lovaliss's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mitch died I don't talk about my dead brother much out loud but he seems to echo through all of my writing. I guess this is my insides telling me they have a story to tell. I do have story. The last time I saw him was from a side-long glance. He sat at the kitchen counter on a stool, he was wearing a royal blue hoodie, jeans, and black Airwalks. The kitchen lights weren't on and the light from the window created a cool hue in the room. Everything looked kind of blue. I didn't say anything and he didn't look up. I drug my bags and sleeping bag out the door into the sunshine. He had followed me around that morning not really saying anything, I thought it was weird he wanted to be where I was. I was sucking on ice cubes and I remember him hassling me about it but in a half-hearted way, almost out of routine more so than he really felt like hassling me. It was his way of giving me attention. I just thought he was weird when he followed me around. I wonder now what he was feeling inside and if he knew he was going to die...as if some part inside of him was reaching out to hold onto things he didn't conciously acknowledge he cared about. I left for summer camp. It was 2 weeks before my 11th birthday. I had just bought some candy at the little store inside the mess hall when it dawned on me I hadn't seen my sister or my two cousins in a while. I went looking for them while I was eating my candy. As I came around the main building and onto the trail to my cabin my leader came up and put her arm around me. I didn't know what she was doing and she was acting weird. When I heard that last sentence I knew he would die. He was dead to me. We packed our things into the car and I heard other's talking, "...if we have faith and pray he will live..." I didn't dare believe in that kind of faith out loud so I began praying over and over in my mind, "Dear Heavenly Father, please let him live...Dear Heavenly Father, please let him live..." We drove out to the highway from the camp site to wait for my parents. The stretch of road was straight and long for about 5 miles. I sat on a log and watched every single ant car round the corner and pray that it was our minivan. I kept fidgeting...I started bending my fingers back as far as they would go just to relieve the pressure somehow inside, I started chewing on my fore finger, a habit that would last that night. I finally saw the car...I didn't know what I'd say when I saw my family. The first look into my oldest brother's (Phil) eyes was frightening...I had never seen him like this. He was holding Mitch's good luck charm in his hands while he cried...he was 17 then. The charm was a small terrier dog carved out of a shiny white rock of some sort. Mitch would set it on top of the TV when he played Nintendo, he said it was good luck. Now my brother's fist was wrapped around it...for good luck. We started driving to Idaho Falls, it was where they were life flighting him, we were about an hour away. I fell asleep as we drove and woke up just as the sun was sinking...the fields of Idaho were golden and the irrigation pipe water sprayed out in rainbows against the sun. The scene was sooo beautiful to me in that moment...everything felt calm and quiet. There was a women in the ER of the hospital...she was holding her sons head and crying...he had cut his head...but he seemd to not care as much as the mom. I was furious with her. I hated her in fact. I wanted to shout in her face that she was weak and pathetic and that her son would get stitches and be fine tomorrow so why was she crying!!! Why was she crying over a cut when my brother was dying! Young pain is selfish...you believe you are the only one that could hurt this much in the world. You're also convinced that no one's problems are as big as yours are at the moment. I hated her none the less. He arrived they informed us. I was frightened to see him. We were led to a waiting room the church had furnished...it had low lighting and patterned wall paper. Every time I heard someone coming I waited in horror to see if it was him...I'd see the sheeted body starting at the feet and wait to see the bump of breasts or a fat belly or any characteristic to distinguish that it wasn't him. It was never him. They brought him in a different way. I stood at the window, we were high up. There was a roof beneath the window filled in with rocks. I looked at my cousin Lacey who was my best friend growing up and we both looked back at the rocks...we were practically telepathic when we were young. I kept chewing on my finger and didn't cry. I watched my little brother Dallin, I was more concerned with what he was feeling or thinking...I just wanted to hug him and tell him not to be scared. I just didn't want him to hurt...he was 6 then. Time feels so unatural in the event of a crisis. I found myself at the Burger Kning drive through with my cousins and their mom (my camp leader). I forced myself to eat a french fry...I couldn't though. I couldn't eat anything and wouldn't eat for days. She took us to a hotel room. My heart has never been more broken than it was that night. I have never felt such intense emotional pain quite like that felt...although some things have come close. I laid awake while everyone else fell asleep. That's when I started to cry. I said a prayer to God this time other than the one I had been chanting the whole time in my head. "Dear Heavenly Father, I know I'm not the best kid in the world, but if you let him live then I'll take his place, I promise. Just let me die instead." I meant it, every word. It's funny how we view death in numbers or tallies, as if there is a quota that has to be fulfilled every day and we can just switch it up as long as death's justice is served. Janadene heard me crying. She came over and started to rub my back. I said, "If everyone in the world would take a little bit of his death then he wouldn't have to die...if we'd just take a second less of our lives then he could live...nobody would even notice that it was gone..." I must've sounded crazy trying to trick death's quota. I couldn't stop crying...it shook my body...I knew I should be quiet to not wake people up but I couldn't control it. I don't remember when I feel asleep but I hated hotel rooms for years after...I still do, I felt so alone in that room, more alone than I have ever experienced in my life...I hated the smell of it...I hated the way the bathroom light was on and the way it lit up the room in that warm glow that might comfort you on any other occasion. I woke up to sniffles. My entire family was in my hotel room, I was the only one still asleep. I knew my entire life was different at that moment. I walked out of that hotel room in a daze...I was watching people drive down the street and walk by and it was a bizarre thought to me that they didn't know...it felt like the whole world should know he was dead...why weren't they crying, why weren't they starring at me...it felt like I should've had a sign on me, "Hey my brother just died!" It is such an odd feeling to be trapped inside of a body that is feeling such intense pain and unless you said something not one soul would know. We can never know what people are feeling or going through. I wonder if the clerk at the gas station thought anything of my dad's tired and swollen eyes...she wouldn't guess that he'd just lost his child...I didn't know how she could go on not knowing. But we drove away. I walked into my room to find my Aunt cleaning it...I thought she was weird for cleaning it...I didn't believe she had ever been in my room in my entire life, now here she was on her hands and knees putting my little brother's toys into plastic ice cream buckets. I just starred at her. She excused herself and walked out...I don't remember if she hugged me or not...it seems appropriate that she would but I don't know if she did. My house was an entirely new house to me. The whole world was a novelty...I had never seen it from this angle. My bunk bed...my bed spread...the color of my carpet...I was seeing everything for the first time inside this world that had been created in one sentence. I sat down at my desk, pulled out my light pink journal and wrote, You can only express your feelings so much as a ten year old. I walked out onto our deck and saw Mitch's irrigation boots sitting there in a puddle of water...they were in the exact place he had kicked them off of his feet...this was incomprehensible to me...I could physically see the reactions from his actions and how he no longer existed...but I could see he existed...the water was still there...it was still wet...it was wet. Sometimes I still go down into his room and smell the insides of his baseball caps...I can still smell him...I have done this for years and everytime it is so odd that I have physical proof he once existed, my physical mind doesn't believe it anymore, it would shock the hell out of me to see him alive again...it would be just as shocking to see him alive as it was when he died. I begged my mom to let me go with her to the funeral home...I helped pick out his casket, I wanted the one with the gold embossed Aspen trees on the lid. I also wanted his picture to be round on the program...all of these very small. The night of his viewing my dad took me in by the casket, it was just me and my dad and Mitch's body. I knelt down and said to Mitch that I didn't hate him and I was sorry that I had never once told him I loved him when he was alive...I begged him to forgive me and told him again that I did not hate him. I thought I hated him when he was alive...quite a shock to a bratty 10 year old when the brother you "hate" so much dies. In the following years I would freak out whenever I heard someone say they "hated" any of their siblings. I would feel like screaming in their face but would only say calmly, "You don't mean that...I promise." Me and my siblings started taking care of each other then...Phil became more of a mom than he had been before, that's why we're like that now...we're close because we had to take care of each other. My mom shut down. She was depressed all the time. She cried over anything. I began to despise her for that. I hated that it seemed like she was oblivious to any of the rest of us hurting...I can see now that she was just trying to keep living, she said having the rest of us kids was the only thing that kept her going. It crushed her to lose Mitch. She keeps him on a locket around her neck. I developed a spite for my mom that turned into a raging hatred for ten years. She couldn't understand why I hated her. All she could pinpoint was that I started hating her after Mitch died. I never talked to her. I felt like she abonanded me. She didn't know that, but I felt like she wasn't there for me when I needed her to be my mom. I took that experience to mean that nobody could help me because if I couldn't depend on my mom then I couldn't depend on anyone...I learned that I didn't need anybody to help me because I could take care of myself...I still have that engraved in me now even though I'm not as bad as I once was. I was a stony mystery to my mom the rest of my time at home. Things changed once I went to college. I figured stuff out and learned how to let it go...I sobbed the day I asked my mom to forgive me for hating her and treating her so bad for so many years. She cried too of course and said she didn't understand why I went away like that...she did then, and she was sorry. I remember going back to school after the summer he died. I didn't want to see people, I knew they knew and it was kind of embarassing in a way. I was nervous about the first day of school...but nobody mentioned it and I was glad...we just pretended like it hadn't happened. But I wasn't the same kid anymore. I didn't look at anything the same way. I didn't misbehave like I had before...it was like all that extra fire in me had been burned away. I still can't comprehend how it has affected my life...mainly my relationships to people...but I know it filters into everything. 4:03 p.m. - 2005-04-21 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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