forever.

It’s till we meet again.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury