Ten Years Later: Eight Days I will Never Forget.

 

             

There are some dates that don’t just live on in a calendar, they live in your heart.

Ten years ago, we said goodbye to my brother at just 55 years old. Even now, the number still feels too young. Too much life left to be lived. Too many phone calls that never got to happen. Too many laughs we thought we still had time for.

What stands out most in my mind, isn’t just the day he passed away, it’s the eight long days before it. Eight days of sitting beside him, taking shifts with his wife, our siblings, and his family and friends. Eight days of watching someone you love slip away. Eight days of hoping, praying, remembering, and preparing your heart for something you know you can never truly prepare for.

As stressful, heart breaking and exhausting as it is, there is something special about sitting with someone in their final days, it strips life down to what really matters. Not success, work schedules, or small disagreements that we sometimes think are important. What matters is love, just love and presence, just being there. As hard as it was, I would do those eight days all over again to be supportive of his family and make sure he didn’t feel alone.

Ten years later, what I miss the most are the ordinary things, his sense of humor, the kind Mary Jane, Michael and me all share, where it just takes a simple remark or a look to get you started and you keep adding to it, exaggerating the life out of it and laughing way harder about whatever it is than most people would. I miss his phone calls, the just checking in ones that you don’t realize are treasures until they stop coming. I don’t miss how early in the morning some of them were, but I still miss them just the same.

It’s funny how grief works like that. It isn’t always the big moments you miss the most, it’s the everyday connections, the little things. Back when we were kids and summers felt endless, my brothers Paul and Michael would bring Mary Jane and me to Plugs Pond. We weren’t thinking about the future oh how fast we would grow up or how fast time would pass. We were just kids, laughing, exploring and catching cray fish under rocks and near the shore. Those are memories I enjoy, the ones untouched by sickness or loss. The ones where he was strong, healthy, funny and very much alive.

Grief is strange because while loss changes things, love doesn’t disappear, it just changes where it lives. Now it lives in memories, especially the ones of him that make me smile.

More than anything, what gives me peace is knowing that even though his life ended here on earth, he accepted Jesus into his heart before he took his last breath, and I know he is now living for eternity with those who made that same decision. I am so grateful that he did. I know now, I will see him again one day. That knowledge has helped me through many hard moments. While we experienced a painful goodbye here, I know it was his best hello ever when he reached Heaven.

I picture him now, reunited with our parents and so many relatives who loved him. Whole again, no sickness or pain, probably still making people laugh, and that thought replaces some of the sadness with hope.

Ten years doesn’t erase missing someone, it just teaches you how to deal with it differently. The sharp pain softens into something a bit more subtle, more like an ache that visits rather than an overwhelming storm.

Even though memories can hurt, I am grateful that he was (is) my brother, I’m grateful for the childhood memories, grateful for those last eight days even though hard, and grateful that love doesn’t end when a life does.

I still miss him and probably always will, but I know this is not the end of our story.

To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” ~ 2 Corinthians 5:8 

Because of that promise, I don’t look back, I look forward.