As my brother struggles to speak, I listen closely, trying to understand his words without requiring him to expend his energy repeating them.
Lowell has been at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center for over a week now. His nineteen-year battle, first with lymphoma and now with advanced Merkle cell carcinoma, has ended here. The white flag is up.
I flew in this afternoon, hoping to spend as much time with him as possible before an ambulance transports him back to his home in Wichita, KS., where he will die. I’m driving his wife back in their car.
Listening to him fight for words, looking at the dark circles around his eyes, watching his life slip away, I wonder if he will survive the journey to Kansas tomorrow. The answers to some questions have a short shelf life, so I open the subject that has lain in the silence of our other brother’s grave for sixty years.
The character “John Hobbes” says in The Fallen, “There are moments which mark your life. Moments when you realize nothing will ever be the same and time is divided into two parts—before this and after this.”
Such was the moment that changed our lives—-my brother’s and mine. The car accident happened in May, involving three of us four brothers: Lowell, who was then a teenage driver; Dougie, my seven and a half-year-old brother; and me, age 6. Dougie didn’t survive. Our fourth brother was spared the wreck, which didn’t scathe Lowell, either, at least not physically.
“That accident shadowed both of us,” I said to Lowell, “connecting us ‘at the hip.’ For you, it was the feeling of responsibility for being the driver; for me, the guilt of being the survivor.”
As a result, Lowell had flung his life into a flurry of rebellion for years; I struggled to live up to the Great Expectations of being The Chosen One. Much of what I remembered about the incident, Lowell had mentally erased, details I could recall frame by frame, in slow motion, like how I bounced against the front seat of the car to the back before catapulting through the air, shattering the windshield, and then plopping onto the hood of the vehicle.
I didn’t tell Lowell what I sometimes hear, even to this day: Dougie and I crying, the two of us seated next to each other, Lowell praying aloud in the front, begging for God’s mercy, and then at the ER, Dougie asking me if he was going to die, and me at that moment being thrust into the role of a prophet, grasping for an answer to Dougie’s question, feeling bad for not knowing what to tell him and afraid that I too, was going to die.
Lowell and I sat there in silence, having relived portions of that day. I leaned in to hear him.
“I felt horrible after the funeral.”
“You know it wasn’t your fault,” I reassured. “I’ve worried about you all these years for that. I knew you must have felt guilt for something you couldn’t have helped,” I said, lapsing into the role of a priest.
Knowing and feeling are the distance between the head and the heart. For some, it’s a mere eighteen inches; for others, it’s measured in years, and for some, eternity.
“I came to a peace about that several years ago,” Lowell whispered, nodding his head.
I grasp his hands with joy, and with teardrops gathering in our eyes, I gently kiss his forehead.
“I’ll see you tomorrow in Kansas, big brother,” I say as I gently close the door to his room.
And walk away.
Remarkable writing, David. I pray that you are at peace during this trying time in your life. I am grateful that God has graced me with your friendship.