I knew that something had happened the moment I picked up the phone and heard my mother's voice. The only fear was not knowing what.
Strange how in just a few seconds, brief as the single beat of a butterfly's ragged wing, my heart beats out a list of the people I fear for the most. No one is sick. No one has their death sentence written in a spidery handwriting of clouds and smoke waiting for the rains to come and wash their name from the sky. It was a sudden death. Final end. No good byes. No farewells. No time for tears and guilt and what if's. Those will all come later.
She says the name. Gives voice to the sentence. My heart constricts with relief and grief mixed in broad strokes of red and black swirled together in a chaotic dance. My voice trips on the barbed wire fence that has wrapped itself around my throat and has tightened painfully around the words that squeeze from my lips.
And she changes the subject, moves it to safer shores. Gives me time to recover and regroup. Distracts my heart long enough that my brain can hammer the door of my grief shut. Gives me time to peek at my grief at intervals while allowing me to slip blades of light and life into the darkness of loss.
The name on this day was that of my cousin Bill. (Or Billy as he was forever known to my tongue.) He is the eldest of my grandmother's almost 30 grandchildren. Though you would never know it by how little I saw him or spoke of him, I have always had a soft spot for him. It's hard to explain, really.
You see, the Billy that always creeps into my mind when his name is mentioned or remembered is the Billy that I remember from my childhood. A tall, lanky, blond haired boy on the cusp of manhood. At the time he seemed decades older than me, yet the reality was much less. I was ten or eleven just on the threshold of adolescence while he was standing at the exit.
He belonged to the "class" of cousins that were "above" the age group to which I belonged. Older and wiser and definately too cool for the kids who still looked under the rocks along the river and climbed the apple trees. We rode bicycles, didn't drive cars. Didn't care about cars, really. Didn't want to know about carburetors and rims, cylinders and horse power (unless it whinneyed.) We were "kids." They were... not.
Yet with Billy, even at that awkward age when it's sometimes easier to sneer and snigger at the "little ones" and tease them and taunt them with your superiority, his true heart shone through. I'm not going to pretend that his teenage arrogance didn't sometimes get the better of him, but he seemed to have a greater patience for us who were watching, waiting, and wondering what it would be like to be "grown up."
I'm sure that he was just as kind to the rest of the cousins that came after him, but he had a way of making me feel special. I don't know, maybe he felt sorry for me. He had lost his father tragically at an early age. Did he remember him? We had moved back to Pennsylvania after the breakdown of my parent's marriage. My father had stepped out of our lives. The wounds of loss were only freshly scabbed and prone to bleeding. I definately remembered mine. He and I are both the eldest children in our respective families. Maybe he understood how easy it was to feel invisible against the backdrop of the needs of the younger kids. Maybe he sympathized with the struggle between trying to be strong and mature, "not a baby," and just wanting to be a child.
Who knows? It's only in retrospect that I analyze the relationship and the why's and how's of it. I struggle to make sense of what I shouldn't really dissect. All I know is that even while he struggled with his own uncertain futurity, he managed to make my present a little more bearable. I don't remember the words he said, but only that he said them. I remember they were words of encouragement and understanding. They were kind words. Kind enough to make a young girl whose soul felt perpetually on the edge of tears to look up and admire the blond boy with the too charming, quiet smile, and sparkling eyes. At a time when the main male figure of my life had disappeared, Billy unknowingly stepped in and helped ease the void.
A word of praise for a stone well skipped. A casual tousling of my mouse brown hair in a moment of silliness. A voiced concern when an ankle was overturned, a knee skinned, an arm raked by thorns.
Eventually he became a full-fledged adult (at least age wise) and I moved into the torture of the teenage years and beyond. Life moved us into different orbits and though they crossed every now and then, we didn't see each other as often as those golden summer Sundays when the cousins would gather at my Grandmother's house and we would tumble around the landscape.
I wish so much that I could say that his life continued to shine with the promise that reflected off his golden hair, but it didn't. As I caught snippets of his life through my mother's voice, I remember never really knowing if I should be happy for him or not. Like most of society these days, he felt the pain of divorce. For many years, we rarely saw Billy because he worked on a dairy farm and though we all celebrate our Christmases and Thanksgivings, the cows don't stop giving milk or needing food simply because we want to eat a turkey dinner or spend a few hours with our extended family. In the arrogance of my education, I always felt like Billy could have done so much more with his life. But I guess the question I didn't ask myself was whether or not Billy was happy with his life.
I'm sure there were things he would change, but when our paths would cross and we would inevitably find ourselves with just a brush of time to catch up I was struck by the fact that he seemed okay with the hand that life had dealt him, almost contented. Who was I to say what he should or should not have done with his life? Yes, his job was physically very demanding, but I'm not sure I would give up the soft, grain scented breath of cattle for the braying herd of humanity. A four year degree doesn't make me any more motivated to leave behind the satisfaction I get in being a stay at home mom for the childish and unreasonable demands of the job world.
Billy. I never had the chance to thank you. Say "Hi" to Grandmom for me.
Good bye.
No comments:
Post a Comment