Dear Kid Brothers

In the Before Times…

Dear Kid Brothers,

On this day forty-one years ago, life as we knew it ceased to exist. John’s fourteenth birthday was just a few days away. My Sweet Sixteen was still visible in the rear view window of the two-door Pinto out front waiting for me to learn to drive.

It was a Saturday, sunny and crisp like it is today. I woke up early to get ready for my part-time job in Manayunk; Mom, who was up with her first cigarette, agreed to drive me.

As you know, we never made it out the front door.

Dad was dead.

From that moment when I found him, crouched on the floor in child’s pose, his skin cool to the touch, everything changed. It sounds so trite as I read these words out loud. But it’s as if the axis of the earth had shifted, or the tectonic plates below Penarth Road had cracked. There was now a Before and After in the story of our family.

In many ways, we never really recovered.

In a recurring dream for several years after his death, all five of us are on a wooden raft, riding the rapids, and Dad is steering. He’s singing as he used to do. Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily  life is but...

Rough water comes out of the blue, and our happy-go-lucky captain – along with his oar – is swallowed by the river. The raft splits into four pieces, each of us barely hanging onto our piece of wood. We drift off in different directions.

In the real-life version, you guys turned to drugs and alcohol, separate and together. On my little piece of raft, I laser focused on schoolwork and an overachieving load of extracurricular activities. Class president, student council, French honor society, yearbook, school paper – anything to fill the indescribable void.

With each passing year, we literally drifted away from each other. We did not keep up with each other’s lives and try to heal. We came together in an emergency, when someone was in the emergency room, on the run, or locked up. The world in which you inhabited was far away from mine. Impenetrable and galaxies apart. For many years, I felt like an only child, with a parent in constant triage mode.

Our tree was on the verge of falling down.

Dear Kid Brothers, forty-one years since that day, we are all in our fifties. No longer kids. We live several states apart. Nearly everyone in the extended family is gone, and has been for more than a decade.

We are all that we have.

Dear Kid Brothers, it’s time to pull out the rake from the shed and gather autumn leaves like we used to. Jump in the pile for old times’ sake. Then haul them away to be composted. It’s time.

Love, Big Sis.