I was googling sad songs because that is what makes me feel better. It helps me release my saddness and I cry like a baby.

I lost my brother November 22nd, 2008, a little over a month ago. To make it even harder I lost my Mom December 6th, 2006. It is difficult.

Like your brother, my brother was young. He was only 26!

Thank you for letting me vent on your page. I hope you find peace. A good book to read is Everyday becomes a chance by Max Lucado. It is simple and helps a little.

IrreverentFreelancer’s last blog post..A Screw You! with a Heart

kk

Katharine’s last blog post..Lean Times in Publishing

Do you still have the beekeeper’s daughter poem? I’d love to read it again. I’ll e-mail you.

kk

i have a distinct memory of collapsing in my roommate’s arms on the white linoleum tiles of my dorm room the night i learned of jesse’s death.

the next day was a work day. i remember sleeping late, alone in the house. my mother called me to find out what i was doing.

i was scared to go to your house. you weren’t home yet. i didn’t know what i would do or say. what would be expected of me. my mother told me that i didn’t have a choice. that i had to go. she said, do whatever cathie needs you to do.

when i arrived, your mom was on the phone. cubbied into that phone corner in the kitchen, the long phone line limp, running the length of her body to the floor. the kitchen was full of women. it was full of women. i don’t know what they were all doing. making food. someone cutting fruit salad. i said, what can i do? someone told me there was laundry on the line. i went through the backdoor, up the stairs there, and i took the laundry down. i waited, alone, for a ghost. for some feeling at my back, or some sound, maybe, or something. but the backyard was only the woods and the cows and clothespins in my pockets.

later, i sat on the front-front steps with a bowl of fruit salad. my tears fell into it. each bite had a certain sensation – something that verged on being unpleasant. it was sweet & salty & too full of flavor, too full of water over-filling my mouth. i have a memory of alan asking me if i was ok.

how completely unlike any other experience, those days and nights that we found ourselves in. we were learning what mourning was. wrapped into each other in sleeping bags at night, eating and not eating, surrounded by teenagers and mothers, a thousand pieces of fruit in baskets, fast-arriving sympathy cards. funeral clothes. hours and hours of receiving. and candles at the track. armbands. a full, full church.

my parents attended jesse’s funeral in a room below the sanctuary because there was not enough space in the main room.

one night i told my mother, sitting in the family room, that i didn’t know what would happen when everyone went home again, when the cushion of community dispersed. my tears welled out of sheer helplessness, then – but let me tell you this now:

you are my tactile sister. who knows a hundred million beautiful details: who can describe anything. you terminate two-dimensions with language, making any space that holds your text – the air or the page – pregnant with your relief. and you know the details of your memory, the things you learned in those first weeks have become wrapped like a seed in the fruit of the 2071+ days that have followed. kristen, i love you. don’t be afraid of the stories you have to tell on your dark guitar-nights. tell them as slowly as you need to, but tell them deeply – to yourself, if to no one else, until that seed of memory shows you its true nature: that it is as much an image of the end of a life as it is of life’s continuance.

walt, from crossing b-klyn ferry:
It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Oddly, my sadness comes every holiday season, starting with Thanksgiving. I mourn all those long-gone people who used to crowd into Gramma’s house for a meal made by a saint (she was). The noisy Gallaghers, the rowdy Widmers, the assorted visiting cousins from the Leslie side and beyond….at the first strains of “over the river and through the woods…” I well up. I miss them all. I can’t yet watch A Charlie Brown Christmas without crying at the end. Those songs, oddly, are my release.

Lori’s last blog post..Tunnel Vision