Nineteen years ago to the hour, I received the worst news of my life. I was ten, three weeks shy of my eleventh birthday. I was singing in the Tulsa Boy Singers, and after rehearsal had ridden with the usual carpool back to the usual grocery store parking lot (It's a Bud's Family Foods now), only to find that nobody was there to pick me up. Then my sister got out of a car I didn't recognize (a white Cadillac de Ville), and I, confused, went with her. She didn't know what was going on either. Or maybe she did, but I think mom and dad had "protected" her up to that point.

Anyway, we rode home in the foreign Cadillac (sorry mom, but I didn't have any idea who Mrs. Luthey was, even if I had met her, and I don't think I ever had), and found mom and dad sitting in a chair nobody ever sat in, in the living room nobody ever used except for the piano and the once a year Christmas tree. Something was very wrong.

And so, around 10pm central on a Wednesday, my parents sat us both in their laps and told us that Mark -- our brother, our closest relative, a month shy of his twentieth birthday -- had been killed in a car accident that afternoon.

There are many things I don't understand about the way parents raise their children, like the way my mom asked me if I'd moved to the front of the classroom when I told her I couldn't read the blackboard despite the fact that everybody in the family wore glasses already. I can place at the top of that list this question: why, when my brother was killed around 2:45, did my parents not pick me up from school or rehearsal as soon as they knew? Why did they let it wait?

In the days that followed, dad hid any newspaper articles that referred to the accident. I know it made the front of the City/State section, above the fold, but I never saw the articles. Mark and his friend Danny, who was driving, had been at the top of their high school class two years before. Tulsa is still a small enough place that this sort of story resounds -- stark contrast to Washington, where only the most shocking deaths are reported, and then only rarely. There was a similar tragedy last year, and somebody at the paper who knew Mark (and Emily) called mom and asked if she'd be willing to do an interview. She was. They didn't tell her they were going to lead with her.

After that article ran, I thought about writing an essay and sending it to the same editor who thought to call mom, about what it's like to be the little brother and not the parent, but I wasn't sure I actually had anything to say that would help and not be controversial.

The conventional wisdom, especially in a bible belt place like Tulsa, is that something like this is "God's Will." I guess maybe for some people that explains it. Not me. Mom had grown up a Southern Baptist, but both my parents got tired of the politics involved in going to church. So by the time I came along we weren't a church-going family, and by extension not a religious one either.

So, take an almost eleven-year-old kid who's already too smart for his own good, have his only church experiences be weddings he's sung in or the funeral of his grandfather (a grumpy old man of whom he wasn't fond, and in an unairconditioned church a long drive away), take away the person closest to him in the world -- who taught him to read, taught him multiplication tables, started him playing piano, talked mom and dad into letting him audition for the Boy Singers, et cetera -- and then tell him it's "God's Will." See how far it gets you. And God, whoever he is.

Take away the person who stood in for the father who worked too much, and put in his place the actual father, who has trouble dealing with emotion (that grumpy old grandfather? Dad didn't like him all that much either) and who has missed most of his youngest son's life so far since he was spending so much time at the office. See where that gets you, too. For added measure, have him tell that youngest son on the night after that he's going to take a belt to said youngest son if he doesn't buck up and stop crying.

(I won't say that my family was dysfunctional, and I won't say that I hate my father, because I don't. I will say that he never could deal with me until I was getting ready to graduate from college and he suddenly realized that I'd become an adult, and he could deal with me on that level. Relations between us became a whole lot better once he admitted I could take care of myself. I was 23.)

So. Telling that kid that it was "God's Will" was the wrong thing to do. Threatening him with a belt was the wrong thing to do. So he did what any sensible kid would do -- he withdrew into himself.

I think that's actually where my cynicism started. By that point I'd already figured out that public school wasn't built for smart people, but my attitude hadn't yet been soured on the general public. Having a bunch of people (many of whom I barely knew) in the house all day, trying to make sure I was okay, and reassuring me again with the God's Will crap, got me to stop talking better than anything else possibly could. I sat in front of the TV all day Thursday, eating all the Rice Krispie treats and peanut butter cookies on the food trays people brought, and generally trying to avoid talking to anybody. I was a sullen teenager three years early. The mass of people in the house made me really uncomfortable, and I decided to go to school on Friday, if only to get out of the house. So I went. I was in shock all day, but I went, and I didn't go home early.

I'd been big into the Legos (yes, I know it's a trademark and it's LEGO, but this is my story here), and that was something I could do by myself while I thought this whole death thing through, so that weekend I conceived and built my most elaborate project to date: a castle, with city walls and gates, big guard tower, stables, the works. Aside from the funeral itself, that's how I spent the weekend. That's how I learned to deal. Nobody else could possibly tell me anything that would help, but they wouldn't shut up. But I could close my door and sort through the Legos and figure out how I was going to find enough pieces to put a roof on the stable, and they'd leave me for the most part alone.

Mark had a picture cut out of a newspaper pinned to a board in his room. It was of a squirrel clinging to the side of a tree, taken somewhere on the TU campus. His services were at Sharp Chapel, on campus. As we left, mom and I spied a squirrel clinging to a tree in front of the chapel. The squirrel seemed to stop in that spot, making sure that we saw him before he hurried up into the tree. "He's okay," the squirrel seemed to say.

I didn't really talk much to people during the next year or two after that. I was afraid that any conversation would reopen the wounds. I didn't trust anybody I hadn't known before the wreck. Eventually I realized I didn't like the person I'd become, so I decided to become somebody else. And I did, mostly. But that kid with the scars is still there, hidden underneath the rest.

In January of 95, my sister got married. About halfway into the service, I recognized the chapel as where Mark's funeral had been. One friend of Patrick's saw me burst into tears, but assumed that I was just moved by the wedding, and I didn't bother to correct him. Since I was singing in the wedding, I was in a chair over along one wall, so I don't think anybody else actually saw me overcome by emotion. In that five minutes, I had to reconcile that place with the worst and best times of my life. I guess maybe that's easier for people who go there more frequently. For me, the contrast was striking.

It's nineteen years later. I'll be 30 in a couple weeks. Most days I can talk about Mark without breaking out in tears. When people ask me if I have any brothers or sisters, I tell them about Emily, and that I had an older brother who was killed in a car accident. They're sorry. It's okay, I tell them. It's been a long time.

I haven't been by to see his niche in a couple years. The letters in his name -- all the marker you get on the wall -- are crooked. There's no place to leave flowers. Eventually mom and dad will be in adjacent niches. The columbarium overlooks a little pond, and is mostly sheltered from traffic noise from the two six lane roads that intersect at the corner of the cemetary. It's not my favorite place. It has dignity, I guess, but it's creepy.

The tough thing here is, I never did figure out the death thing. For months afterward, I'd lie in bed expecting Mark to come into the room, and we'd just pick up where we left off. I still don't get it. Death is not fair. Death is only fair if the Reaper can look you in the eye, and then only if you can respond, "it's a fair cop." A cement truck broad-siding a VW Beetle containing two brilliant young men is not fair. I don't want any part of a religion that believes in a God capable of that.

Nineteen years ago today, my brother's life was cut short. If there's a reason for everything, I still haven't found the reason for that.

(4 nov)