I began to grieve for my brother years before he passed away. The schizophrenia which had been present but manageable throughout his adult life began to take over as he grew older. Bobby spent more time “in his head” than he did with us in “reality,” and breaking through to my once social and happy-go-lucky brother became an ordeal which often yielded only a few moments of recognition. What follows is an expression of my grief for Bobby at the time.
Lost
by Frances K. Prescott
I am
my brother’s ghost.
I haunt
the edges of
his mind
each time
I visit.
Calling out to him
across a gray abyss,
I hear
my voice — a tattered
echo in the wind.
I watch him
walk
with solid shadows,
substantive as stone,
as steel,
as serpents whose
deceitful voices
lure him out
and lead him further in
his mind
is a dark wood
I try to reach
him but my
limbs become
transparent
thin as air I
cannot touch him
cannot move him
cannot make him
know I’m here so
I am gone
and now I know
what death is for.
I die
and die again
to haunt his world.
I wrote the poem, “Lost” about four years ago. But it is not the first grief that I felt for my brother. Growing up with Bobby, my life was filled with love and laughter. But by the time I reached second grade, if not sooner, a greater awareness of Bobby’s limitations saddened me again and again.
I remember a time when I came home from college to visit. Bobby had been placed in a job unloading trucks at a retail store. I sat with him on the couch, in our old familiar way, and he looked at me. “Frances, I not a ‘retard,’ am I?” he asked. He looked so worried. He must have heard someone calling him that at work, and it was clear that he knew this was a derogatory term.
That’s when it struck me how lucky our little sister was. Her intellectual impairment was severe enough that she would never be aware that she was “different.” And the pain I felt then for my brother was so severe, it was as though someone had squeezed all the air from my lungs and would not let go.
I don’t remember how I answered him. I know that we hugged, and he seemed to accept whatever I told him, and that I didn’t cry in front of him.
But as I look back at this and other memories, I understand why my grief for my brother is different from the grief I felt when my sister died. When Jeannette died, it was sudden. There were not months of suffering and hospitalizations, years of withdrawal, no real sense that she understood her own mortality. But Bobby knew about loss, and death, and he missed his sister but worried about growing older because “I still a young man. I not go to Heaven yet, am I?”
He also missed his ability to work—he was accepted into a warm, loving vocational program called Seabird Enterprises shortly after the “retard” incident, and never wanted to miss a day’s work if he could possibly help it.
And Bobby missed our mother when she had a severe stroke and had to go to a nursing home, but Bobby’s mobility and psychological issues prevented him from seeing her for months. Bobby understood loss.
And so my grief for my brother is augmented in some ways by the grief I felt for him throughout his life. Yet I also feel relief for him. He has set down his burdens; his weary body rests.
So I try to remember the good times, the way he laid his head on my shoulder even in the last weeks of his life. I try to focus on how lucky I was to have him in my life for so long, and not on how much I miss him.
And today I look back at one of the poems I wrote when Bobby passed away, and at one of the pictures of us from our childhood. And I will try to celebrate my brother more than I mourn him.
Bobby’s Request
Come walk with me,
if you don’t mind
my halting steps
and distant thoughts.
I am, in some eyes,
broken.
But stay with me
and you will find
within my smile
an offered heart
whose voice is heard,
unspoken.
Now dance with me
on threads of time;
no boundaries left,
no hills to climb;
a road before me
opens.
October 2011
Frances K. Prescott
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