Chapter 6~My brother's ghost

A sad time in my life. Avatar picture is of my grandson that I speak of in the story.

I have a favorite brother from among my six brothers. Many things happened to bond us more than I bonded to any of my other brothers. He is not even the brother closest to my age, but he is the brother closest to my heart.

This ghost story is going to be quite a bit longer than the others as it is more complex and takes place over a long period of time and requires setting up a little background for you to be able to understand it.

I was living in Seattle. Life in Seattle is very hectic, fast paced, expensive and worst of all, gray. It rains a lot in Seattle, as you may or may not well know, dear reader. It's not usually a torrential rain, but just a mist that keeps misting day in and day out during the worst of the rainy season, which is most of the time. When the sun chooses to come out it shines down on a lush green place that is very beautiful.

I was working two jobs and could still barely pay for the apartment where my teenage daughter and I lived. I kept sinking deeper and deeper into depression as the financial demands and the gray weather pressed down on me each day.

Aside from being expensive just to live in an apartment, I wasn't used to apartment living. I had always owned my own home, so I wasn't even used to renting, which is more expensive than paying on a mortgage to own a home. Who would willingly want to rent when you can own a home and pay a lot less per month? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Anyway, I started thinking it couldn't get any worse. I began to think dark thoughts. But my spiritual beliefs would not allow me to out and out take my life in a pro-active way. However, I surmised that two things kept me breathing... God's will that I live, and my cooperation with God's will by sustaining my body with food and water.

I had a conversation with God. It went something like this... "You seem to want me to live because I'm still breathing. But what if I choose not to cooperate with you anymore by nourishing my breathing body? Will Your will still be able to keep me alive? I am curious to know the answer to this question, so here's the deal, God. I'm going to go find some place where I won't be disturbed, where I can lay down and wait for death. If you find some way to keep me alive despite my best effort to wait for death then I will believe you still have a purpose for me in this life, and I will do what I can to live it to the best of my ability. Otherwise, take me home, because I really don't want to be in this pain anymore."

I did consider that I had quite a few loved ones that might not be happy with my choice to wait for death... my 7 children, my brothers and sisters and their children, my grandchildren, some close friends... everybody usually has someone that cares, and I knew I had quite a few. So I started writing a lengthy letter to those whom I loved, assuring them that they had nothing to do with my decision. I was most worried about my young grandson whom I'm very close to. Being very young, he might not understand, no matter what I might say to him in my letter.

I was just finishing my letter when a man I had been dating that was a co-worker of mine, called. I told him of my plan, and then hung up, grabbed my coat, and walked out of the door.  It was a gray, cold January day, about 3 in the afternoon. It had been raining, as usual, but it wasn't raining at the moment.

I walked for a long time. Finally I found a tree a ways back off of the road I was walking down, and went and laid down under it. The leaves were quite wet, and I began to feel the dampness and the coldness of laying on the wet leaves.

I started thinking about my favorite brother and thinking about when I had decided to leave sunny southern California, but hadn't decided yet where I was going to move to. I had a phone conversation with my brother, who lived in Florida. He wanted me to come to Florida. He promised I could stay with him until I could find a house I wanted to live in. He promised me he would get me a job as a dispatch operator with the cab company he worked for. He had a management position and could guarantee I'd be hired. He promised he'd even find me a boyfriend if I wanted one.

The offer was a tempting one, but I didn't think I wanted to live in a place that had such a flat terrain that the highest point was Space Mountain at Disney World. I longed for mountains and pine trees, and distinct seasons, and that's where my little sister lived in Washington. She and I had always been close. We were only 14 months apart in age.

As I lay there, shivering, I began to think, "I wish I'd taken my brother up on his offer. At least then if I decided I wanted to die, I could wait for death in a warm, sunny place." Hmmm... I wanted to die, but I wanted to be comfortable while waiting to die. That's an oxymoron.

Finally I got up off of the cold ground and started walking some more. I won't go into all the details of what took place over the next four days, except to say that at one point as I walked along I saw an orange on the ground and without thinking I picked it up, peeled it, and ate it. When I realized that I had so quickly forgotten my resolve not to eat or drink, I said to God... "That was a dirty trick to throw that orange down in my path like that. I won't be so easily fooled next time." Going without food or water can do funny things to your mind.

Then I found myself standing in front of a church. I thought I might go in to get out of the cold for a bit, and maybe pray. But the door was locked. I went around back and discovered that someone had not tightly closed the door from the nursery to the play yard, so I let myself in and laid down on the floor in the dark room, falling soundly asleep. It was the first real rest I had gotten in four days.

Suddenly I jerked awake and was aware of muffled voices. I slipped out the door and went around front to discover that people were going into the church. I thought maybe they were going to have a church service or Bible study or something. So I followed the crowd in, but sat down at a table in the lobby.

I soon discovered it was a choir practice. What luck I thought. I love to sing. Especially in a church choir. So when someone invited me to join them I didn't hesitate. They were excited to learn that not only did I have a good singing voice, I could sight read music and sing any part they needed me to sing. They begged me to join their choir, but I told them I was visiting from out of town.

After choir practice I went back to the nursery to leave that door unlatched again, then went back to the people milling around and exited the front with the group, watching the director lock up. When the parking lot was empty, I went around back and let myself in.

Choir practice seemed to spark my energy and I couldn't sleep, even though I had gone into the chapel to sleep on a padded bench. I wandered through the dark church, feeling warm and safe and comfortable for the moment. I found a telephone and decided to call and check my voice mailbox. I was pretty sure my family had found my letter and might have left a message for me in case I changed my mind and went back to my apartment while they were out looking for me.

There was more than one message. The last one was my daughter's pleading and crying voice begging me to come home and let the family help me work through whatever was bothering me. I thought about her message. Then I thought of a plan. I knew if I called her she would want to take me to the hospital or a doctor or a therapist at the very least.

I decided that I would call her and tell her that I wanted to go home to her house to lie down in a comfortable bed and wait for death. I decided that if she even tried to "talk some sense into me" that I would hang up and not go home. But if she agreed without hesitation to my terms, I would go to my daughter's house.

I was shocked when she agreed without hesitation. I wasn't expecting her to. She was thinking, "I've agreed too quickly. What am I thinking? She will know I'm lying just to get her to come home." She didn't know of the "test" I had devised. But I had forgotten that she and I have always been psychically connected in an uncanny way because I died giving birth to her. When she was being chased by a shark while swimming in the warm and shark infested waters of Tahiti I knew it instantly. Not only that, she KNEW I KNEW, and insisted they put ashore immediately so she could call me to tell me she was alright. So somehow, she psychically knew the right thing to say, even though her logic told her differently.

It happened that the church I was at was close to where one of her brother's lived. She immediately called him to tell him to go pick me up outside the church and bring me to her house. It was late at night, probably after 11pm.

I hadn't been standing under the street light very long when a car came screeching up and four strapping young men jumped out. At first I was alarmed until I recognized one of them as my son. I got in the car laughing and saying, "Did you think I might resist you and you might need to wrestle me down to put me in the car, so you brought help?" That's exactly what he thought. My daughter hadn't bothered to go into any detail, just told him to go get me.

All the way to my daughter's house my son kept asking me... "Ma, aren't you hungry? Don't you want me to take you to get something to eat?" I was puzzled. Hadn't his sister told him I was coming home to wait for death? Why would he want to feed me?

When we arrived at my daughter's house it was full of family members and she was cooking. Then I knew. Then and there I decided. "Okay. They think they can save me. They will want me to see a mental health specialist. They will put me on anti-depressants. I will cooperate with them, but when they see that it doesn't work and I still want to die, then maybe they'll let me do just that.... let me die." You see, to me, death was the next logical step. I thought I was thinking quite rationally. I didn't know it was depression doing my thinking for me.

I'm going to skip ahead a few days in time now. My little sister in Spokane called me at my daughter's house, hearing that I was back safely home with her. She mentioned something she thought I knew. Something my family, considering my fragile mental condition, had decided not to tell me yet, but forgot to tell her of this decision. It was, on the one hand, a good decision not to tell me, considering the unbearable pain I was suddenly thrown into when sis let the cat out of the bag. On the other hand it answered some questions for me.

She mentioned my favorite brother's upcoming funeral. It turns out that at the very moment I was laying under that tree on wet leaves and thinking of my brother in Florida, and how I wished I was with him then instead of all alone in Seattle, he was dying of a heart attack. My family knew of my close bond to him and felt that when he gave up on life that somehow I knew on some level, and is why I had given up on life at the moment I did. I believe they were right. I had been depressed for months, yet I chose that very moment he was dying to finally give in to my depression.

Skipping ahead again a few months in time... I had left Seattle to go back to Spokane and live with my little sister. I was pretending that I was getting better, with the help of medication, but I wasn't. I wasn't getting better even after moving out of a gray place. I was getting worse.

Now the depression, combined with mourning over my brother, had me in it's grip so tightly that as I drove to pick up my medication and was waiting at a curve to turn left into the drugstore parking lot, I saw that the traffic I was waiting on was two double trailer logging trucks with all four trailers loaded down with logs. I decided that if I pulled out in front of them they wouldn't be able to stop before hitting me and crushing me to death under tons of trucks and logs.

Quickly I tried to put my car into gear so I could do just that. I had put my car into neutral so I wouldn't have to tire my foot holding the clutch down, waiting for these slow moving trucks to pass by. But even moving slowly, the weight of the logs would not allow them to stop in time.

A strange thing happened. I had been driving my little 5 speed Toyota Tercel for 13 years, and suddenly I couldn't remember how to shift the darn thing into first gear. I frantically tried, screaming... "Damn you, God! Damn you. You don't play fair." But then had I played fair? Hadn't I told God that if He managed to keep me alive despite my resolve that I would realize He wasn't ready to call me home and I should agree to go on living, as was His will for me to? Of course I wasn't thinking about my part of the deal with God. I was just in pain of grief, and pain of depression and still wanted to die, only now I wanted to pro-actively bring my death about, but God wasn't going to let me go back on my word. God wanted me to remember my deal with Him.

I won't go into all the details of the next few hours, or even days. Actually months, even a couple years. That's not what this story is really about. But I couldn't completely shake my depression. I was going through my life mostly in a fog of ongoing grief and depression.

Then one night, in a new home on my own, believing I had fooled my therapist into thinking therapy and pills were working, but I knew better, and guess who else knew better? My brother.

I was sleeping in my bed under the window when I dreamed I woke up and saw my brother standing in the window, smiling down at me. My heart leaped for joy when I saw him. He was young and healthy. He was even thin again, the way I remembered him when I was a young pre-teen and he was my big brother in the Marine Corps, teaching me how to ride his motorcycle, sharing his hobbies and interests with me, taking me anywhere I wanted to go in his car, being the best big brother a girl ever had.

I stood up in my bed and said, "Com'ere, you!" And grabbed his hand and he stepped down onto my bed with me and hugged me, a long warm hug, and I realized I wasn't dreaming after all. He was there. I could see him. He glowed and was all white. I could feel him. He was smiling at me. I was crying great sobs of joy. I never wanted to let him go. Then he stepped back a little, and smiled down into my face and said, "Sis, don't cry anymore. Don't be so sad. I'm always with you. It breaks my heart that you haven't been able to feel me there, trying to comfort you. Please know I'm always watching over you. I always will be, until we meet again." And then he was gone.

But somehow I wasn't sad or disappointed about it. Somehow I knew that even if I couldn't see him all the time, I could feel him. I could talk to him and he would hear me. Maybe he was the one that kept me from being able to shift my car. I don't know. But I know he's always watching over me.

This picture was taken before I was born, when he was a Kindergarten baby.

Post Script: Before I moved back to Spokane, I was talking to my grandson. He was telling me his concerns about a little friend of his that was going through a lot because of the divorce of his parents, and how it was hurting his friend so much. I was empathizing how sad it was that the parents were so blind they were'nt realizing how much they were hurting their son. To comfort my grandson I assured him that I would never hurt him. He looked at me stunned and then said, "But grandma, you already DID hurt me!" And I realized that even though I left behind a little bag of gifts for him, and wrote some special words in my letter just for him and didn't want to hurt him, and hoped he understood, I HAD HURT HIM. At the tender age of 4 he knew that! Suicide is a terrible legacy to leave your children and grandchildren.
      

Author's Note

They say when people grieve over the loss of a loved one they can't feel their loved one, because the grief blocks them from it. It was a couple years before my brother could finally get through my grief. I've heard stories of spirits visiting someone else that is receptive with a message for their grieving loved ones.

Reviews

[Boldpen]

A very well told tale. I truly loved it. And also.... if you must have gone to God, it must have been a very big loss to me. I own a big debt to your brother.
The experience was definitely a holy one.

[MsMermaid]

More stories for this book to come.