It's been strange, over the past week, to read everyone else's New Years posts. It's all about new beginnings, joyous looking forwards, cleaning out and looking ahead.
I've been stuck in looking backwards for the past few weeks.My brother David died on December 29th, 2009. He was 50 years old. He'd had a stroke-like injury this fall and never recovered. His poor health to begin with didn't help, either. As we learned more and more of his life I got more depressed - here was a person I really hadn't seen for about 20 years, and certainly wasn't close to. I knew very little indeed about him, I found out. Even being in the same city with him for a year prior didn't help - he made no effort to be with me, and my efforts were certainly not encouraged by him. But he loved me as a brother loves a sister, I know that, he showed it sometimes. We just weren't part of each other's lives, really ... perhaps the age difference was too great, he was up and out doing big things when I was still a little kid.
We're finished now with burial plans (thanks in large part to another brother working tirelessly on this) but it won't actually happen until spring, when the ground has thawed enough to dig. Until then, he rests temporarily at a cemetery's holding spot.
It's only now that the decisions were finalized that I feel like I can start to let go of the past few weeks and start looking forward again. To better health, to organized craft space, to more time with friends I love, to new job (please oh please), to cuddles with the cat, ferry rides and road trips and time spent out in Nature.
Comments