This morning, the silence is almost overwhelming. It seems I’ve beaten the sun, the birds, and my half-asleep neighbors walking their dogs.
In this moment, the morning belongs to me. I take ownership of the quiet and check in with my heart, what kind of day are we going to have today? The truth is, I don’t know. I am optimistic, but I don’t know. It's been different every year, with some being better than others.
It’s been twelve years since I heard my brother speak the words that wove themselves into the fabric of my family, forever changing what our lives would look like in the years to come. Twelve years gives a person a lot of time to change and I have. I am not the same teenage girl from all those years ago, but I am not the person I would’ve been had that day not existed.
I was sixteen. A very immature sixteen. We lived an hour and half from a sweet little ski town where we spent most of our winter weekends while growing up. I remember this particular day as one big whisper. Every time the phone rang, my aunt would go into the bathroom and close the door before she started talking. I knew I was on the wrong side of a secret.
I may not have known the details, but what I knew was enough to infer I didn’t want to know anymore. Except that I did. My brother, James, was an hour away at the hospital undergoing tests with my Mom. My Dad was with me, my younger sister, Nora, and our younger brother, Brendan.
If it was good news, there’d be no reason to hide it. So I knew, it wasn’t good news. I was also angry. I didn’t want to know, but I did. Here was my aunt, talking to my mom, about my brother, and no one was telling me anything.
My family began getting ready for Saturday mass, the halfway mark of every weekend. They might not have realized what was going on yet, but I did, and I wasn’t about to go somewhere and pretend everything was as it should be. In fact, my whole life, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid anything that makes me uncomfortable.
I still do.
It was as if all those moments in the past had been preparing me so I could perfect this one. I faked sick and stayed in bed. Of course, now I was alone with my thoughts and that is a very dangerous and uncomfortable place to be. My plan had backfired. I remember trying to fall asleep, but with my stomach in my throat and my heart beating as fast as it was, I was afraid if I let my guard down enough to fall asleep, I wouldn’t be able to hold back my tears any longer.
I was a child with her eyes closed, desperately hoping that made her invisible to and unaffected by the rest of the world.
It didn’t work.
My family returned from church and almost immediately I was told we were leaving, a day earlier than planned, and to pack up my things and head for the car. Whispers and secrets were one thing, but now a sudden dash to the car with no one answering any of our questions? This. Wasn’t. Good.
We piled into my Dad’s jeep. James and I had flown with my Dad to Baltimore to buy it and drive it back home. That was a before memory. The good kind, when we were still relatively untouched by the harsh reality the world could be.
My Dad drove, I sat beside him in the passenger seat and Nora and Brendan rode in the back. It was a small car. Most cars offer you a little room to retreat, even if only within yourself. This car had none. The soft windows closed in around us and the sounds of the road played like a radio station. That day in particular, the car felt so small it was almost as if words weren’t needed for us to hear one another’s thoughts.
I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Instead, I was racing down the thruway towards what I knew was going to be one of those moments there would be no coming back from. Our lives were about to change and I think everyone was beginning to feel it.
My Dad wears his heart on his sleeve. I wear mine more like a feathered boa that seems to leave an unintentional trail of feathers wherever I go. Needless to say, we aren't exactly the best combination of emotional support to have in a crisis. Even so, at sixteen years old, it was the first time I’d seen my Dad so silent and within myself. Halfway to our destination that changed. He looked at me and asked if I “wanted to hold hands?”
I wanted to say, “no.” I wanted to tell him, “I am sixteen and that would be weird.” I wanted to tell him, “you’re supposed to be acting like everything is going to be okay. You’re the Dad. That’s what you do. That’s your job.”
But I said none of those things.
I didn’t say them because in that moment, we both knew that once we got where we were going, turned off the car, and walked through the front door of the hospital, that my Dad would be unable to do the one thing in the world that every Dad is supposed to do for their children. He wouldn’t be able to make this better, no matter how much he wanted to.
And so, for the rest of the way to the hospital, I sat next to me Dad and stared mindlessly out the window, not entirely sure who was holding whose hand.
It wasn’t until later that I found out my Dad was as much in the dark as my siblings and I were. There was a reason no one was telling the four of us what was going on. James had felt it was important that he be the one to tell us. He didn’t want us to hear it from anyone else.
At fifteen, in the middle of the scariest moment he’d faced, he was thinking of others. Anyone who knew my brother knew that was just the type of person he was and it came effortlessly to him.
I made an unsuccessful last-ditch attempt to extract information from my uncle who was waiting in the hallway outside my brother’s hospital room. I’ve tried but haven’t found the right words to describe what it feels like to know something, but not to know it and to desperately want to find out, but at the same time wanting to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction before someone can tell you.
The thing about receiving life-changing information is that life changes. From here on out, life would always be remembered and talked about as before and after.
Hours ago, my Mom and brother had their moment and now it was our turn. We entered James’ hospital room one by one. That room, like so many others over the next two years would become a makeshift extension of our home. He was sitting up in bed, my Mom with him. To be honest, I don’t remember those beginning moments, not even the exchanging of hello’s. Maybe there weren’t any.
What I remember in that moment is James looking at us and saying, “They think, they’re pretty sure I have leukemia.”
So there it was, We were all officially living in the “after.”
My brother started to cry as the words escaped his lips. I wonder if he had practiced what he was going to say before we got there. I wonder how different that moment was from his side of things. I wonder if I would have handled it as gracefully as he did.
Looking back all these years later, I’m not entirely convinced those tears were for himself. After that day, James made a rule. There would be “no tears in his room.” And for the next two years and three weeks, there weren’t.
The sun is up and I tuck the memory back into my heart to keep it safe. It lives beside the memory of another day, just three weeks from now that will mark an entire decade since my brother died. But I am not quite ready to relive that one yet.
Instead, I let my heart settle on the way God has been able to transform my grief, and I focus on the gratitude I feel for having known my brother and his bravery. I remember his request for no tears and I try to honor it.
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| James & Brendan |
Lauren
