Inked

 

 

Being the youngest of three, my brother was always doing things to make us laugh, or to turn our heads. When my sis and I started dating, in the age before cell phones, we would crowd around our parents' phone on a Friday night in the kitchen and wait for it to ring.

 

My brother, even in his pre-teen years, towered over my sister and I and was almost six foot before he was fifteen.

 

When the phone would ring, Laura and I would leap for it and he would barrel past us easily.

 

"Hello."

 

"Uh...she's not here."

 

"She left about an hour ago with some other dude."

 

Then he would hang up.

 

We would be fuming, demanding he tell us who was on the other end

and which of us they were asking out.

 

He would shrug his shoulders, laugh and head off to his room.

 

"I've got no idea girls. Good luck with that."

 

He got his first tattoo before his twentieth birthday.

 

My mother was horrified that her baby boy had inked himself permanently.

For at least a year, he convinced her as only the baby of the family can, that it was only a henna tattoo and he went every three weeks to have them redone.

 

She was livid when Laura and I broke it to her that those tats would never be coming off. He finally got her to laugh about it when he told her he was getting her name tattooed on his backside. When she finally realized he had meant he was going to get "your name" tattooed on his butt, she gave up on trying to parent him and just laughed at his joke.

 

He and I talked about getting tattooed a lot.

 He loved it.

I think he believed that his tattoos had to be temporarily painful so he'd permanently

remember all that he had been through.

 

He also said that Laura and I would never go through with getting

one because we were too big of chickens.

 

(Actually, I know he said that to me. I think he believed Laura always had the guts.)

 

After his funeral, Laura and I decided that there was only one way to appropriately remember all the pain that his loss would carry with us for the rest of our lives.

 

We decided on the Bible verse that we had chosen for his coffin.

 

Isaiah 46:4 "I have made you. I will carry you. I will sustain you and I will rescue you."

 

And I insisted that it be in Laura's handwriting.

 

His Bible verse.

 

Her handwriting.

 

Sibling love.

 

I think my mom is secretly pissed we marked our bodies.  

 

But I know he is smiling his face off on his cloud as our witness, as we muddle through this race of life without him.

 

 

 

P.S. Laura was a trooper and went first when we got our tats.

 

I cried like a baby.

Some big sister I turned out to be. :) 

He was right all along.

 

I miss you precious dude.

I wish we would have gotten inked together, but I'm honored that my first was in ode to you.

Funerals Are For The Living

 It was a Tuesday. The Oklahoma air was so cold it would take your breath at the inhale. My brother had left us two days earlier. It seemed like a lifetime and a mere second before Tuesday. Someone had suggested Thursday for the funeral, but my sister had more of her wits about her than I did in that moment and had objected. The weather was predicted to be thirty degrees warmer on Saturday. I think the weather was definitely a factor, but I think she believed that Saturday would give us more time.

Who wants to attend a funeral on Saturday? I knew I didn't. But nobody whose loved somebody deeply ever has a desire to attend their funeral. Yes, Saturday technically gave us a few more days to plan and to process, but the time that I wanted had already been taken from me. I wanted more holidays, more blazing hot summer Sundays out by the pool watching our kids play together and us laughing at some silly joke. But the only time I had left alloted to me was going to be without him. So Saturday it would have to be.

While my brother's life was honored that day, the entire process of burying the dead is really for those who are left behind. We choose flowers and caskets and burial plots, not for those who are being planned around, but for those who are standing there to see it. I'm not sure if knowing that makes the process better or worse. If for the better, than it is so we carry the remembrance of those we've loved and lost into a honor we want those who knew them to agree with. Perhaps though it is always for the worse, because after all the flowers have died and the casket is lowered, the dead's status remains unchanged and the hollowness of our hearts are all that remain.



 

Preaching An "I Miss You."

"Lindsey?"

Every one's eyes in the room were looking at me for the answer.

I wasn't sure I had heard the question.

"Huh?"

The last two days had been such a blur, I would often stare into space thinking I would awaken in a few moments and I would have only been dreaming. I often would pray that I was.

The funeral director was taking notes and we had come to the part of the meeting where we had to decide who was going to "officiate" my brother's funeral.

"I am."

I heard the words and then couldn't believe I had said them. Did I really think I could preach, officiate or even stand up during my baby brother's goodbye ceremony? But I had been thinking and praying about it a lot.

I had a number of people who would have gladly preached. We live in Oklahoma for crying out loud. I could have walked out of the front door of that funeral home and hit a pastor with a rock if I had wanted. There were at least four pastor's cell phone numbers in my purse.

But if we were all going to be gathered on a Saturday for an event no one wanted to be there for, let's not choose someone who my brother had never even met. If saying "see you soon" to the only baby brother I'd ever have was going to be the order of that day, I owed it to him as his big sister to do it myself. I couldn't think of another way.

The air must have escaped out of the room, because for a moment time stood still.
Mike, the funeral director, tried to reason with me.

"Have you thought about how hard this is going to be?"

I had.
I knew.
Did he know how hard it was knowing that my life as forever broken into two places: life with my brother and life without him?

A bad highlight reel had been playing in my head about the funerals I had attended where afterwards, I felt as though I knew the deceased less after hearing the same old hymns and dismal words said over a casket. If this were good night, it was going to be one of which my brother would have been honored to have played a part.

"I do. And I don't know that I can pull it off, but I have to try."

As we drove home, my sister looked at me through tears and said "If we have to do this, then we have to do it together. I'll be in charge of his graveside service."

I'm not sure what Laura and I said that Saturday afternoon. I know we both made it. Before I got up in front of that church, The Hero squeezed my hand and said "you've got this. You can do it. It's not goodbye; only 'see ya soon'."
My baby brother was so felt and present that day that Mike pulled Laura and I both aside afterwards and thanked us for letting him be a part of a funeral that was honorable and fitting for the "I miss yous" we were making.

And I guess that's a song my heart will sing for now until my last day because some days there are no other words than "I miss you."

A Break Up With Words

How do you plan a funeral for a 29 year old, hazel eyed wonder who hadn't been inside a church in ten years? The first answer would be "you don't because that kind of crap should never happen." That was my first answer at least.

But last week my sister, mother and father had to answer that question together because it was our reality.

My brother loved music and most of his play lists it couldn't be played inside the walls of a church building and it wasn't something we could have asked anyone to sing. There were also so many funny things that he would say or do or pranks he would pull on us through the years, but again, none of them were "appropriate" for a church service or graveside burial.

Appropriate.

The first time some member of my family said that word, I wanted to slap them. Yup. They were right, my brother dearly loved rap music but leading his casket out of the church to anything by Jay-Z or Dr. Dre was definitely not "appropriate" but how "appropriate" was it to be laying my baby brother to rest one month after his twenty-ninth birthday. "Appropriate" and its converse "inappropriate" can take a flying leap out of my dictionary after these last few weeks. I have lost the ability to discern or care what is and is not "appropriate" during this stage of my life. 

No one has words for this kind of agony. There is no script for telling our mother that her baby boy and only son was no longer here on this earth. There is no pre-written dialogue for driving out to my grandparents farm to break the news to them because we didn't want them reading about it on facebook.

I left the music up to my sister. She was always the lyrically gifted one anyways and she did a stellar job. She weeded out our family's insistence of anything by Adele or Whitney Houston's version of 'I Will Always Love You."

We were able as his final song at the grave site, to play Blink 182's 'I Miss You." If you know my brother, it was the only song he would have approved and it was MOST appropriate.