Grace has fallen

Part One

When I was single, my friends and I used to amuse ourselves playing something we called the Corpse Game. We'd determine how long it would take for any one of us to be found if we died in our homes. My average was five days. If I died on a Friday night and had no plans for the weekend, it would be Monday before anyone would notice I was missing. Coworkers would assume I'd just called someone else to say I was sick or late. On Tuesday, my boss or HR would call my house. It would be Wednesday before anyone ever actually showed up at my house. And depending on the situation, they could get in then or maybe that night. So five days from death to discovery. It was all very, very amusing. Until it took five days to find my brother's body. 

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I am often overwhelmed by images that may be of a past remembered or a past desired. Images of late afternoon sunlight through a car windshield, my mother's profile, songs sung on winding roads that follow the curving path of a river. How much of it is true and how much of it is the memory of the childhood I often wished I had?

Everything unwinds like a damaged film too long stored in a damp closet. Held up to the light, some images are true and clear and others are spotted and faded and others gone entirely. Frames missing. If they ever existed at all. 

The one true thing was my brother. He is in every memory, every event, every frame that I can pull up with breathtaking clarity. Fourteen months younger than I, he was my responsibility for as long as I have memory. He was my witness, my confidant, my best friend, my enemy, my playmate, my accuser, my tormentor, my steadiness, my pride, my responsibility. He was my brother. 

In the weeks following his death, I didn't think I could live through the grief. It's an ache that never leaves you, even in your sleep. I tried to slip deeper, where it couldn't touch me. But it slid beneath my clenched eyes, past my dreams of grocery shopping and walks and Christmas dinners and a time before it was all changed. It slipped past the home movies I so desperately tried to play, soundless yet so filled with my brother's laugh...the sound and temperature of a compelling spirit and sweetness tinged by darkness and pain and angst that begged to be held and understood and seen. 

Then one day the ache left me for a moment as I smiled at a stranger, and the loss of the ache itself hit me. I was sick. I was weak in the knees, nauseated and spinning and wondering if this moment of grieflessness meant I was forgetting. And that thought was more unbearable than the grief ever was. 

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This is the first in a series of not-so-funny remembrances about my brother and his death. I apologize for those who come to laugh, but this story has been a long time coming and perhaps shows a different side to the mom who has been known to call her son a freak but loves him desperately and with all her heart. As she did his namesake, Shawn. As we draw near to what would have been his 43rd birthday and the anniversary of his ruthless separation from us in December of 2001, more excerpts from "Grace Has Fallen" — a book of short stories...some fiction...some not — will appear here. Thank you for reading.