5 Years…

There are some periods of your life that you gloss over. Even during good times, periods of you life that you remember fondly and glorify later on, you skim over the minute details unless you have reason to dig deeper into the cracks and crags of your memory to pull them up to them up to the surface.  College is a great example of this. Overall, a great period in my life and given time and some prompting, I can dig up most memories. There are a few I’ve buried and would happily leave that way and few others that I’m pretty sure aren’t coming back thanks to some of my cohorts, but overall, the well is full.

Often the well is just as full during awkward periods of your life. Like High School, for pretty much everyone. I don’t care who you were then – jock, geek, art student, slacker, pick your cliche… high school was awkward for all of us. It was just about the degrees there of. And I can go back to that well and dip down, pulling up people I thought I’d hate forever, situations that would never be resolved and a place it felt like I could never escape. I’m capable of that type of recall, but just as with the good times, some memories take effort.

Then there are those times, usually condensed periods of no more than a few months, that are like low burning coals in your mind. The smallest stir, the tiniest bit of water falling on them or even a vague gust of air and they react, flaring, hissing and searing in your mind. Returning the pain and exacting detail of those moments.

Five years ago this month, one of those periods began for me. I can tell you about everyday I spent on commuting back and forth across New York City, checking my voice-mail for the next scrap of news. Each moment on the train to Boston, thinking the worst had past, is there waiting for me. The letter I got via email, in the midst of phone calls and debates over what to do and impassioned arguments between my siblings. The letter that revealed the true character of a woman I once loved. A woman who knew what was going on had only weeks before promised to be there for me, day or night, as one of the pillars of my world crumbled.

The call that told me the end was near and how I steeled my own voice, knowing that I needed to offer strength, fearing I would break later. Getting his favorite cookie as part of the snack box on the flight home and almost weeping. Every moment from the time I got off the plane in Florida, every moment watching him die, watching my family struggle and cry and fight, each word the tumbled out of my mouth as I spoke at his funeral, each impulse I had to surpress in order not to kill my siblings, all the words my Brothers in Blood and Spirit handed to me that I wear still as a badge of pride, the empty pit that even now I can recall inside myself… It all comes crashing back the moment I touch those memories.

The pit is small and the heat less intense when I just graze the thoughts. I can stand near to them and not be burned immediately. I can look on them with more than just pain and loss now. I can apply some wisdom and some understanding. That’s how I know the wound has healed.

Mostly.

If I linger too long, the heat overtakes me. It singes my heart and mind again, taking me back in ways I fear and hate.

So I kept a respectful distance. Knowing I must visit and pay my respects. Hating the memories of the pain.

It will get harder, the closer I get to the anniversary of The Death.

But I will get through it.

I have no choice. I still live. I still have memories to make.

And I still have a name to honor.