remember me as a time of day

 

The night of the day that you left us, there was a moment when I snuck away from the crowds of people in the house and crept slowly into your bedroom, as if you were still there. They had just taken your body away. I had sat and nursed my three-month-old baby, your nephew who you rushed home to see but barely got to know, when they brought the gurney in and went up to get you. I felt calm and focused on soaking in every detail, burning it into my memory. I handed the baby off and stood next to the kind, uniformed people who let me and my dad say goodbye and the priests say a prayer. I was so grateful to have that moment.

It was surreal to stand in your room; in the spot where you last stood. You were still in there, somehow – I was sure of it. I expected the atmosphere in the room to feel heavy but it felt chilly and peaceful. The feeling of your presence was so palpable. The note you left was still on your computer screen and I took a picture of it because I didn’t want to ever lose your last words to us.

I sat on your bed. Ran my fingers over your things. Breathed in the smell of that ferret you treated as your own flesh and blood. I could feel the whispers of your fingerprints on the last things you touched. The shape of some of your last movements molded into the softness of your bed sheets. I was simultaneously afraid to touch anything for fear of disturbing or somehow desecrating how you left things, but also felt an incredible pull towards everything you left behind, like holding on to them would somehow bring you back for a moment.

There is (or was?) an exhibit at the natural history museum in NYC with some of the first known fossilized human footprints from Australopithecus afarensis. They’re known as The Laetoli Footprints. I had learned about them in school and stumbling across them in the real world took my breath away.

I’m not really a sentimental person – at least not in the way you might expect a woman to be. Numbers on a calendar don’t mean that much to me; I don’t really assign much meaning to gifts or anything material. Heirlooms and artifacts are fascinating but what interests me more is the spirit surrounding the objects. How they were used, what they can tell us about the people who used them and when and why. I will carry the thought behind a gift with me far longer than I carry the actual object.

But footprints are like the purest form of anything that can be left behind by any living thing that has since passed. Those A. afarensis were just walking through damp volcanic ash. Just walking. To where, from where, why… we don’t (and will never) know. All we have is the mark they left behind from that one moment in their lives. And, to me, that is incredibly powerful. They were alive in that moment. The weight of their very existence, the space they inhabited, the way they moved… there was a moment in time when they lived, and the earth preserved that moment for us to find millions of years later.

The footprints of my brother were everywhere in that room. We had to quickly clean it out and paint it for when me and the boys moved in, but the memory and the thought of that space he occupied and the steps he took in that room that day has never left me.

It wasn’t very long ago when I finally sat at his grave and told him that I understood, and that I didn’t want to hold him to this world anymore, and that I wished him peace. Since then, I haven’t felt his presence. Any dreams of him have been happy and peaceful instead of the horrors I faced at first. The demons of fear that I hadn’t confronted in years but suddenly returned with a vengeance whenever I would try to close my eyes finally faded. I’m glad for that. I know there’s a logical reason behind all of that, but to me, that means he’s free. Free from his pain and free from his struggles and free from the attachments of the people who loved him but who he felt like a great and terrible burden to. I felt like my grief and my holding on was a tether that kept his spirit chained to his suffering here. If I truly wanted him to be at peace, I came to understand I’d truly have to let him go.

He might not still be with us, but our memories and our stories and that feeling we get when we remember his smile haven’t gone anywhere… The way that grief morphs and changes with the years but never leaves us… That makes him live on forever.

Happy 25th, Tony. I love you forever and always.

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