The trees never mind bursting into flame and jumping off into the darkening world. They give me courage.
My sister’s boy, Michael, went down to New York City for his eighteenth birthday. He had told us all that he’d enlisted in the Armed Services, like his Dad had, and that was hard enough to imagine. We anticipated the worst. He was so young and sunny and brave, a daredevil. We didn’t want him to go. He shouldn’t have been drinking, underage, in the city. When Mike and his buddies realized they were on the wrong side of the tracks, Mike dared his friends to run across the track to the right side where they belonged. They did—and made it. He was right behind them, and didn’t.
It’s been almost three years now. I think about him all the time. My sister is grieving hard, but moving through it. I helped with the funeral arrangements. I helped his friends make a Facebook page where they post music and poems and things they remember about him. I helped with the fundraiser for a small memorial prize the school will give in his memory. I went to see a therapist at the Carson Center because when I wasn’t helping with these things, I just felt stuck, frozen, like I couldn’t get the tears out. I thought if I started to really feel it, everything would fall apart. How could he be gone?
I see sunflowers all the time. The real ones, and pictures of them. They are him. I’m just at the beginning, but I want to live fully through the grief. My therapist and I talk about this. I know the grief will change and that I will change with it. I know that it can deepen me and my life, that it can open me. He calls me to be brave, even now, as my world darkens for a while.
By JAC Patrissi
