I opened my blog on a whim today, and it has been a whole year since I posted my last entry, the riveting and hard hitting write up on raisinettes. A year flies by when you're having fun while also suffering miserably and feeling like life knocked you in the face with a sock full of nickels. This has been the year of the great and the depths of awful.
I was driving home from work yesterday, enjoying the fact that I was headed for home, when a song came on from Jason Isbell. It's called Something to Love, and when it started to play, I just started sobbing and driving and sobbing.
I kept thinking of my brother Jerome and that moment he must have realized something was wrong. I kept hearing my brother Jeff in the car as we made the long drive to Tazewell from Richmond saying, "I hope Jerome wasn't scared." The small comforts we seek. I hope he wasn't scared when he got so sick, and in the space of that breath between life and the end of life, I hope he wasn't scared. And even thought I know he's not scared now, sometimes my mind goes back there. It's at once a useless exercise and also a way to force myself to face this grief.
Grief makes for a strange bedfellow. One moment you can be driving down the road, feeling pretty good, and the next you're hit with a tsunami of sorrow. Yesterday I didn't hear the tsunami warning, but there it was. A half an hour later, I felt like I had been dashed against the rocks, but I was going to be ok. That's grief. Then you text your brother and tell him you miss his brother, your brother, the third in the trifecta of awesomeness.
I had a dream about him where I called him on his cell phone. We had been looking for him and trying to find him all over the place. When he answered, I said, "We're here waiting on you." He said, "I already left. I didn't need to be there anymore."
Music is a tricky thing for me these days because so much of my brother Jerome is tied to memories of music...songs he liked or that he sang a lot...songs he would send me via messenger...the song going through my head the day I saw a red bird and thought of him and later realized the song was "Time to Move On" by Tom Petty. Sometimes I listen to that one when I'm not quite in the tsunami, but I'm pacing like a wild animal that knows some awful natural disaster is about to happen. I listen to that song when I want to unleash the impending wave of grief, when I want to see the big sky moving above me as I drive the open road and think my brother is out there, moving on.
