Post 10: "Lay Me Down"
“It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love is put in the giving.” Mother Teresa
At the time of Sean’s death, my memories were still perfectly, hermeneutically sealed. Nothing of his abuse of me was conscious in my 15-year-old memory.
Nothing.
The Politburo and Handbook had done its job well in this regard. I was truly a grieving sister at her brother’s bedside, begging God for a miracle. If not a miracle, then promising God, “I will take care of him for as long as he lives in this state.”
I said these things.
Sean’s body lingered without regaining consciousness until he succumbed to pneumonia within two weeks. I was devastated.
However, Sean’s death would slowly, in the minutest steps imaginable, begin to thaw out my memories. That first year after his death, I had a flashback out of the blue of a later abuse memory. Sean had bribed me a dollar in exchange for sex. I was six. Afterwards I was delighted to run to the candy store and buy something I had wanted.
I looked at this memory that popped into my mind out of nowhere as if I was looking at someone impersonating me. That really wasn’t me. That wasn’t Sean. Those were just characters that just happened to look like us. Just like that, it vanished. The Politburo had quietly called in some welders to repair the leak. The fix would hold for four more years.
Sean had killed himself in 1975. Slightly more than a year later another brother, Chris, tragically died in a jeep accident. Chris, 24, was the dreamer of my five brothers. He was the singer and songwriter who dropped out of college a semester shy of a degree to travel to Colorado and California. He made his way tending bar and playing his guitar in small restaurants. Chris had a special touch about him; he made you feel alive. He was a fun guy to be around.
Chris was a Jackson Browne fan; he even sent some of his songs to Mr. Browne. Out of all my brothers, I felt the most noticed by him. He would gently poke at my cocoon –with his best Wicked Witch of the West imitations or just hanging out with his dog, Nuper. He knew I liked to write and he encouraged me. I watched, fascinated, as he treated a kitten born with a malformed leg. My brothers called her “Tanglefoot.” Chris massaged her little limb faithfully to try and fix it. That’s how I saw my brother Chris: he could set things right. Then at some point after Sean died Chris came home from his travels and moved his gear back into the basement. I was thrilled. He had decided to move back to Cleveland.
One night, soon after he got back home, I saw him as I was leaving to get an award from Junior Achievement (a program that teaches high school students entrepreneurial and business skills). I had sold an admirable quantity of personalized golf balls (“Can’t you just see your name soaring through the air?”)
Yes. I actually said that.
Chris’ smile filled me. I knew he was going through his own struggles, but he had once more made time for his little sis. I hung onto that smile, because not a week later the phone rang around two or three in the morning with someone – the police, the coroner’s office – explaining there had been “an accident.” It was raining and Chris took “dead man’s turn” too fast.
He was dead.
My mother was never the same. Her spirit broke. No one could blame her, burying two of her boys before their time. I don’t think any of us were quite the same after Chris died. It was, for our family, as songwriter Don McLean put it, “the day the music died.”
For so many years, a long biblical-traipsing-in-the-wastelands-generation of time, I wandered. The 1972 Jackson Browne song, “Doctor My Eyes” gave voice to my anguished search for my lost brother, for my broken and hurt past, and my determination to create something redemptive from all this loss:
Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand
I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can
I saw my brother Chris lurking in so many of Barry’s songs. In a phrase. Or a refrain. A word recast would reawaken the pain, which by then I discovered was heaped layer upon layer, rotting and festering. Yet thank goodness for the Handbook which kept feeding me recommendations: stay numb, deny the pain; smile girl, nobody needs to know – all which kept the sorrow at bay during that dark summer of 1976.
So I imagined Chris as my big brother reassuring me in “As Sure as I’m Standing Here”:
As sure as I’m standing here
You’ll never have to be afraid
As sure as I’m standing here
I’ll try and help you find your way
Even “Mandy.” That haunting eight-bar introduction and opening lines became the recipe of all things griefdom:
I remember all my life
Raining down as cold as ice
Shadows in the night
Night turns into
Morning just another day
Happy people pass my way
Looking in their eyes
I see your memory
I wrote about Chris.
However I continued that practice the Politburo instilled in me; I tore that poem to shreds.
I tore up everything creative I wrote.
Notes:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa?page=5
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
[email protected]
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the previous post.
At the time of Sean’s death, my memories were still perfectly, hermeneutically sealed. Nothing of his abuse of me was conscious in my 15-year-old memory.
Nothing.
The Politburo and Handbook had done its job well in this regard. I was truly a grieving sister at her brother’s bedside, begging God for a miracle. If not a miracle, then promising God, “I will take care of him for as long as he lives in this state.”
I said these things.
Sean’s body lingered without regaining consciousness until he succumbed to pneumonia within two weeks. I was devastated.
However, Sean’s death would slowly, in the minutest steps imaginable, begin to thaw out my memories. That first year after his death, I had a flashback out of the blue of a later abuse memory. Sean had bribed me a dollar in exchange for sex. I was six. Afterwards I was delighted to run to the candy store and buy something I had wanted.
I looked at this memory that popped into my mind out of nowhere as if I was looking at someone impersonating me. That really wasn’t me. That wasn’t Sean. Those were just characters that just happened to look like us. Just like that, it vanished. The Politburo had quietly called in some welders to repair the leak. The fix would hold for four more years.
Sean had killed himself in 1975. Slightly more than a year later another brother, Chris, tragically died in a jeep accident. Chris, 24, was the dreamer of my five brothers. He was the singer and songwriter who dropped out of college a semester shy of a degree to travel to Colorado and California. He made his way tending bar and playing his guitar in small restaurants. Chris had a special touch about him; he made you feel alive. He was a fun guy to be around.
Chris was a Jackson Browne fan; he even sent some of his songs to Mr. Browne. Out of all my brothers, I felt the most noticed by him. He would gently poke at my cocoon –with his best Wicked Witch of the West imitations or just hanging out with his dog, Nuper. He knew I liked to write and he encouraged me. I watched, fascinated, as he treated a kitten born with a malformed leg. My brothers called her “Tanglefoot.” Chris massaged her little limb faithfully to try and fix it. That’s how I saw my brother Chris: he could set things right. Then at some point after Sean died Chris came home from his travels and moved his gear back into the basement. I was thrilled. He had decided to move back to Cleveland.
One night, soon after he got back home, I saw him as I was leaving to get an award from Junior Achievement (a program that teaches high school students entrepreneurial and business skills). I had sold an admirable quantity of personalized golf balls (“Can’t you just see your name soaring through the air?”)
Yes. I actually said that.
Chris’ smile filled me. I knew he was going through his own struggles, but he had once more made time for his little sis. I hung onto that smile, because not a week later the phone rang around two or three in the morning with someone – the police, the coroner’s office – explaining there had been “an accident.” It was raining and Chris took “dead man’s turn” too fast.
He was dead.
My mother was never the same. Her spirit broke. No one could blame her, burying two of her boys before their time. I don’t think any of us were quite the same after Chris died. It was, for our family, as songwriter Don McLean put it, “the day the music died.”
For so many years, a long biblical-traipsing-in-the-wastelands-generation of time, I wandered. The 1972 Jackson Browne song, “Doctor My Eyes” gave voice to my anguished search for my lost brother, for my broken and hurt past, and my determination to create something redemptive from all this loss:
Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand
I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can
I saw my brother Chris lurking in so many of Barry’s songs. In a phrase. Or a refrain. A word recast would reawaken the pain, which by then I discovered was heaped layer upon layer, rotting and festering. Yet thank goodness for the Handbook which kept feeding me recommendations: stay numb, deny the pain; smile girl, nobody needs to know – all which kept the sorrow at bay during that dark summer of 1976.
So I imagined Chris as my big brother reassuring me in “As Sure as I’m Standing Here”:
As sure as I’m standing here
You’ll never have to be afraid
As sure as I’m standing here
I’ll try and help you find your way
Even “Mandy.” That haunting eight-bar introduction and opening lines became the recipe of all things griefdom:
I remember all my life
Raining down as cold as ice
Shadows in the night
Night turns into
Morning just another day
Happy people pass my way
Looking in their eyes
I see your memory
I wrote about Chris.
However I continued that practice the Politburo instilled in me; I tore that poem to shreds.
I tore up everything creative I wrote.
Notes:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/838305.Mother_Teresa?page=5
Give the gift of music to the next generation through donations to:
The Manilow Music Project
8295 South La Cienega Boulevard
Inglewood, CA 90301
[email protected]
Click here to go to the next post or click here to return to the previous post.