MEMOIR

My Brother’s Death in Living Color

Every summer brings a kaleidoscope of memories, sharp fragments captured in free fall.

CW: This story details a fatal traffic accident involving teenagers.

When David died, I was out shopping for a new outfit to wear that night. My old boyfriend had turned up and I wanted to show off the party of a life I had made for myself. I had a summer job as a hotel bartender in a seaside town and the season was in full swing. At age 17, I shouldn’t have been in a bar at all but it was England in 1979 and I was far from home, no one seemed inclined to question it.

Back in Scotland, David had made plans to go with a friend as he tried out a brand new 200cc motorcycle, a 16th birthday gift from his father. It was a perfect summer day, clear and dry.

About the time David and his friend careened around a tight bend on the country road, my hand landed on a buttercup yellow t-shirt. David’s favorite color but no match for the purples and blues I loved to wear.

Totally out of control, the motorcycle slammed into the front of an oncoming car. The boys were thrown from the bike and landed in a field. David died instantly. I bought the yellow T-shirt and went back to my room at the hotel to change.

I was called to the manager’s office to receive the news. A family friend, who lived nearby, tucked me into bed in a darkened guest room where David and I had played hide and seek many years before. Next day she put me on a train for the long journey home.

I felt myself pushed gently onward with hushed condolences. Who knows what to say in the face of such tragedy to a no-longer-a-child, not yet an adult. Someone had pressed a small New Testament into my hand, someone else a half bottle of cheap whisky. I didn’t know what to do with any of it. I was stunned and sorrowful but without tears.

If you have ever lost someone close, you know the fogginess that follows. The dislocation from time and space, the sense of being swept along as if by the tide with obstacles looming suddenly from the murk. Collisions with these urgent, practical matters are deflected by merciful and unseen hands if you are fortunate enough to have good people around you.

Mum met me at the train. I’d been away a couple of months and I was tan, my feet so brown she couldn’t tell what was sandals and what was my skin. The pictures in my mind of that time are a mix of blur and fragment, white fog cut by shards bright as colored glass. The yellow shirt I never wore but couldn’t throw away. The rolling green pastures that lay just outside our town. Two boys not yet grown, pressed against a leather saddle, their excited grins framed by over-size helmets.

I think of the silence that must have followed the crash and imagine songbirds high in the summer blue sky. I wonder about the driver who found herself so suddenly, terribly alone.

I’m sitting next to Mum in the chapel at the crematory. Beyond the small windows, the memorial gardens are drenched in sunlight and my eyes struggle to adjust. I think the coffin was simple pine, the color of honey.

I suppose friends and family must have come in from out of town, the minister and the neighbors would have come for the reception too so our small house must have been full. I stood in the driveway looking down the street of neatly trimmed lawns and window boxes with loud bursts of summer color. The sheer everydayness of this picture, of 17-year-old me alone on the periphery of it, is almost impossible to bear. It is layered with another view, this time looking towards the driveway as we returned from the funeral. My father’s brother whom we hadn’t seen in years is sitting half in, half out of a turquoise Volkswagen bug, his head in his hands. Somehow this unlikely tableau of grief, the scowling dark stranger literally blocking the way, is my default image for that day.

Sometime later, Mum and I traveled south together, she needing to be anywhere but home and me desperate to return to parties at the seaside. We went to a lovely family, Mum would stay and I would leave the next day. After the inevitable early awkwardness, the teenagers of the house initiated me in The Rocky Horror Picture Show while our parents communed over long glasses of red wine. That night in our room, I held my mother as she sobbed, her whole body shaking as if some tremendous lump was ricocheting around inside her, like a washing machine on spin with a balled-up tangle of linens trying to escape its tortured cycle. I still had no tears of my own, just a gaping, wretched sadness.

Since then pictures have been added to my memory that are not mine, at least they weren’t seen with my eyes. A young policeman knocking on the door and saying there had been an accident. Mum caught mid-breath picturing something like a broken leg and a visit to the hospital. Perhaps the policeman went with her to ask Iza next door if she would come with her to identify the body. Iza is good people. She must have given Mum a whisky because, years later, she found one of Iza’s glasses mixed in with ours. I don’t know where they went, or if they held each other as they recognized David’s slight form and bushy hair. His smooth brown face perfectly still.

The best last picture of David that I can summon is probably not accurate. He wears a dark sweater and padded jacket, too warm for the spring day. His legs are both too skinny and too long for his jeans. Cheerful as a butcher’s dog, he is heading out to meet friends. I hadn’t seen much of him for a while, our friend circles didn’t cross anymore, but I was leaving for my summer adventure so we exchanged a ‘tip of the hat’. I sent him money for his birthday soon after and he wrote me that he was saving up to buy a motorbike helmet. The thank you card has a corny Scottish joke* that still makes me smile when I look at it each year as June 29 rolls around.

Before moving away, Mum would sometimes come across people who would share a memory of David. A teacher who told how she would send him on errands to the closet to burn off some of his always plentiful energy; “He told me the light in the closet was pointless. By the time it came on, he had found what he was after and was on his way out”.

That’s our David, how I picture him now. Clever as quicksilver, traveling at the speed of light. Godspeed, little brother.

* A cartoon postcard shows two gents having a wee dram at a hunting lodge. One points to the taxidermy stag head hanging above the fireplace and asks, “Did you shoot him in the Trossachs?” “No” replies the other, “Right between the eyes.”