My brother Stevie died fifty years ago today. In November he would have joined his big brothers in old manhood, but instead, we reached old age without him, and his loss has been, at least for me, the most important fact of life. I grew up forlorn, prematurely elegiac, that is, hurt pretty bad. Twenty-five years later, with little relief to speak of, I found poetry that was not reassuring. “They say that time assuages,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “Time never did assuage. An actual suffering strengthens/as sinews do with age.” Except that Time does, actually, you know, assuage—you just need a lot of it, more of it than Emily had, and much much more than we are led to believe by the greeting card industry: time heals all wounds and everything happens for a reason (It doesn’t, and it doesn’t). But in this case, my case, it does assuage after another twenty-five years: for a total of fifty.
I returned to Mercer this week to observe and reflect upon those years this anniversary of his death. Every summer there has seemed less to remember—it might be just a seeming, of course—but not only do I recall and feel less, less remains of the world he died in to prompt my memory. Our mother and father are gone now. At Brandy Springs Park, the pool, from whose poolside I watched his body turn that single broken fatal somersault, is gone, too, a raw escarpment capped by a lunar kiddie playscape. The basketball courts remain in some repair, not yet in ruins, but with the park’s halting renewal come those changes that efface the destroyed Arcadia that was my childhood at that moment. Soon enough there will be no one to remember.
What is the metaphor for a life that formed around such loss? A hole in the heart that centers one, that terrible presence of absence about which this self is styled, that silence in which I have bespoken myself in low tones—now minus the terror. After all these years.
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| Photo Credit Steve Van Woert |
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