Backpacks to Death

NOTE: The column below is my revised version of this article, published in May 2010. Last week, May 24, was the 62nd anniversary of my older brother Doug’s (Dougie’s) death. My older brother, Mark, posted a message about Doug’s death last week on Facebook, including the newspaper article reporting the car accident that resulted in Doug’s death. Mark pondered the questions many who have lost loved ones ask: “I often wonder what if…would Doug have gone to college, married, what career he would have chosen, would he have had kids, grandkids?” Dougie was the third born of four boys, having just completed the first grade on the day he died. Mark was in 6th grade, and Lowell (now deceased), the driver of the car Doug and I were in, was in high school. I was not yet in school. As you might imagine, the accident affected us all three in different and profound ways. 

I held the satchel in my hands, “a satchel,” as we called them, before they evolved into backpacks.

My brother had carried it home from school the day he died in a 1961 car wreck. Just another death years ago?

 Not for me.

In 2010, having returned home when my dad had surgery, I was helping Mom sort through boxes in their storage shed. 

I lifted a box. “What’s in this?” I asked Mom. Her silence couldn’t hide the fact that she knew, as if ignoring it would somehow make it disappear. The box carried the entombed memories left covered since childhood, a dark event hidden in a relic unopened since 1961. Pulling Dougie’s satchel out, I held it to my chest. It was just as it was the day he died. Like a genie out of the bottle, it seemed like Dougie reappeared when I opened the box and caressed his backpack—the very one he carried on the last day of school that year, the last day he was to enjoy life. He was there, it seemed—in, with, and under that backpack as I stood frozen, holding it. 

I was grasping a part of him as I clutched it. And I felt bad for feeling it. At that moment, it took on the aura of the sacred. Suddenly a satchel from 1961 transcended the present and brought heaven to earth. Was he whispering in my ear, reminding me he had not forgotten? Was he praying for his little brother, letting me know he was at peace with the answer to that question he had asked me that day?

Mom had let go of his childhood belongings over the past 52 years. “You can throw it away if you want,” she said, even though I knew she still carried the pain deep within. 

“No, I think I’ll keep it, at least for a while,” I demurred, knowing I had no intention of letting it go. I glanced at Mom’s broken smile. The satchel was too close to “that day,” the last day of my brother’s life—only 18 months older than me— my companion, my playmate, the one closest to me, in every way, my brother, my best friend. It was our last moment together, the two of us in that automobile, that fateful day we looked at each other, blood-smeared faces, both of us crying, in fear as much as in pain, and Doug looking into my soul, innocently asking in his 7-year-old voice, “Are we going to die?” When I could do nothing but cry, he asked again, “Are we going to die?”

For years I carried the weight of what I perceived to be my colossal failure—my silence, encapsulated in the confusion of not knowing, the angst in not having the answer (as if not having the answer somehow sealed his fate), and the guilt of surviving. His last words, his unanswered question, have hounded me down the years of my life.

Lifting the backpack to my nose, I breathed it in. It was musty, stale, lifeless. 1961 had passed. It was 2010.

Stepping out of the storage shed that day with Mom, I  knew that though grieving may last a lifetime, living is in the now.

And as Mom and I walked arm-in-arm back to the house, the sun was shining. And the birds were singing.