I received the call from my sister while I was standing outside of the bank with my husband...just standing there in the parking lot about to get in the car and the call came. He was gone. He had fallen after dinner, maybe his heart, I don't know, but he was gone, she said. I wailed, "No! No! No!", but it didn't make any difference. I clung to the phone that night crying and listening to my parents and my sister crying...we hung on the phone and cried together, several thousand miles apart.
We flew to Texas the next day and by that night I was wrapping my arms around my little mother saying, "I'm sorry...I'm sorry, Mom...I'm so sorry!" What else is there to say? The next four days were filled with decisions and planning, sometimes heartlessly demanding. My mother never looked as small as she did the day I saw her standing in a room full of caskets, nodding her head at one, pain etched across her face in silence, tears running down her cheeks.
I stood at the podium in the chapel, unable to stop shaking, unable to steady my voice, barely able to read the words on my pieces of paper. All so surreal. I saw his body and knew it was him, but asked myself silently, "Is it really him? Why do his hands look so old?"
We buried him on my parents' land, there near the road, there where Mom could watch over him and know that there would be no more suffering, just the absence that we will all have to live with and the loss of all that could have been. The next morning while it was still dark, I walked outside wearing Mom's winter coat that she has hanging by the back door. I stood there by the mound of dirt and told him I was sorry and late that afternoon Mom and I planted bluebonnet seeds across the soil and watered them hoping they will come to life in the spring.
You never know what's coming. One of the hardest things about life is keeping an open, receptive heart when you know full well that tomorrow could bring the shock of loss or betrayal or death...with no second chances. I've lost my brother. I know where he is...he is on the other side of that river and I will see him again one day, but today...he is gone and there is a grief that fills that emptiness.
