"In the Sweet By and By.......

The first year after Tom died I stumbled around in shocked grief, the actual anniversary of his death hitting me like a dive into ice water. Numbness was replaced by the raw, vivid reality I'd been skirting for twelve months. Our gathering to mark the day was a fiasco, the inevitable result of choosing to remember the worst and most painful event of our lives, in the place where it happened.

This year, this second year, I find myself wondering, again, how I will really feel, and where this anniversary will sit in my heart. Images of Tom and I float in and out of my mind: working together in his garden, playing foot games on the couch like we did when we were kids, dancing and acting like fools, watching him draw and paint, engage and charm yet another stranger...a steady panorama of our lives together, as soothingly close to him as I can get now, I guess. Most of the time, however, I don't think of him as gone. I imagine that he's just 'away' - on a trip in Europe, in Hawaii, too busy to call.

I tried making sense out of the "he's dead" perspective, and it hasn't worked for me at all so far.

How could it?

This evening, while I was thinking all of those big existential thoughts about what happened to Tom, and everyone else I've loved who has died, it occurred to me that the only way to cope with this huge, unknown, insane reality is to shape it myself. Of course, religion and mythology has done that for years. The afterlife stories have kept our ancestors sane and safe for a long time. They never really worked for me, though. Too weird, too unrealistic and fantastic.

So this year this is what I've come up with - I've decided that the people you love don't leave you, they just move to the next locale a little ahead of you. We'll all catch up with one another eventually. They aren't taking a one way trip to nowhere...they're getting to the condo in Hawaii a week before we do.

Tom has to be sitting somewhere in the sun, with his legs crossed, a camera in his pocket, a pencil in his hand and sketch pad in his lap. He's smiling and drawing everything he sees. It's beautiful and green around him. His iPod is playing the eclectic mix of music he loves, or maybe the sound just surrounds him at will. He may peek down at us now and again, tease us by moving an object or hum a tune in our ear that brings him right next to us. Maybe he decides to make an appearance in a dream or puts a rhino in our path.

The important thing to know is that he is there. That's what I'm going with. I have to believe I'll see him again. This year, this very hard year that threatens more loss, has to have a point to it. Our little lives have to have some meaning. Loving my brother as much as I do has to have some enduring reality.

It's way too hard otherwise.