Gift From the Beyond, part 1 by Sara Wright

The words came unbidden “go outdoors”. It was dark but I felt my way to the door. I always listen when Nature calls.

I had just re -membered that Davey’s birthday was the next day. ‘Happy birthday Beloved’. My little brother would have been 75. I calculated the years with difficulty imagining what it would have been like if he had lived…

Dead at 21 from a self – inflicted gunshot wound, part of me died with my Gemini Twin. I failed him at the end, turning into a parent who was incapable of being emotionally present to listen to a young boy on the verge of adulthood at a time of desperate need. Instead, I parroted my parents’ script, not having developed one of my own…

”You have everything to live for,” I screamed when Davey tried to tell me that he was tired of living.

I no longer blame myself for my inadequacy, but regrets linger on just the same.

It would be eleven years before I was able to begin grieving. Catapulted out of my body at the time of my brother’s death I felt nothing for years as I self- medicated with alcohol and a dreary round of boyfriends while being unable to be emotionally present for my own young children. To feel one must inhabit a body but mine was overflowing with anguish and abandonment. Too dangerous to go there. Isolated and alone, I huddled in my house in silent torment, an absentee mother following the parental script with children of my own.

 Davey wasn’t just my little brother he was the love of my life living inside me as part of myself, or that’s how I experienced our lives together. I believe that on some level we might have shared the same soul – is that even possible? I have no way of knowing. In retrospect it is understandable that after his death I could no longer go on living in an abandoned shell.

 When Davey was born, I climbed into his crib to sleep next to him whenever I could. I cared for him like a mother feeding him his bottle when I was three. They named me the ‘little mother’. Later we became the closest companions haunting the wild places where we grew up, catching frogs and fireflies, butterflies and bees, climbing trees; the forest was our home. I think we were both born naturalists.

 During adolescence when my brother became a runner breaking world records as a fourteen – year – old, I rarely went to meets because I couldn’t stand watching my brother’s face when he came in first. His expression was full of pain. When I married at nineteen, Davey having become quite famous during the intervening years was still coming to visit me on a regular basis as our relationship matured. By that time, he was Harvard’s star athlete. Fifty-two colleges wanted him, Harvard won. With all this outer stuff happening we never lost the powerful ties that bound us as One. He remained my confidante, my closest friend.  Much more so than my husband, which should have given me a clue. Neither of my children remember him, though that last Christmas we spent one night sitting around a camp – fire in the Navajo Hogan Davey had skillfully crafted from bent saplings and deerskins that he sewed together himself…Three weeks later he was dead. The night before he killed himself, he called me, and we spent about a half an hour discussing the merits of a wild skunk that had befriended him. When the phone rang the following evening, I didn’t believe my beloved brother could be dead… I wore red to the service, stared at an empty pine coffin covered with evergreens, numb.

When I first came to these mountains, my little brother came too. Together we inhabited ‘elf house’, chased fireflies, raised tadpoles, caught frogs, picked wildflowers, fell in love with trees especially the cedars that towered over the little camp that was situated just a few feet above a roaring mountain brook. It didn’t matter that Davey was invisible, we were together again, reliving our childhood, adolescent friendship and the first taste of an adult relationship even as I began to inhabit my body with a new awareness.

Dawning.

For three years we raised tadpoles caught frogs and scattered forget me nots… chased a field full of fireflies at night. We rose with the sun and fell asleep at dusk…this brief interim constituted the happiest years of my life.

After I moved here permanently my life changed dramatically. Divorced, I returned to school accruing degrees, eventually becoming a teacher, counselor, and writer. Oh, my brother was still with me but there was separation too. I was starting to live a self – directed life.

I became accustomed to periodic distance, but these times were always punctuated by moments when we both once again inhabited the same skin.***

Thirty-two years after Davey’s death I was finally able to bury his ashes down below the log cabin I built above the camp, ending forever the nightmares I had been having each January. In these dreams my tortured brother was wandering around alone looking for a place to rest.

It turned out that my parents lied to me about what they had done with his ashes. No wonder I wasn’t included. Instead of burying or scattering, his ashes were left in a box in the attic. I still shudder at the thought of all those years… abandoned by his own parents even in death.

 After my little burial ceremony, a grieving sister finally found peace.

For a week afterward there were so many red -tailed hawks around Trillium Rock that all my birds left home. Need I add that redtails were my brother’s favorite birds?

Last fall when I broke my hip, I needed to do exercises to help me recover, and I did them at a bureau next to the only picture of my brother that I have. “Help me” I said. And he did. He and Gary both.

Continued tomorrow