It's a Crazy Woild!

"Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it." ~ Audre Lorde

Today I woke to NPR as they memorialized the occasion of the Oklahoma City bombing, and it will be the anniversary of the Columbine High School Massacre tomorrow. Horrible tragedies, impossible for any sane and ordinary person to fully grasp the why of either. Both grown out of intolerance. An essay for another time, perhaps.

These tragedies rekindle my own personal feelings of grief and loss as I remember a much closer personal tragedy which also occurred around this same time in April of 1997. 

We were out of town on business in St. Paul, Mn. The news came in from friends in Honolulu...it read..."I°m afraid we've lost him..." Lost him? What the heck were they talking about?

It took one second, as I read the next sentence...
"We tried calling and calling and when he didn't answer for three days...."  for me to realize that they meant they'd lost him permanently! 

I uttered a deep, guttural, painful sound which caused my spouse to leap up instantly. "What is it? What's wrong," he asked, "what do you mean...they lost him?" He looked puzzled.

"He's ...He's d..dead!" The words stumbled out of my mouth. 

It couldn't be so. We just spoken to him a couple of days before. He had just been out on a boat looking at the comet Hale-Bopp, and had called to tell me about it.

But it was true. 

Found dead at 48, in his apartment on April 9, 1997. Dead for probably two or three days. Wrapped cocoon like in blankets. What happened? No one knew. It would be left up to the coroner to resolve.

I couldn't leave right away, and the next three days were filled with horrible grief, phone calls between family and friends, sleeplessness, logistics arranging to get from Chicago to Honolulu, and more horrible grief and confusion. 

As the reality of yet another painful death asserted itself, (my mother had also died suddenly a couple of years prior), I tried everything to keep from thinking of it. For some unknown reason I found myself singing the inane "Beverly Hillbillies" theme song over and over in my head to blot out all semblance of reality and drown out my thoughts. Absurdity helped me to avoid reality. 

My brother had lived in Honolulu for more than 20 years. He had some very good friends who were like family to him, but he did live alone and there was lot to deal with and to sort out.

Even though life may have sometimes looked different to him than to me, since he was the youngest and my mother's favorite, the basics were the same. Few friends or relatives are ever really around from almost the beginning, especially when you are an Army brat. And almost none, other than your siblings, know and understand the ins and outs of your family dynamics. Since my only other brother, though living, is really lost to me for various reasons, it was an especially horrible blow to loose the only person in the family with whom I could share things in the ways I had with him.

I stayed in Honolulu with his good friends, and with their help my Dad and I sorted through everything and tied up his estate, a situation also filled with it's own absurdities. It was also very disconcerting to be in "paradise" and have to deal only with the leavings of death.

My brother was cremated. The coroner said he most likely died of a massive coronary "...best we can do...it's not TV, you know, and we don't spend weeks and weeks on the mystery, unless it looks like foul play."

We held the memorial service for him on April 19, 1997. He was peripherally into Zen Buddhism, so it took place in a non-denominational chapel. His ashes were placed in one of his pottery containers, and surrounded by photos, arrangements of tropical flowers and many, many beautiful and exotic leis.

So many of his friends came to the service. He had succeeded so well in compartmentalizing his life, that he had kept his life as a Naval employee and as a potter completely separate. It was interesting to hear some people say they had no idea of the other side of him. Some people spoke and had wonderful testimonials to the fullness of his being. Each person who spoke to me had good memories to share. This part was a wonderful experience, and probably the most healing thing we could have done. I am so grateful that I was able to be there.

His best friends took his ashes home and he resides in his pot on their shelf for now, to eventually be placed under a jacaranda tree on their family property on Kauai.

I still miss my brother so! No more calls to ask how he is and for him to answer, "Oh...sameo...sameo." No more dumb jokes about "Soylent green is people." 

No more hearing him say, "It's a crazy woild, eh?"

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