Last Breath

“Where there was something suddenly isn’t”

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, Burning the Old Year

One minute he was breathing the next minute he wasn’t. I saw him take his last breath, waiting for the next one that never came. I forgot to breathe. How could I breathe? My dad was gone.

I had breathed every breath with him the last forty-eight hours of his life, his shallow breaths, almost imperceptible in the dark nights that I sat and talked to him. He was non-responsive, but I know he heard me as I told him everything I could think of about how much I loved him, what a great dad he was. How no one else would ever make tea and cinnamon toast for his little daughter’s breakfast that tasted as good as his. How his hugs always made me feel as if everything would be all right no matter how dark it seemed in the moment. How much my son was like him¬— always The Trickster, looking for his next victim. How he saved and protected me from my mother and what that must have cost him. How grateful I was despite the science, that I inherited 99.9% of his DNA.

I it seemed only fitting that he saw me take my first breath and I saw him take his last.

Box Full of Darkness

“Someone I loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” ~Mary Oliver

My brother was born out of the darkness of my mother’s womb. He brought that darkness into the world. His brilliance spawned from shadow, from sociopathy. This was not a gift for those of us who tried to love him into the light and came out damaged. The hurt went from verbal to physical, to death. Some of us were luckier than others and escaped into the light.

Rebekah Spivey for The Poplar Grove Muse