Safe at Home

A single sheet of notebook paper sits in a desk drawer. The desk was mine in college. My father and I finished it with coats of varnish when I moved into my first apartment in Berkeley. Later, it became my brother's, and traveled with him from his fraternity house, down to his apartment in LA, and eventually to my parent's house, where it is now, in my old room.

The paper has been there for ten years, or maybe a little bit more. It doesn't look like much: light blue lines, three holes down the side, a few words and lines in pencil. Unremarkable at first glance.

I remember the first time I saw this piece of paper. I stayed composed (as was my custom back then). The pencil lines were drawn in the shape of a diamond, with smaller diamonds at the corners, like a baseball field. And at the bottom point of the diamond, where home base would be, a single phrase. "He is safe at home."

My brother had sketched his graveyard.

There are some other details on the page as well. Bill, shortly after a second surgery for a brain tumor that left him partially paralyzed on one side, had included what was to be placed at each base and the various positions throughout the field. It is, as he was, remarkable.

Although he was never a baseball player, my brother was a lover of the game. He analyzed and remembered the great players, old and new. Bill wasn't just a fan. He felt the game. Even as he was dying, long after he had eaten his last hot dog, after his mind and his body started to leave him, he enjoyed a good baseball game.

When I visit my parents' house, and stay in my old room, I always open the desk drawer that holds this piece of paper. I cry now (as is my custom now), thinking of how long my brother knew he was dying, even while the rest of us still held out hope.

And when I have the chance, I visit his grave as well. He is buried among the rows of others, with space around him where my parents will someday lie. His stone is simple.

William Monroe Ress

1976-2002

Safe at home

Today's post was inspired by the prompt "write a fiction or creative non-fiction piece in which an epitaph features prominently."

After

Though it was only March, the sun was glaringly bright. My eyes, which had been indoors for so long, had trouble adjusting. Without thinking, I reached for my sunglasses in the holder by the rear-view mirror, hesitating as I remembered I was in my mom's car. Mine was at my apartment, 400 miles away.

I hadn't cried much since my brother died just a few days before. I felt the need to be strong when I was at home, didn't want my parents to comfort me when it seemed they needed every ounce of strength just to keep breathing. And even though it seemed like the three of us would never feel anything but grief, we are, in the end, merely animals, and our stomachs still growled and throats got dry. I needed to replenish the house with bread and peanut butter. Needed to make sure there was toilet paper and coffee and diet coke for the people who might stop by. So I volunteered to go to the grocery store.

Driving down Ventura Boulevard, I marveled at the number of people out in the middle of the day, going about their business. I was shocked that the world looked exactly as it had the last time I was out. A beautiful, young man, an important person, had taken his last breath, and all these people were eating lunch and going to work and getting gas and everyone was just driving, driving, driving.

I wanted to yell at them. I wanted to scream and cry and curse at the world for letting this happen, and then at all these people for going on with their lives. Instead, I found myself singing. Not a prayer or something spiritual, just a pop song, something old and familiar. The radio was tuned to the station I always listened to when I lived at home. And the tune came spilling forth. The words had been etched into my brain for so many years, the singing was automatic, effortless, normal.

Singing was better than crying. It reminded me that the past that included my brother would always be there, no matter how many days would continue to pass without him. It was a small token of regular life, away from the cancer and fear and death that had overtaken my every thought for the last few months. And, ultimately, singing along to the radio was something he would be doing if he still could, something that we had often done together.

I have cried many, many times since that day. But that afternoon, driving in the sun, I sang. And it felt right.

This week's memoir prompt was to be inspired by this sentence: The first time I ________-ed after _________-ing.