Five Years

Last Wednesday marked the fifth anniversary of my brother's death. It was just a normal, busy, teaching day unrecognized and unmarked by most of those I came in contact with. I thought of Nate, and of the events that were so crippling to me five years ago. Today, I feel peace, but it is not a peace that I have striven for nor worked to earn. It is the peace granted by the passing of time, the fading of memory, the persistence of distancing myself, and the love and comfort offered me by God. I have not worked to reach the goals I have set for healing each year since he died. This year, the busy-ness of my first year of teaching has kept me from feeling extreme guilt, yearning to DO something about this, or to "fix" our relationship. Someday, I would like to write about what or how our relationship could have been, perhaps from the perspective of a loving older sister, which I feel I wasn't. Perhaps writing will help me see my brother in a different light, and it may help me to mourn and heal more fully. But, for now, I will content myself with missing him and remembering things like his spontanious laugh, his two webbed little toes (on his right foot, I think), his talent for catching trout in the tiniest and most shallow streams, his inconsolable bouts of anxiety which caused him to sleep outside of my parents' bedroom for months at a time when he was a pre-teen, and my worry for his safety and well being as a kindergartner when I was in second grade--I remember telling my mom that I didn't feel that he was ready for school and begging for her to have him wait a year, but he went anyway, and he spent the year running away and being put into resource classes that he hated because everyone at school had labled him as stupid. He was troubled, but not stupid. Sometimes I wish I had a relationship with him like any of my other six siblings had, but I know they were flawed as well, as we came from the same family and we are all human. Some may even have been worse than ours was anyway. I am not seeking closure, and I'm not seeking answers. I am seeking to have the courage to explore what was, what IS. I seek to turn and see things the way they were and the way they are, not to change anything. I do seek more peace, active peace.