Issue 5: Spring 2018

Creative NonFiction

The White Butterfly

Shilo Niziolek

I try and unpack memories of my mom’s mom, but they are hard to find mixed around in all the years that have passed in the attic of my mind. Time tends to fuzzy up all the good things in life: a memory of a beloved family member, the games played as children, the man before he became the monster who broke my heart. I know the good memories are up there, if only I could find a light.

There are things I know for sure about my grandma from being told. They have become memories in the same way that I have a memory of me as a toddler getting my head stuck in a stair banister and having butter smeared on it to get me unstuck. I never really know if this happened to me or if I saw it on TV and I have claimed as my own. In this same way, I know things about my grandma Janice. I know she was a saint, and not in the sanctimonious bullshit kind of way I now see so often, but in a way where she genuinely cared about everyone around her. She had five kids of her own and still found it in her heart to work with the foster care system, taking in and loving kids from the worst homes imaginable. She would also take in animals off the street. She wanted to protect every form of life.

I remember things that aren’t real memories either, but memories of home videos or pictures my Grandpa had taken in their house in California. There is a video where my Grandma is standing in the kitchen, leaning on the counter and chatting on the phone. Grandpa is pestering her while she tries to hold a conversation, when she passes gas, loudly. Grandpa begins chuckling from behind the lens, and he accuses her, “Did you just fart?” I hear the sound of grandma shooing him away while trying not to laugh, it is forever in my mind, as is the way she said, “Tom!” to my grandpa. This is the only time where I can conjure her voice. It is so clear to me how she loved him in that one word, the way she said his name.

The first real memory I have of her is from the short period of time where my grandparents, my mom, sister, brother, and I all lived in Wyoming. It was 4:00 in the morning. I remember the bright red lights of the digital clock as I passed through the room, into the hall, on the way to the faint glowing light from the living room. I had been crying and I wasn’t much older than a toddler, when I saw my Grandma Janice sitting in a chair, completely dressed for the day. Even her tennis shoes were on and laced. She sat scribbling under lamplight in a journal as dawn crept through the windows. I am not sure how long I stood there in silence, frozen by the quiet moment that stretches out in my mind like a long summer day. Suddenly, she noticed me and my tear-streaked cheeks. I explained through gasps of air that my hands hurt like they were tingly and on fire. Grandma assured me that they had just fallen asleep, a concept I did not quite understand. She massaged my hands until they were awake, and then she sent the rest of me back to bed.

That is what is real: that memory of a kind woman who sat up early in the morning, sharing her private thoughts with paper; someone who took others’ pain away; who was awake and living while the rest of the world was sleeping. Maybe that is the moment I wanted to become a writer, for there has never been a time when that was not what I wanted to be, so the dream must be distilled in some far-off time in a way I cannot see it even form. Maybe, something in my grandma Janice knew her time would be cut short, so she had to fill every last bit of her time with everything she had to give. Maybe, even now, I can learn from the woman who I haven’t known in over 17 years, an amount of time which is officially over half my life span, at 26.

Janice Sannar was 54 years old when she died of a heart-attack. She had diabetes (the type which is now known to be an auto-immune disease) she ate healthy, she didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs, she went for walks every day, but there was nothing she could have done to stop the heart-attack from coming. I was 8 years old the day that Grandma Janice passed away.

 It was a hot summer day in Cody, Wyoming. By that time, my sister was old enough to stay at home with us to babysit, although my mom came home on lunches when she could to check on us. She was at home on lunch break, outside watering the plants, when the phone rang. My brother brought the cordless phone out to her. After a couple of minutes, Dustin came back in and told us that a Grandma had died, although he did not know which one. For some reason we all assumed it was a Grandma we didn’t know very well, not thinking that death could attach itself to anyone we really knew or loved. I do not know what prompted me to cross to the window. There, I saw my mom outside in the grass on her knees, her pastel pink dress billowed out around her, and her brown curly hair lay limp down the side of her tear-drenched face. That was the first time I saw my mom cry, bent over her garden of succulents, which we had always referred to as mother-hens. My little brother Dustin, always brave beyond his own knowledge, went out to her and held her while they cried. I often wonder about how many women have been there before, on their knees, hearts torn open.

I remember the outfit I wore to my Grandmother’s funeral: ocean blue t-shirt—sweater material—and a matching blue and black checkered skirt. It came in a set. I remember standing outside the funeral home and watching as my mom and little brother went in to see my Grandma in her open casket. Even then, I was afraid of death. I knew it was something beyond my reach, something you could not return from. I had this fear that it was something catchable. I did not want to see my grandma that way. I was not ready to be changed. I did not want her death to touch me, but it did, despite my ardent protests. I remember my little brother coming out of the funeral home and telling me he put a rose on grandma. Even now, the image of this moment in my mind horrifies me. Dustin was fearless back then, and I was so weak.

My mother told me just a couple of years ago that she was very worried about me during the weeks after grandma passed away. She said I did not cry, that she would find me hiding under counters and in small places, doing nothing but sitting in silence. On the day of Grandma Janice’s funeral, I remember sitting in the grass with Dustin, at our mom’s feet. I recall looking up at my mom during that sermon and seeing silent tears slip down her face, a hollow-silent cry I could not possibly yet understand, though something inside of me recognized it and part of me split right open, torn at the seams of my hot blue sweater on that August day. I had been able to shut out the death that surrounded me, but my mom’s grief could not be ignored, for it was through her that I had always found my strength. Though I could not grieve for the grandmother that I dearly loved, I could grieve for my mom, for her loss. I have always been better at feeling others’ pain because what I feel is so compressed and compacted. I have always been so stone cold that my loss, in comparison, seemed so small and insignificant.

Many years later, I would have an accident, a tubal pregnancy, really an un-pregnancy: an egg and sperm had joined together, but my fallopian tube did not have the room for them, so it would not let them pass. The un-baby tried to form a life in my body, but I was not meant for such a thing. My body proved to be an inhospitable environment. At 20, I was already barren. My tube ruptured and I lost nearly all of my blood. I nearly lost my life. In fact, I did lose it—twice, my heart stopped beating. The death I had so ferociously avoided had found me anyways. When I awoke from my surgery in a drug-induced haze, I was told that my living was nothing short of a miracle, that it was my feisty-stubborn spirit that saved me. Somewhere, in a vague memory, I think I told my parents that is was Grandma Janice who saved me, that she had told some unnamed god to put me back, as my time was not yet done on this earth. It was my grandmother’s feisty-stubborn willpower that had saved me. Real or not-real, this is what I know.

Everything I have accomplished since then has been with that in my mind. Here I sit, early in the morning. No one is awake yet, except the dogs. The morning is quiet, and a pen is in my hand. No little girl will ever ask me to rub the sleep from her hands, but here I sit scribbling in my journal in the early hours of the day. I do what I can to help rescue pit bulls, I love deeply, I battle auto-immune disorders, and one day, hopefully, the things I write in these journals will reach people and will help ease their pain in the way that my mom and my grandmother have eased mine. In this way, my grandma, a woman I can barely remember, lives on.

One spring day, I was walking home from the park when I noticed a small white butterfly floating through the air next to me. That same butterfly followed me all the way to my front door. When I stepped inside I sent a message to my mom telling her of this experience. I said, “I think the butterfly may have been Grandma Janice.”

Mom said, “It might have been, or maybe it was a message from her.”

A small, simple, hello.

Shilo Niziolek is a student of Creative Writing & English Literature at Marylhurst University, and a lifetime student of the birds and the trees. She lives in Portland Oregon with her partner Andrew and their two dogs. Her work has been published in the Broad River Review, M Review, Z Publishing's Best Emerging Oregon Poets Anthology, and a short fiction piece is forthcoming in The Gateway Review. 

The Graveyard Custodian

 Cat Pleska

If he noticed me, he gave no sign. He crept along the graveyard’s wall, swaying his round head side to side, scanning for movement, I’m sure hopeful. His white fur stood in stark relief against the charcoal-grey stained gravestones. Part of his fur, ginger warm, allowed me to see his muscles rippling as he jumped down to the gravel path. He approached a huge birch tree rising from the middle of a grave. Sitting down delicately at the tree trunk’s base, he cautiously began to climb. Then I saw what he’d spotted: a Blackbird. The bird, out of reach, remained silent, his feathers smoothed, his demeanor serene, as if he knew the cat would never reach him. But suddenly he flapped and he flew, out over the high stone wall that encircles the Holavallagardur Cemetery. I quickly lost sight of him rising through the tree canopy.

My gaze dropped down to Mr. Ginger, who jumped down from the birch’s trunk and then gracefully leapt to the top of a gravestone. He settled on his new perch to survey the grounds and assure himself all was clear.

In terms of Icelandic cemeteries’ age, this one is relatively new, established in 1838, a mile or so from Reykjavik’s City Center. The churchyard cemetery, nearby, had grown full with twenty-five generations of Icelanders. But yet, burials continued in the old churchyard for a while after the latest resting place was prepared. The new cemetery had not yet been consecrated and would not for a while. First, a custodian had to be established.

But not a custodian who was living.

Before people agreed to internment in the new cemetery, someone must be buried there prior to consecration, who then does not lie in peace and who does not decay. Gudrun Oddsdottir, the wife of the magistrate Thordur Jonassen, became the first one interred; she became the custodian who watches for those arriving later. Could it be she soothes new arrivals, who wring their hands, unsure where to go? Does she gently steer them to where they are to lie down and slumber? Perhaps the custodian holds their hand, smiles at them, assures them she will keep a tidy yard and make sure all is quiet so they can hear songbirds.

Standing in this cloistered garden, I imagine her dancing among the graves, her apron flapping in a soft breeze, watch as her hand plucks violets for her hair, or perhaps she’ll lean against a rowan or larch tree, resting, waiting for the next Icelander she will guide. Beyond the high stone walls that are topped with a moss which grows no where else in the world, traffic whizzes by, people stroll up and down the sidewalks chattering of their lives. Yet, inside the walls, where birches grow straight out of the graves, gravestone carvings bear witness to generations of sons and dottirs, the Icelandic souls sleep, sure all is well and taken care of by the custodian.

And her cat.

Cat Pleska is an author, educator, and storyteller. Her memoir, Riding on Comets, was published by WVU Press in 2015. She's currently working on a collection of travel/personal essays about Iceland and Ireland, titled: The I's Have it.

Uncle John

Justin Hunt

Uncle John, my dad’s brother, was born in Conway Springs, Kansas in 1903. He was mentally disabled, what people used to call “retarded.” When he was an adolescent, my grandparents took him to specialists in Wichita and to the KU School of Medicine in Kansas City to see if he could learn a trade, but no one seemed able to help. Determined to exhaust all options, they had him evaluated at a clinic in Chicago. The examining doctor proclaimed there was nothing he or anyone else could do to improve Uncle John’s prospects.

“He’ll never be able to work,” he told my grandparents. “He’ll probably turn violent, and it won’t be long before he does. You’ll have to find a place to put him.”

When my grandparents died in 1919, Dad, at the age of twenty-two, became his sixteen-year-old brother’s guardian. It was a responsibility he would shoulder for the next fifty-one years.
 

My first clear memory of Uncle John dates to 1955, the year I turned five and television came to Conway Springs. I was playing in our basement when I heard people in the kitchen.

“Why, hello, Brother!” my mother said.

“Mary Kayus, hon’.”

I recognized Uncle John’s voice and ran upstairs. He and Mom were standing with a man I didn’t know but would later learn was Forest Skiles, owner of Conway Springs’ radio repair shop. Next to them on the floor was a large, crated box.

“We’re getting a television, Justin,” Mom explained. “Forest just got it in today. It’s real heavy, and your uncle’s gonna help. Ain’t that so, Brother?”

“Sure is, Mary Kayus,” Uncle John replied, grinning.

“Mary K, can you make sure the door’s open?” Forest said. “John, you take the front end.”

“I got ‘er, Fory Skiles!” said Uncle John.

My uncle locked his thick arms around the crate, dragged it to the basement door and muscled it down the stairs while Forest held the other end. I followed and sat down on the couch in our reading area to watch as Uncle John and Forest pried the crate open and pulled out our TV, a big Zenith in a solid-wood console. As Forest finished wiring it up, Uncle John sat down next to me and put his arm over my shoulders.

“Whada ya think, Ookie?” he said.

Uncle John, who always called me by my nickname, gave me a squeeze. He was as excited as I was by the first image on the Zenith’s screen. Neither of us had ever seen a TV.

The following year, I started first grade and got a bicycle for Christmas. I would ride it downtown after school and on Saturday mornings to buy a two-cent stick of licorice at Nichols’ Variety Store. Sometimes, I’d go to the State Bank, where Dad was president, in order to deposit the money I’d saved up from my allowance. Uncle John, it seemed, was always in the lobby or standing somewhere outside on Spring Avenue, our small town’s four-block business street, one hand stuck in his bib overalls, a King Edward cigar in the other and a railroad engineer’s cap on his head.

“Hello, Ookie!” he’d say whenever he saw me. He’d bend down, sling his arm around my neck, pull me close and rub his cheeks and chin against mine. His face bristled with stubble, and his flannel shirt reeked of cigar smoke. But I didn’t mind. His nuzzling didn’t bother me either, unusual as it was in a family not given to displays of affection. He was my uncle John. And sometimes he would slip me a shiny, silver quarter—the same amount I got at home each week, but only after doing chores.

In my early years, Uncle John lived by himself in an upstairs room at the Midland Hotel, above Wheeler’s Grocery and Dry Goods. He took all of his meals next door at the Northside Café and paid for them with tickets Dad bought in advance and doled out each week. My uncle never strayed from his set menu. For breakfast, a stack of hotcakes with bacon and eggs. At lunch, the Northside’s daily special, either fried chicken or chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and lima beans. Dinner was steak with French fries and pie à la mode. Uncle John’s appetite was prodigious, his body sturdy and muscular.

When the Midland Hotel closed in the early 1960s, about the time I turned eleven and began working summers at the State Bank, Dad leased a room for his brother from Mr. Leddy, a widower whose house was just a few yards down the alley from the Northside Café. Other than his sleeping quarters, nothing changed for Uncle John. He continued to go to the post office several times each morning to pick up the State Bank’s mail. After lunch, he’d sit for a while with the old men who gathered at the front end of Meils Hardware. Then he’d resume his rounds up and down Spring Avenue, shouting hello and waving to everyone he met.

One morning in June 1963, fifty-some years after the doctor in Chicago had warned my grandparents about their son John, I was working at the bank and saw my uncle through the front window. He was trudging over the sidewalk toward the lobby door, balling his fists and scowling. He threw the door open and stomped across the floor toward the desk where Ash Cranmer, the bank’s cashier, was typing a letter.         

“By God, you better leave that satchel alone!” Uncle John yelled as he pointed to the leather mail pouch on Ash’s desk. His outstretched arm trembled. His deep-set eyes glared. I’d never seen him like that before.

Ash said nothing and kept on typing. Uncle John released a torrent of dark words—garbled curses and oaths not even Dad could decipher. But it was clear he was angry that someone had picked up the day’s first mail drop at the post office. That was his job, by God, and the satchel was his, too. That much we understood.

Uncle John grabbed the satchel and tromped over to Dad’s end of the counter. Although he’d yelled at Ash, it was his guardian brother he looked to for satisfaction.

“It’s okay, John,” Dad said, his voice even. “It’s harvest, and we thought you were workin’ at the grain elevator.”

“They ain’t cuttin’, Brother. Dew’s too heavy.”

“Well, that’s good, ‘cause we’re awful busy today,” Dad said. “It’d be a big help if you’d keep checkin’ our box.”

Uncle John snorted and looked at Ash again, not realizing I was the one who’d picked up the bank’s mail that morning. But his face had already begun to loosen. With the satchel under his left arm, he walked out of the lobby and turned west toward the post office.

I was a senior in high school the winter Uncle John asked for a new sweater. As was often the case when he wanted something, he approached my mother first.

“I sure do need it, Mary Kayus. Don’t know if that brother of mine’ll buy me one.”

“Well, John, I’ll talk to him.”

Mom prevailed on Dad to tap my uncle’s guardianship account and order an extra-large sweater from the John Plain catalog. A week later, John Plain sent a postcard saying they no longer had the item in stock. My parents then placed an order with Sears & Roebuck. Each day, Uncle John would pick up the mail and expect to find a package with his sweater. Each day, he’d come in the bank, empty-handed and crestfallen. As it turned out, Sears was also out of stock. When Mom gave him the bad news, Uncle John fumed and stomped his foot against the lobby floor.

“By God, I better have a sweater here by sundown!”

“Now, Brother, we’ll see what we can do,” Mom said.

She called Woolf Brothers in Wichita and arranged for a fancy cardigan to be sent by special delivery. After it arrived the next day, Uncle John saw Mom in the bank. He sidled up to her and laid his head on her shoulder.

“Oh, Mary Kayus, hon’. I’m so sorry I talked rough. I’m so sorry.”

“That’s alright, John, just forget about that.”

Although my uncle had a child’s temperament and sometimes boiled over from frustration, he was never violent. His flashes of anger always gave way to remorse.

Uncle John couldn’t read and wasn’t able to hold down a regular job, but he worked throughout his life. Everyone knew he was eager to earn his own spending money, and people gave him opportunities that matched his abilities. Dad paid him to pick up the State Bank’s mail. Until diabetes weakened him at age sixty-five, he shoveled out wheat trucks every summer at the Garretson Grain Company. Business owners like Forest Skiles and Ike Meils tapped him for odd jobs. Others lent him their cars and pickups so he could run errands for them. In those years, getting a Kansas driver’s license didn’t seem to require literacy, and my dad would let him use our Cadillac to deliver items to my Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Pip in Cheney, a farm town twenty miles away. Uncle John was, as Dad used to say, “pretty darn stout” and a reliable hand for moving anything heavy.

But Conway Springs’ engagement of my uncle ran deeper than work. During the five summers I worked at the bank, I could see that the town sheltered him as much as our family did. He was the son of early-day settlers and had never lived anywhere else. He was never more than a hundred paces from people he’d grown up with. He was a town fixture, known to all and loved by most.

No mental images of my youth stick with me more than those of Uncle John with his friend, Fred Hoover, a retired railroader who also spent his days on Spring Avenue. The two of them would sit on a steel window ledge on the south side of the Talbert Lumber Company, just across the street from the State Bank. When the sun rose to an intolerable angle, they would shift to the shade of Talbert’s southeast corner, where the words “COAL, LUMBER & NAILS” were painted in huge white letters on the building’s red brick wall. As cars, pickups and farm trucks rolled by on Highway 49, their drivers would wave, and Uncle John and Fred would wave back. They smiled but seldom spoke, Uncle John puffing on his cigar, Fred hooking leathery thumbs under the straps of his blue denim overalls. Every now and then, they would remove their engineer caps, wipe sweat from their foreheads and look skyward for signs of rain before pulling their caps back on—often at the same time, always at the same angle as before.

Almost fifty years have passed since Uncle John and Fred Hoover sat for the last time on their Talbert Lumber Company perch. When I was growing up, it didn’t occur to me that they would never have met had our family lived in a city, even one of modest size. I couldn’t have understood that urban life would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for my uncle to live in his own place and find meaningful work. Nor could I have fathomed how living anywhere but Conway Springs, or another small town like it, might have proved the Chicago doctor right. He’ll never be able to work. He’ll probably turn violent, and it won’t be long before he does. You’ll have to find a place to put him.
 

Whenever I think of Uncle John, I am flush with his kind touch. And I think of how Dad, Mom and the people of Conway Springs looked after him until his last breath. I recall the drinking fountain that “The Friends of John Hunt” installed on Spring Avenue in his memory—beneath a brass plaque bearing his name. I remember the way Mom’s voice warmed whenever she spoke of her brother-in-law. I remember the tear that trailed down Dad’s cheek one night, years later, as our family reminisced about his late brother.

And I am haunted by what is lost: a time and way of life that are no more. A landscape wide enough to weave the threads of people like my uncle into our tribe’s common cloth. A town small and tight enough to hold them safe.

Uncle John died in 1970. For the next sixteen years, Dad used his brother’s leather satchel to carry mail and other paperwork. Every day, he would take it to the bank, go to the post office and bring it home. Every day, until he retired at ninety. Dad called the satchel “John” and kept it on a stool in our kitchen.

I have “John” now. It’s in one of the boxes I packed up in Conway Springs in 2010, the year I moved Mom to North Carolina and our family left Kansas for good. Before I die, I must find someone to give it to.

Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. In 2012, he retired from a long business career in order to write full-time. His work has been published by The Atlanta Review, The Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, The Live Canon Anthology (U.K.), WinningWriters.com, Spoon River Poetry Review, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose and Bacopa Literary Review, among others. Hunt’s recently completed memoir, Dominoes Are Played at Joe’s Place (working title), probes his relationship with his late father, who was born in 1897 to Kansas settlers. He is currently writing a novel based on the true story of a complex and enigmatic cousin, a bank robber who died while on the run in the Kiamichi Mountains of southeast Oklahoma.

The Walnut Tree

Susan Strayer

For John

It has always seemed to me that death is more about the living than the dead.  How we cope and carry on, how life is better or worse without those who have passed.  Losing you has forced me to confront the empty spaces you left behind.

***

The walnut tree grew tall and strong, spreading its feathery leaves over the yard like protective wings.  We loved it for its shade as well as the sweet nuts it provided.  As children, we would gather these and crack the shells between rocks to get at the meat inside, littering the yard with sharp surprises for unsuspecting feet.  Its trunk stood in for the characters of our made-up games, as base during tag, and as a counting place for hide-and-seek.  In its shade we lazed away long summer days, sucking the sweetness from clover and watching ants march to and fro over the bumpy roots.  In winter it supported our snow forts and offered dropped branches for snowman arms.  We watched its leaves turn slowly yellow and brown in the fall and sprout fresh and green in the spring.

The tree was planted by our many times great uncle, who had been a reverend in his time.  It was one of three relics of the past that Father had clung to while alive, and that Mom maintained in his memory.  I often wondered if this was a sign that she still loved him.  Even though he beat my brothers.  Even though he made my sisters into little housekeepers befitting his Catholic beliefs that women were worth less than men.  Perhaps instead I should have wondered if it was her way of dealing with her guilt.

When we were forced to play inside, you and I often gravitated to the reverend’s chair.  The seat was big enough to accommodate us both between the square oak arms, the back tall enough to hide behind.  It smelled of old wood and leather, the padded seat and back cushions beginning to crack and peel with age.  We would sit there and listen to “Sloop John B,” making up hand motions and silly faces to go along with the sailor’s lament. 

Nearby sat the family bible, a solid tome with thick leather-bound covers beginning to fall off the well-loved pages.  Our siblings tell me stories about Father reading the story of baby Jesus from it every Christmas.  Mom recorded all of the family births and deaths in the front.  I loved to look at it.  Gently leafing through the thin, gilt-edged pages.  Reading the names of all the relatives who had come before me.  Seeing your name just above mine.  There were just four years between us, and you were my best friend in the world until we both started school.  Then it seemed as though the distance between us were too vast to cross.  After you finished elementary school, we never played on the same playground again.

Moments became precious because they were so few.  I remember us spelling all of our siblings’ names backwards and deciding that the eldest sounded distinctly Klingon.  We wrote a story together about twins and airships and travel and wonder and hope.  Now that you are gone, I can’t help but think of one particular conversation. 

“What do you think death is like?” I asked. 

“I try not to think about it,” you said. 

“That’s just it,” I said.  “I worry that I won’t be able to think anymore.  That’s what scares me the most.” 

You just shuddered and changed the subject, but I know that you agreed.  Now I wonder if you were still afraid when the end came.

Our first brush with death came when you were in high school.  You had a seizure while playing a computer game, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t wake you up.  The ambulance came and the paramedics strapped you to the board, and you struggled and finally came back to yourself.  They took you away and I finally allowed myself to cry, wondering what happened and why it should have happened to you.  Later we found out that the seizure was caused by multiple sclerosis, and that you would need to take medicine for the rest of your life.

For weeks afterward, I was awakened by the slightest noise, terrified that you were having another seizure or that Mother had stopped breathing in her sleep despite her CPAP machine.  Unbeknownst to anyone, I frequently left my room to check on everyone and make sure that you were all still alive.  To make sure that there were sounds of breathing on the other side of doors.  To make sure that I was not alone.  I would sleep in blanket nests on the floor of my closet, reassured by the small space and the enclosing curl of my bedding.

Soon enough you went off to college and I learned to forget about my fear.  I stopped being afraid of death once I learned that human beings are all made up of the same elements as the stars burning millions of miles away in the night sky.  I imagined my bones disintegrating into stardust and blowing away to join with the Milky Way and the smallness of death began instead to feel like vastness.  Death began to feel like hope.  But that wasn’t enough to prepare me for losing you.

***

I’m home from college to find that the walnut tree is gone.  It was blighted and rotted from the wet spring that year.  It is too sunny now that there are no shady limbs to cast shadows.  Mom has taken to staring out at the yard from the back window.  I wonder if she is remembering all of her happy times under the tree, too.  I wonder if she feels empty without Father, the same way the yard feels empty without the tree.

I feel empty, too.  Now that I am done with school it’s hard to envision what step to take next.  I wish it were possible to keep learning forever and never have to take up a job I don’t like and face the adult task of paying bills.  You have been in this situation for four years before me, and the toll it is taking on you makes my heart hurt.  More than the weight of debt and a job that offers no sense of permanence or hope for advancement, it is the way you have changed that scares me the most.  Why, I wonder, do we have to keep on doing things that kill our very souls?

I hear the story from the rest of the family, second-hand: a coworker reported you for your general demeanor, claiming that you creeped them out and they didn’t want to work with you.  How, we all wonder, could someone see a quiet, introverted human being and come to this sort of conclusion about someone they haven’t bothered to get to know?  (How much quieter would you be, I wonder, if Father had been alive to keep beating you?)  The event hits you hard, and you start to become self-effacing, apologizing for any little thing.  You become a shadow of yourself.  You lose all self-confidence and become even more entrenched in this rut that your life has become. 

Looking back, I can’t help but see this as the beginning of the end.  How could you fight back against cancer when you had already lost all your strength fighting a battle you couldn’t win?

It has been months since I last saw you, and when we meet I am shocked by your appearance.  There is a gray tinge to your skin, and you are gaunt and bony in a way you have never been. 

“You look like crap,” I say bluntly.

“Gee, thanks,” you reply.  “It’s the medication.  One of the side effects is death.”

I stare at you for a moment, shocked into silence.  I suppose I had an inkling then that you were not far off the mark.  But this was supposed to be a treatment for your MS--a clinical trial for a new drug that might prevent your flare-ups.  Shortly after, the doctors send you to the hospital for testing when they find elevated levels of calcium in your blood.  The results aren’t good: cancer has taken root in your gut and has already metastasized to your ribs, pelvis, and liver.

Despite this, the doctors tell us your prognosis is good.  They are optimistic about treatment and all of our lives are immediately turned upside down.

Except mine.  I actively avoid getting involved in your treatment, which is easy to do now that I’m not living at home anymore.  I don’t think very hard about my reasons for doing this, and choose to believe that I’m simply too busy to visit regularly.  The truth is that I don’t want to see you like this.  I want to remember you as the boy who played with me under the walnut tree.

Mom tells me that you can’t believe this is happening to you.  The doctors put you on antidepressants and tell you to be hopeful, but it takes only three months for the cancer to win.  It hasn’t responded to any treatment.  I want to yell at the doctors for their optimism, but I’m too busy ignoring that this is happening in the first place.  Mom calls me on a Wednesday to say that you’re not doing well and to prepare myself.  Family who we haven’t seen in years start coming to visit you in the hospital.  You use up your words telling everyone how much you love them.

I don’t come to visit you until Friday.  Mom has called again and says that you are on hospice treatment only and that you haven’t woken up since the night before.  I feel obligated at last to see what the cancer has done to you.  To witness you at the end, despite knowing that if you were yourself you would hate all of the attention everyone is giving you.

I force myself to look at your face when I come into the room.  You don’t look like my brother, and I am relieved.  It would be so much worse, I realize, if you looked like the man I remember instead of the one the cancer has made.  I am relieved, too, that I won’t have to hear your last words or see your pain or your thoughts writ plain on your face.  Seeing your body failing is hard enough.

Our niece is there, and she holds your hand frequently as the family gathers to keep vigil over your dying form.  We tell stories and laugh, and I know that if you can still hear us you are glad that we are not moping about or crying over our remembrances of you. 

The hospital sends the pastor in, and I cringe as he tries to force us to speak about you in artificial ways.  He does not belong here.  He is a reminder of the religion our father forced on us, and the excuse it became for his abuses.  You have been quiet for some time, but when the pastor leans over you to say a prayer, you make a loud exclamation.  I imagine that this is you objecting to the man’s presence and his words of devotion.  Whatever you think death will be now, it is not what this pastor thinks he is sending you to.

We all stay until it grows dark outside and we need to get back to our own lives, now that we have celebrated yours.  You slip away quietly once we are gone, as though you were waiting until you were alone to finally let go.  It doesn’t matter to me that the doctors say people often do this at the end of their lives--I choose to believe that you held on to one last stubbornness by waiting until we had all left to die.

***           

Mom will write your death date beside your birthdate in the family bible.  I will take possession of the book and pay to have it restored to its former glory, the binding painstakingly reassembled so that the covers are no longer separate from the spine.  I will know that this is an act performed out of guilt--an attempt to make up for the distance I placed between myself and your illness.  The guilt will follow me for a long time, until I can accept that creating distance is just another way of coping with death and illness.  Others will tell me not to feel guilty and it will take me a long time to believe them.

We will go through your things, and I will possess many more books that once belonged to you.  Science fiction and fantasy volumes that you once shared with me will become memories of you that are stirred every time I pull one from the shelf to re-read.  You wrote all of your computer passwords in the pages of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World.  Knowing that I can never get rid of this book will haunt me until I find a way to safely dispose of it.

Your body will be cremated, and Mother will arrange to have your remains interred in the family plot next to Father and baby Matthew.  I will be the only one to dress up; the only one to wear black; the only one who feels guilty enough to swathe myself in mourning.  We will bury your ashes inside a box made from walnut, as a substitute for your request to plant a walnut tree over your grave.  It will not be enough to satisfy my own sense of honor, but I will feel helpless to do anything else.

Someday I may own a home of my own.  I will remember our happy days in the shade of a walnut tree.  I will remember your request.  I will plant a walnut tree in my own backyard.  Beneath its roots will rest a worn copy of The Eye of the World that has long since lost its dust jacket.  I will watch the walnut tree grow, feeding on the dusty, disintegrating pages of a worn out book and long-cherished memories of a brother who is no longer with me.

Susan M. Strayer recently earned her Ph.D. in Literature for Children and Young Adults at The Ohio State University. She also has an M.F.A. in Children’s Literature from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She primarily writes for young adults in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, but also dabbles in poetry, contemporary realistic fiction, and creative nonfiction when the mood strikes her. She currently lives in Hilliard, Ohio with her cat, Rigel.