Of Memories, Loss, and Johnnie Myron Weeks …

by d o l f i

I am the keeper of memories and bloodlines in both my families of origin and immediate relations.

By the time I was sixteen both my father and my younger brother, who was my only sibling, had died. Life had severed my family of four during the span of two years into one of me, and my mother.

It was painful, the losses.

I will never know the terrible ache my mother felt in losing not only her husband to a massive heart attack, and then her adolescent son to accidental drowning.

My mother was not one to speak much of her feelings.

The day that my brother drowned, my mother entered what resembled a catatonic state, she mumbling to herself. At sixteen I knew enough to go inside the hospital and face the emergency room physicians who after explaining that they had done all possible to save my brother, but failed. On thanking them for their efforts, I then asked if I could see my brother.

He was still warm, my brother, when I touched is hand and felt his fingers. His eyes were closed. He looked at peace. I was not. And neither was I. We had lost a brother and a son.

My mother had lost the surviving male in the family she had created with my father. I had lost the person who in ideal circumstances would have grown up to be with my husband, a close and dear friend, the young man who at what would have been eighteen years old, had he lived, my husband’s best man. I might have even asked him to give me away along with my uncle.

I will never know what would have transpired had my brother lived.

I will never know the children he might have had or with what wife or significant other he would have chosen to spend his life.

I will never know, not in this lifetime.

And yet I hold the memories, reflections I hold dear, hopes that lay upon my heart and that I will carry into the next lifetime beyond that of this world.

My brother lives on in my memory and that of my children, our daughters.

I, their mother, have kept the pictures, and given them stories of my brother, explaining how he live, how we as siblings, I the elder, fought, my regrets that he died before we reached the age of knowledge that brothers and sisters are all we have sometimes.

I am lucky to have a husband and three daughters. But this does not mean I forget my brother.

Rather he lives on in me and in them. Ideally whatever children to whom our daughters give birth, will not bestow immortality upon not only me and my husband, our parents and grandparents of whom each holds a name.

But they, if my prayers are answered, will also give eternal life and let the world know that he once lived, to my brother, Johnnie Myron Weeks (September 19, 1963–July 3rd, 1976,) as I do now.