“We tried everything. They took my bone marrow because I was a match.”
Jake shut his eyes as if it pained him to hear me say that.
“He had a stem cell transplant, but it wasn’t successful. At first, we had so much hope. Then, it was destroyed and there was just nothing left. He was sick for about two full years before we lost him.”
Silently willing me to continue, he squeezed my knee again.
“When he was in the hospital, we would play that game, Yahtzee. That was during the period about six months before he died. The last month or so, he had gotten so sick, so emaciated; I couldn’t bear to watch it…couldn’t handle seeing him like that.” I paused to catch my breath. “I stopped seeing him, Jake. I just stopped visiting my brother. I wasn’t even there when he died.” The tears started to pour out again as I recalled the most painful time of my life, no longer able to speak coherently.
He wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into him. I closed my eyes and sunk my head into the heat of his chest as I cried.
He spoke softly into my ear. “He knows you loved him, Nina. You loved him so much that you couldn’t bear to see him in pain. He knows. If he didn’t know then, wherever he is—wherever it is that we go—he knows now.”
I looked up at him. “You believe that?”
“Yes, I do. I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I can’t be 100-percent sure, but you have to have blind faith. You have to believe it in your gut. The fact is, it’s more likely than not that there is a purpose to this fucked up thing we call life. Your brother…he had a purpose. He just fulfilled it faster than you or me.”
“I want to believe that,” I said.
He let go of me suddenly and walked over to his closet, taking out the sketchpads I had looked through the night I snuck into his room. Flipping to one of the pictures of the man on the motorcycle, he sat back down on the bed next to me and stared at it for a bit before speaking.
“That’s my Dad,” he said with his eyes still focused on the drawing.
It blew me away that the haunting image that stuck out at me the most amongst his sketches was actually of his father. He had an impassioned look in his eyes as he continued to stare at the image without saying anything.
“That one was my favorite. The one of him looking back,” I said.
After another long pause, he finally spoke. “This was the last memory I have of him. He died that night in a motorcycle accident. I was only five, but I remember this moment in the drawing very clearly. He was going out to meet some friends. He told me to be a good boy for my mother and that he would take me out to my favorite diner for breakfast the next morning. For some reason, he looked back at me one last time before he took off, and it always stuck with me.”
This was breaking my heart.
“I don’t know which is worse: never getting to say goodbye to someone or watching them suffer first,” I said.
He put the sketch aside and turned to me. “Both scenarios suck. My point is, as painful as it was to lose my father that way, I never want to forget him. Ever. I do everything in my power to remember him, to remember the little things he taught me, even at that age.”
I took a deep breath in and nodded, thinking about what he said as it related to Jimmy. I had been trying so hard to push away thoughts of my brother’s illness, that all of the good memories were getting pushed away too, so there was nothing left of him.
Some random funny memories came to mind suddenly because I allowed them in. “My brother was such a jokester. Kind of like you.”
He smiled. “Yeah?”
“Jimmy was shameless. Once, he brought a whoopee cushion to church and put it under this old lady in the pew in front of us. My parents grounded him for like three weeks after that.” I shook my head remembering that day. “Whenever we got into fights, and I tried to stay mad at him, he would hold me down and tickle my feet until I begged his forgiveness. He knew that drove me crazy. Sometimes, he would get Ryan to grab the other foot. They would gang up on me.”
Jake raised his brow. “Ticklish feet, huh? I’ll have to remember that the next time you zone out on me during a math lesson.”
“No, you don’t!”
“But see, it makes you smile to think about those things. You need to just remember the good times with him. Your brother’s last days don’t define who he was. You can choose to remember him however you want, like I choose to remember my Dad on his bike…just going out for a ride. It’s why I draw. It’s therapy for me and helps me etch the things I want to remember in stone.”