Thad

When you’re asked by a friend, “Would you like a copy of his obituary?”

And you think, “Maybe. Do I?”

Where will I put it? Next to Dan’s? In the ‘Dead Brother’ file which until now only held one?

Who will find it? Will they even know? Will it get yellowed, soft, and torn, something to be thrown away with the rest of things people don’t want any more once you too are gone?

Do I want it? He’s ashes. Memories and flashbacks. An unopened voicemail.

Do I want it? It says nothing of the suffering and the trauma and the body that failed him or of the confusion about why he was the one to lay wasted and gaunt haunted by ‘what ifs.’

It doesn’t mention the little boy so shy, he’d rather cover his head with a dishtowel than speak to you. It doesn’t mention the first time he could dunk and you were the only one around to show.

It doesn’t mention trudging along on the campus of the University of Southern Maine, so cold you had to take your earrings out because your ears were freezing, and tuck your chin into your jacket, your gaze on the ground to keep warm on the way to class. But because you did, you saw a flyer on the ground, an advertisement of the boys basketball game that night. His face, the player in profile, looking up at you from the ground. So you go and cheer for the opposing team.

It doesn’t mention sharing a bedroom with him when you’re six and he’s four and he wakes up with the sun and jumps on your bed begging you to wake up.

It doesn’t mention the ten thousand memories that make up a childhood and form a sibling bond.

It doesn’t mention going to chemo with him for his first dose and you’re petrified and he’s petrified and he’s trying to remember all the medications he was supposed to take beforehand. And you’re no help.

And it doesn’t say how he walked into chemo looking like a god among men who were already wasted but refusing to quit. No one in that room was a quitter. They talked of sports, of hometowns, and of better days.

They loved him but maybe they also saw themselves in him, the way they were before. Before the cancer and the chemo, when they were gods, too.

It doesn’t mention that he played with me the very first time I went on a golf course and he hugged me at the end and said, “You did it.”

It doesn’t mention what that last week of hospice felt like. Maybe that part is a blessing. Because no amount of jumping on his bed saying, “Wake up! It’s morning!" was going to matter.

Morning came. And he was gone.

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