Remembering My Brother

In this past year God allowed me to realize that Palliative Care was a calling for me. For those of you who may not know, Palliative Care specifically involves improving quality of life and providing comfort for those at the end of life. Nurturing anyone at the end of life is a challenge for the patient as well as the caregivers even when it is expected as a natural progression of age. However providing palliative care in the nursery or labor and delivery presents an entirely unique set of challenges…no matter how much information we have…nothing ever prepares a parent to say good-bye to a child and especially a baby. So although I consider this a calling, and although even as I write I am completing a course at Harvard for certification in Palliative Care, I am clear that when my brother died in July nothing in my grief training could have prepared me for it.

My brother was brutally murdered in his home on June 29th, 2010…he was thirty-five…tomorrow October 14th would have been his 36th birthday. It’s only been three months since he passed and it still doesn’t seem real. His killer has not been found…but my sadness, my regret at not being able to see him one last time hurts way more than my anger at an investigation that seems to be at a standstill. And even if the person was found today I am clear that it would not bring him back. And even if God himself told me why he had to die this way…somehow I don’t think I would have less sadness or less regret.

I think about all the parents I have prayed with, held hands with, cried with, hugged, been at witness at baptism, taken pictures of, and tried to comfort as they said good-bye to their precious babies who were destined to be angels. I was always aware that words could never be enough, but always prayerful that in time healing and peace would come. I think about all the babies over the past ten years that I have had to say good-bye too. And all the baby funerals I have attended…and standing in a baby cemetery looking at tombstones covered with dolls and trucks and trying to make sense of it all. Yet, somehow deeply understanding that sometimes we simply will not understand. We just have to accept and move on…find a way to live with our grief and to cherish the memory of our loved one’s in that grief. But no one really move’s on, because to move on means to move forward in the same direction. I think those of us in the grief process move forward but our destination is very different than the one it would have been without this experience of pain.

In my brother’s death I received a greater understanding of what loss means for these families…it’s not that I haven’t lost loved one’s before I have..and it never gets easy just the manner in which I lost him did leave me totally blind sided and wonder how did I ever console a parent? How did I ever a hold a baby and watch it take its last breath? It’s times like that…time’s like these that we know without a doubt there is a greater power…and I am grateful for daily peace in the midst of tears. I am grateful for the capacity to love and to remember.

I am so grateful for the opportunity I had to have experienced Frederick Demond Jackson for thirty five years. I miss your smile…your big eyes…your wicked laugh…your passion for life…your always knowing what was going on and always managing to be on the VIP list…your sense of style…your accountability to everyone in our family…your loyalty…and of course your insatiable love of ketchup. I miss you…but I know somewhere you are smiling…and getting ready to celebrate your birthday with banana pudding and ketchup..but hopefully not together…but knowing you I wouldn’t be surprised. Happy Birthday Fred…love your Big Sis.