18 years later

Don’t forget to take a look at The Clock Would Drop, and our new blog Traverse Bay Rocks.  The following is a kind of look back on my brother’s death, 18 years later.

Dear Ryan:

I would imagine you’ve dealt with many clients who suffered a loss, maybe a sudden loss like mine, or after a long illness like others.  Which is worse for the one who dies?  For the one’s who survive?   Brandy’s last words, after his fourth attempt to get up on water skies were:  “Let’s go!”   Then he died, within a heartbeat or two, the doctors said.

I arrived here yesterday afternoon, quiet, warm, and breezy, the bay blue with choppy white caps.  You never know with the bay:  some times it’s various shades of slate-grey and flat calm, like it is this at this time in morning.  Other times it’s choppy and almost green, or deep blue half way across, then aqua green the rest of the way; it depends on the time of day and position of the sun, whether it’s clear or overcast, raining lightly or storming wildly.

It’s 6 am, now, and I have time.  My brother, Brandy’s time was short, though it didn’t take much for him to die, and even less to dispose him.  I’d gone out to the deck this morning, which hangs slightly over a weedy and fern-filled ravine, grown even weedier and more fern-filled since the place has gone to seed, since my parents last came here six years ago.  I sat under one of the patio umbrellas to smoke a cigarette because it’s raining.   After my brother died, I had dreams.  I dreamed that we left him lying in that ravine, through the fall and winter, all alone.  He lay covered with dead, wet leaves from last fall and newly sprouted green ferns from the spring.   Oddly, though, he was made of clay, like an unglazed gray sculpture or statue, my brother turned to stone.

In this dream my father and sister were sitting on the deck in the one place warmed by sunlight, gazing out at the vast blue body of water.  I looked over at my father, stunned.  What was Brandy still doing here?  I alternately looked down at my stone brother, then my father, who sat staring out into the distance.

“Shouldn’t we get rid of him now?” I asked.

“You think so?”

Yes, I had thought– it was about time.  I walked back into the cabin to get a garbage bag, where my mother was cooking up the ground beef that we never had the chance to eat the day before.  But it wasn’t the day before.  He died the year before.

When I’d returned the deck, trash bag in hand, my brother transformed.  He was now lying there dead, wearing wet swimming trunk, his hair flattened and soaked on his scalp after waterskiing, his eyes half mast, but he was beautiful.

My sister had dreams too.  In her dream, she spent an entire day carrying his dead and rotting corpse around.  He was heavy, she had said, his head would flop against her cheek and she’d have to push it aside because he smelled so bad.  Finally she put him in the backseat of the car.  She wanted to take him home.  She struggled to carry him out to the car, she said, his arms and legs were all wrong, on backward and folded weird.   But she shoved him in anyway, all screwed up, and headed out down the lane.

I chased after him in one dream, after Emily was born.  He was walking away from me, and   wanted him to stop, to turn around and see my baby:  “Look Brandy; see my baby?  It’s Emily?  Do you see her?”  He stopped, finally, and turned around to look.  He smiled and nodded.  He approved.

Brandy only saw Esther twice, in his time, when she was very little.  He played a lullaby on his guitar for her the night before he died, then set his guitar aside and fell asleep in his chair before I even tucked her in.  He was high strung that week, tired.  He used to like to watch Esther play and often played with her, that is, the two summers he saw her, at two and three years old.  Though he placed his hand on my belly to feel her move, he missed my Emily altogether.

“No one told me you were pregnant again!” he said surprised when he arrived for this holiday, maybe pleased, maybe worried:  “He had worried,” my sister said later.  “He thought you were trying to save your marriage.”   It was true, not my wanting to save it, but wanting to pretend all was well; I wanted to move forward with my own family.

Truth is Brandy and I were not that close growing up, so likely he didn’t worry so much; more likely just observation.  My sister and I were close; my three brothers were close to each other, all one year apart, all in a rock and roll band together in LA.  They had dreams of rock stardom.

But as adults we had come to enjoy our summer visits.  Brandy was always game to do something, go golfing, play board games, go to the beach, or a flee market, play outdoor games with the kids.

As years went by, I would dream he’d come back to life:  he’d show up at a party and we’d learn we got it all wrong.   He never died; it was a joke.  He would laugh, like he always did “Bah!  Ha, ha, ha!  Don’t be ridiculous!”  Or, I’d go to some party and look for him and he’d be nowhere to be found.

He never suffered; not one bit. It’s possible he felt that burning or crushing pain in his chest, but if he was unconscious within a heartbeat, that pain would never have registered anyway.  You know, they (the infamous “they”) say car accident victims, or those who’ve been hit in the head and knocked out have no memory of it.  It takes a few seconds or more, “they” say, for an event such as that to be stored in short term memory, in the hard drive of your brain.  If you get knocked unconscious before storage, it doesn’t make it there at all.  And of course, if one dies, it doesn’t make it there at all.

It matters that we know he didn’t suffer.   He skied his way out, fell down and out of life.  But I had no clue where he went and no idea where to put him.  The last I saw him he waded out into the shallow water in his swimming trunks and t-shirt to the speed boat and climbed in.  Off they went.

If you had been my therapist back then, how would you, a Christian counselor have helped me, an atheistic-like client?  What would you have said to me back then?  How would you have helped me put him somewhere? Because, even though he didn’t suffer, the rest of us sure did.  It was careless of him to do this to us.  He was that way, though, living life with no forethought for what would come next.  It wasn’t that he didn’t care.  He wasn’t even rebellious, just oblivious to mundane concerns like thinking things through.  He just lived.

His death was our common experience.  We all had dreams; sometimes we talked about them.  But my mother saw him, the first days and weeks following his death.  He followed her around the cabin, smiling as though to tell her everything was okay.  She didn’t believe in God or spirits or life after death, but there he was, “as clear as I can see you now,” she had said.   A common experience I hear.  Have you been told this by others?  No wonder people believe in life after death, but someone like me might wonder where that life exists.  Back then, he was lost to me, vanished in thin air. But for my mother, he hung around for days, even weeks, standing in the kitchen behind her while she cooked ground beef, while she ran wildly around the cottage dusting and cleaning; He followed her to the clothes-line while she hung the clothes on the line, and stood in the doorway when she laid down on our porch swing to rest.

“What did he look like?” I’d asked her.

“Same as he did before he died–wearing blue jeans and his black leather jacket.  He was smiling,” she said.  “He seemed to want me to know everything was okay.  It was very comforting.”

My good friend, Hugh, a devout Catholic had said, “Oh, you can be sure he made an appearance.”  But Mom dismissed his appearances as illusions, caused by an overwhelming grief, and most likely that’s true.  However, an appearance is an appearance, isn’t it?  Whether a spirit in one’s head or in actuality–what’s the difference?  Perhaps you know.  My mother was not religious.  She was anti-religious.  She often said after Brandy’s death:  “When you’re gone, you’re gone.”  Yet there he was for her.  I was jealous, and all the next summer I looked for him high and low, around the cabin, on the beach, down the lane.  I sometimes strained my eyes to see him, but he was lost, long gone.  I guess only mothers can see their dead sons.

I tell you, there was nothing weirder than Brandy’s being dead, and for the longest time it was hard to grasp.  My mother and father believed a quick disposal of remains was best—no coffin or burial, no grave or marker, no funeral, no ritual of any kind.  They even turned away the flowers delivered to our door.  They couldn’t accept the flowers.   Too funereal, I suppose.  I did not disagree with their wishes–after all, I was numb and trusted and respected my parents’ decisions.  Still do.  And this was their son, their call.

My dreams gave troubled me.  My obsession over what became of him troubled me.  I researched Marfans Syndrome:  a connective tissue disorder, affecting especially the main artery leaving the heart, the aorta.

I read the autopsy report:

. . . .  Rigor Mortis present; head symmetric; eyes, corneal donation carried out as requested.

Facies symmetric; nose unremarkable; neck unremarkable; chest slight pectus excavation.

Internal Examination:  liver weight 260 grams; pancreas 250 grams; testes right: sperm present, descended bilaterally.  The right testes is removed and sampled.

Heart:  sampled aorta bears evident recent hemorrhage on advential surface; elastic stain reveals diminished and irregular fibers.

Final Anatomic diagnosis:  dissecting aneurysm thoracic aorta with rupture, pericardial hemorrhage and tamponade. . . .

The letter which accompanied this reported a two centimeter tear in his aorta, right next to the heart.  When it ripped, it filled the pericardial sac and choked off his heart.

I read the funeral home billing statement:  Transportation from Munson Medical Center to the American Crematory in Gaylord: $400.  Crematory requires container.  Corrugated Pine Box:  $400.   Crematory fee:  $1000.

I read his death certificate; I read all the songs he’d written in his notebook, pages and pages of song with pages on pieces of paper inserted– a huge mess of songs.  I listened to his songs on cassette tape.  I studied anything I could get my hands on to make sense of why he died and, hopefully, where he went.

But where he went, I had no clue.  Why he died?  It was simple.  Brandy’s aorta ripped like worn fabric, a time-bomb he carried with him all his weird life, on his fourth attempt to get up on those water skis on Lake Bellaire.

The days before he died, he tried to feel the baby flip and kick in my belly. Whenever I felt her move, I grabbed his hand and held it there.  It would be nice if I had a clear memory of him feeling her inside me, because it’s as close to Emily as he would ever get.   She was born in December toward the end of that year, on my parents wedding anniversary:  Dec 18, 1992.   I was granted a reprieve, then, a break from the deep grieving that weighed more than she did, so heavy during those last months.  Her birth re-lighted the world again.

Last summer of 09, a bunch of us returned to Ken and Sandy’s on Lake Bellaire for a family gathering, the first time since Brandy’s death–everyone but my parents.  My mother is in a nursing home now with advanced dementia; my father stays close to home to feed her three times each day.  It had been 17 years. Emily was 16, to turn 17 the following December.  She was with me that day.

That’s what the day of Brandy’s death was:  a family gathering:  Ken and Sandy had them every year when we all came home, several years of boating and barbecuing for a day.  After Brandy’s death, the ritual stopped, though my parents did visit once after his death.  Sandy was concerned about extending invitations in years following, afraid the memories would be too painful.  She was right for the most part.

But last summer I returned to “the scene” for the first time.  Ken still had the same boat, the same one that pulled Brandy, or tried to, on skis (he kept falling down the minute he was up), the same one where he laid so they could perform CPR.

Here’s a cliché phrase:  August 6, 1992 is a day I will never forget.  the sounds of things especially:  the sound of that boat racing back toward shore.

When that boat came racing back, the tow rope was left trailing, skipping wildly and weirdly along the surface of the lake.  On shore, we wondered, each to ourselves, why.  It was strange, the way everyone was waving their arms over head;  they were yelling,  maybe screaming, but we couldn’t hear.  The only sound was the boat jetting full throttle over the water, not slowing for one second.

“He’s going to slam that thing into the shoreline,” I remember thinking, and then noticed his teenage daughter, floating lazily in her bikini on an inflatable raft just off shore.  “He’s going to run into her!  He’s going to run right into her! What is he doing?”

The sound of silence:  when the engines cut.  One second, maybe less.

The sound of the shout, like a scream, a shout that would repeat without warning in my head for years to come:  “Call 911!  Now!”

The sounds of other things:  the boat’s engines scraping the bottom along the rocks and sand, because Ken had sped fast and too hard, way too close to the shore.  He failed to lift the engines, and a dull, audible under-water crunching sound stretched into the next second and a half.

A slightly different, distant sound:  all the children in the boat were crying.  I noticed a few clouds drifting peacefully over head, as though the first shout didn’t quite register.  Then a repeat, loud and clear on a sunny day:   “Call 911!”

The worst sound:  my mother began to wail. I’d a never heard anything like it in my life, never before or since, a god-awful wailing cry, and she knew.  How she knew, I don’t know:   “Oh my God, is he dead?”  She sobbed and choked and wailed. “Oh my God, he’s dead isn’t he?”  And even as she prophesied in mournful wails, I didn’t yet know what happened, but since I could see everyone but Brandy, I figured it.

My father whimpered:  “Oh my God!” his voice breaking, his arms to the sky.  He waded out into the water to his already dead son.

Last summer I returned for the first time.  It was then I realized I had gotten in wrong.  I had previous recalled the helicopter landing in the front yard, propeller whirring and chirping. “Get him outta the boat,” paramedics shouted.   “We can’t work on him in there!”  I’d seen so many “Rescue 911” shows I figured they’d easily save his life.  In fact, Bethy said at that moment, “Don’t worry.  They’ll jump start him.”  Her arms were around my mother’s shoulder.  “They do it all the time.”

I’d had it wrong.  Last year when I saw his front yard for the first time again, I realized it was too small, only a bit of yard before the lake, a grassy lawn that immediately dropped off into the shallow inland lake.  The helicopter could not have landed there.  I mentioned this to Ken “It didn’t,” he said. “It landed in the neighbor’s yard, over there,” and he pointed to the right, just south of his own yard, the neighbor’s yard was some bit of distance off, on the other side of a row of shrubs.  In my memory, all these years, the helicopter had landed in Ken’s front yard.  Ken’s boat was the same, and in the same place:  anchored just off shore in the distance.  That was almost too right.  The helicopter landing was wrong.

So, last summer, we went for a boat ride again, same boat, something I’d looked forward to all day, a great little speed boat with lots of seating:   in the back, on the bow, along both sides.  Ken kicked it into high gear, we sped off, the front end lifting while the back end dropped, leaving a powerful wake behind us.  I could see Emily was nervous.  Ken noticed this too, slowed it down, and said to her:  “You go ahead and drive it.”  A bit apprehensively, she took Ken’s seat behind the wheel.  It worked.  Her anxiety was cured by her taking control.  My brother Lindy said later that he’d wanted for years to ask Ken if he could drive that boat, how miffed he was that Emily had her chance and not him.

Ken instructed her to push the lever up, and off she went in high gear to the far end of Lake Bellaire.  She slowed down as we near the opposite side of the lake, where she circled it steadily in a big arc, turning us back.

It was all so fitting:  to see the baby in my belly the day my brother died, return to the same place and steer that same boat.  We’d, in some way, come full circle.  It seemed right to me.

Ken returned to the wheel and cruised quietly.  I had a million questions:  “Where did it happen?  Where in the boat did you lie him down?”  He steered us to the place where Brandy had fallen, where he remained face down in the water.  They thought he was joking.  Then his life vest forced him upright (which apparently they are designed to do).  He flipped up, his head rising and falling back.  Lindy jumped in the water first, but Ken steered closer, jumped in himself and got to Brandy first.  I’d never known these details.

After the shout, after the sounds of my mother’s wailing and children’s soft crying, Sandy bolted for the phone, attempting to open the sliding screen door, which she ultimately ripped off the frame when it stuck.  I followed her, heart pounding, not quite knowing what to do. She spoke urgently into the phone, and I looked out the window.  That’s when I saw, out the window, Ken pushing, pumping on Brandy hidden from view below the rim of the boat, alternating dipping his own head below the rim to give mouth to mouth and then up again to continue pumping.  That was the moment I became heart-sickeningly scared, literally shitless.  I didn’t know if he was injured and bleeding.  I didn’t know if he had drowned.  I didn’t know what had happened.

Then I got the runs.   My bowels cut loose.  I was in and out of the bathroom, curling over my pregnant belly while twisting and wringing wads of toilet paper, the room tilting, for what seemed forever.  I was no help.

Other haunting sounds, which I heard from the toilet:  My brother and father, alternately calling out to him:  “Brandy!  Brandy!”

Someone said, “Go out and meet the ambulance so they know where to go.”    My cousin lived so far out of the way, miles of twists and turns, down tiny dirt roads, or at least that’s how it seemed.  I hadn’t recalled that either until we drove there last summer, and I remember thinking it was no wonder it took forever for help to arrive.

An ambulance never came.  A volunteer firefighter arrived singly in his pick-up truck.  He was no help either.  He saw the guys doing CPR, saw that they were doing it correctly and told them to keep going.  If he informed someone Life Flight would arrive, I didn’t hear about it, and  puzzled over why just a one man arrived, just one man, not even an official ambulance driver or firefighter, no equipment, no rescue service, just a guy who said “keep it up.”

Finally, finally, we heard it in the distance, growing louder as it neared, louder yet as it landed, then settled down to a whirring and chirping as rescue workers leaped out, one by one, our heroes, and got to work.  The relief all around was enormous.  We knew then, he’d be saved.

My mother wandered outside:  this was after paramedics had lifted Brandy out and had laid him out on a stretcher.  I was impressed by the activity, reassured everything would be okay.  My mother wandered out and my father wandered toward her.  They embraced.  I think he said to her, “It’s out of our hands now.  They’ll take care of him.”  Lindy and my Dad spent a good deal of time leaned over the paramedics as they worked.  I never saw Brandy, but I looked on from a distance.  I saw the paramedics squatting beside Brandy, but I never saw him.  Not once.

After some moments, Lindy turned around, triumphant, gave a thumbs-up, and turned back toward Brandy.  For just one split second of time, I thought they’d gotten him back.  I even ran around ecstatically, telling everyone:   “He’s okay! He’s okay.”

And it took far less than a minute of time to know that he wasn’t.

Lindy turned back around, his face scrunched up and in tears from complete despair and helplessness.  He had often felt, long afterward, that he failed to be the hero, failed to save his brother’s life.  I saw him walk toward my father shaking his head, his face crumbling.  They may have hugged too, though I don’t know if I’m imagining that memory or if they did embrace.  Seems to me my father tried to offer Lindy comfort; maybe he’d said the same thing to him:  “It’s out of our hands now.”

I’m not sure how long they worked on him there.  My father said later that Brandy looked peaceful, a little ashen, but warm.  His eyes were parted slightly, and before help had come, my dad rubbed my brother’s hands and his feet, hoping this, and calling his name, would make him come to.  Brandy hadn’t suffered, my father said later; he had not hurt, but laid still and quiet, seemingly at peace.  This may have been father’s view in retrospect, but I know his seeing him that way offered a little peace.  My mother remarked later that all she saw was her son’s one leg, which had fallen off the stretcher when they lifted him to the helicopter.  It had dangled there for a moment, until someone put it in place.  I believe that was an image that haunted her.  They loaded him fast, all jumped in.

I never saw him.  Not even one body part.

Another sound, another shout:  “Clear!”  and a dull, jolting thud.

They tried this a few times.  And I remember too, clearly, how quickly they moved after the last “Clear!”  After the last jolting thud:   the quick loading of the stretcher, the rescue workers leaping:  one leaped, two leaped, three leaped in, one following the other fast.  The propellers went from chirping to full whirr in less than a second, then lifted clean off the ground, simultaneously rising and rolling full circle above the ground, simultaneously climbing and flying south at full speed.  It rose up off the ground, turned, and disappeared out of sight, the sound of it growing distant, then gone within seconds.

And he was gone.  The last I saw him he had waded into the water after changing into swimming shorts.  He’d left a shirt and slacks and a pack of cigarettes on the lawn, where he sat and chatted with me and Bethy and smoked.  He had just a few hours earlier asked me if I would try water skiing.  I had said, “I heard you shouldn’t take on physical activities that you’re not used to when you’re pregnant.  It could be dangerous,” and he said what he said all the time:  “Bah!  That’s ridiculous.”

He thought everything under the sun was ridiculous and silly.  He was wonderful that way.  How strange now.  I did not ski because it could be dangerous or unsafe, yet he is the one who died.

We learned not long after what we all already knew, though we denied it all along:  he was dead.

The emergency room doctor asked if my parents wanted to see him.  They both said, “No.”   They firmly believed there was nothing left of him, nothing to see, and no need.  Lindy and Bethy followed suit.  If I had been there, I wonder if I’d have been brave enough to see him.  I wonder if my parents would have tried to stop me, or let me go.  Most likely I’d have done the same as Lindy and Bethy and numbly followed suit.  (Did they numbly follow suit? Or did they choose not to see him as well?)   Still, I’d always wanted to rewrite that part.  I had wished I’d gone to emergency with them (I’d stayed behind with the children.).  I’d wished, for a while, I’d seen him dead.  Maybe that’s an odd wish.  Lindy had seen him dead, so had my father.  My mother saw one dead leg.  I’m not sure about my sister.  Travis wasn’t there.

My parents’ wanted to take care of things quickly:  a simple cremation, no need for remains.  There would be no funeral (in retrospect, I just now recall my mother saying, “I hope that’s alright with everyone.”), no burial, no marker, no nothing.

I believe some religions want their dead in the ground within twelve hours of death.  But for me, it all happened so quickly.  Too fast.  It was like he vanished into thin air, disappeared in some cruel magic trick. Gone.  The dreams and images and sounds haunted me for a long time after.

Even now, I sometimes think about the details.  My mother announced the evening of his death that we’d have no service, and that he’d be cremated right away.  She did not want the ashes.  She suffered her own mother’s death when my mother was young, her mother’s dead body laid out in the living room of her home as strangers remarked how beautiful her mother looked.  She thought everyone was full of shit  and decided long ago she would never again in her life deal with the ridiculousness or pain of funeral rituals, neither for herself or her own.  She found the ritual of funerals and all that goes with as horrible as religions and churches and all that goes with them.  She was firm on this.  My father told me recently that she seemed never to grieve her loss, but I’m not so sure that’s true.  She spoke of him often and freely, early on and later.  She was never afraid to talk about him, or laugh about him, or offer us a bit of comfort when she could:  “He’ll always be part of our family.  He’ll never go away,” she had said to me on the phone after I’d gone home that week.  I realize now that what she said was, is, true:  he did remain part of our family; he still does, and always will.

But that day my brother died, my mother cleaned furiously.  She took everything Brandy packed, including the bag he packed in and gave it all to my father to get rid of.

“You threw everything out?”  I said.

“What the hell do we want to keep his filthy, dirty laundry, ripped jeans and holey socks and underwear for? You think I’m gonna wash them?”  Sure enough, I looked out back by the burning barrel across the lane and my father was feeding his clothing into the fire, my other two brothers standing along side, their own private ritual.

Early in the day, and throughout the first day and rest of the week, neighbors arrived with casseroles, bread, cakes, deserts, fruit baskets, vegetable trays, full meals.  Even after we left, one family on the lane brought dinner to my parents every night for two weeks.  We did not go hungry and I’m surprised, still, at how badly food was needed, how comforting it was (always take food, I’ve learned).  Flowers started coming too, but my mom didn’t want them; my father turned them away.  She couldn’t take the flowers.  The cards starting coming:  thirty or forty or more sympathy cards kept coming.  They were kept in a basket in my parents’ home for years.  I don’t think it was long ago, maybe just after my mother went into the nursing home, they were finally thrown out.  Some things we hung on to.  Sympathy cards, of all things.

Lindy took care of things at the funeral home.  My father did not want to deal with it.  When he returned, he came around to the front deck. Lindy placed a billing statement on the patio table “The funeral director offered to take the ashes and put them in the bay on Saturday.  Says he does it all the time for people when he goes fishing,” he said.

My mother groaned, marched off the deck and into the cottage.  I doubt it bothered her for long though.

“What else was I supposed to do?”  Lindy responded.  “He said if we didn’t pick them up, by law, he’d have to put them on a shelf for ten years.”

Ten years?  I don’t recall exactly what Lindy said, or what the law was or is today, but that was the reason Lindy gave the go ahead.  At the time, and for some years after, I had wished we’d done it ourselves.  We could have put his ashes in the bay.  But that would have been a ritual my parents had opposed.  I do believe, now, that it was important we supported our parents and their decisions.  Even if I had struggled, wished I had– or we had–done this or that differently, this was their dead son.  This was their decision.  It was all taken care of exactly as it should have.  I no longer wish things had gone another way.

In therapy, however, after my divorce and two years after Brandy’s death, my therapist suggested I do something to find closure, perform some ritual to help find a place for my brother.  I never did, but I did call the funeral home in Elk Rapids around that time.  I wanted to know that his ashes were, in fact, thrown into the bay following his cremation.  A nice woman left a message later that afternoon.  Yes, she had said, everything was taken care of as arranged.  A simple phone message.  It did help at the time.  And writing his story; my first published essay was about Brandy and his death.  That helped too.

Now, right now, it is near 8am, and it’s still gray and a little rainy, and time for two big black crows to do battle in tree tops above the beach.  Must be some kind of turf war, or they’re fighting over Brandy’s lost soul.  Native-American legend says the crow is the carrier of lost souls into the light, though in some legends, the crow is also a trickster, like the coyote, playing games and fooling others.  I’d bet Brandy be the biggest trickster of all, and if the crows were after his soul, I could see him dodging them right and left, laughing his head off- -“Bah! Ha, ha, ha!”—he would most certainly tell them “That’s silly.  Don’t be ridiculous!”  We have had a nesting pair of bald eagles too; they’ve been around the last 10, maybe even 20 years, living in the Antrim Creek Natural Area a mile or so down the beach, a place we still call “The Dunes.”   The Native-Americans believe the eagle is the master of the skies, protector, and a symbol of visions and spirits with a special connection to the creator.

I’ve never had visions, like my mother, but to this day, he shows up in my dreams, less often now, but always alive.  He stays with me in memories, my own and those shared with my family.   His friends, too, share stories and memories, a few of them still play his songs.  It’s possible I’ve adopted some of his personality, a nervous energy, a spacey head, a lot of “don’t be sillies,” of my own, based primarily on a kind of distaste for the idea of precautions, of living carefully.  Precautions, precautions!  He hated those, he once said.  It got in the way of living for him, and he had no time for that.

His death changed the world and warped the atmosphere around Old Antrim Shores, for a time, the place where we spent a lifetime of summers.  If he ever got lost, it’s only because I didn’t know where to put him.  I’d also imagine if Brandy were given an after-life, he wouldn’t be hanging around on this planet.  Who would, when you’ve got infinity and eternity to explore?  I believe Brandy’s life continues within us, those of us that do live and hold onto to those memories.  It works for me.  And he’s not lost, but a part of our family, still, like my mother said.

And though he was once alive and flawed, inside and out in a million different ways, I’ve raised his status, perhaps unfairly, to dead rock star, like John Lennon.  He is also a trickster hero himself, a demi-god, a dead brother turned to stone.  He is an idol, or icon, created in his own image, that is, the one I created for him, far greater than he ever was living.  Maybe it’s not fair to raise the status of my brother, but I know I’m not the only who applies greatness to the dead.

I used to imagine he was still around, teasing, and joking and whispering dirty jokes in my ear.   The following June after his death, I once wondered about his ashes.  Did they make it into the bay?  Did they float or sink when they were thrown in?  Did they disperse and scatter across the water’s surface?   I had waded into the bay that early June a year later, thinking about him and his ashes and where he had gone, certainly not left in the ravine to rot or turn to stone.  But as I stood there with the shampoo in my hand, shivering, I thought about how we left him behind after we’d all gone home, all alone in the cold and snow, or in the water under mountains of ice. Brandy out there in the Great Lakes under the ice and snow, in ashes floating or drifting in a body of water that wrapped around the state, heading out the St Lawrence Seaway to the oceans that cover three quarters of the earth.

I recall throwing the shampoo back up on shore, nearly giving up.  Then I imagined him standing on the cliff laughing, “Bah!  Ha, ha, ha!  Don’t be silly!  Just dive in!”

I want to share an excerpt fro my father’s journal.  It’s not personal, but written for the record, for future generations who might take an interest:

Nov 9^th, 1993

I don’t want this journal to be a prime source of information about Brandy. . . .  But I must report that the images of August 6, 1992 intrude my thoughts a dozen times a day, day after day, even after all this time.  And the final realization that Brandy is no longer alive, that I lost a son, is an unending burden.

I must climb out from that maze and grab those remaining possibilities yet untapped.

Quite simply, this is the story I wanted to share with you, and this was the time for me to tell it.  Fortunately, even well beyond November 9^th, 1993, there are many, many remaining possibilities yet untapped.

Sarah