Fourteen years ago this evening, the door was ajar when I started to enter my Venice apartment. A chilly and fatally ill wind was blowing from the east through the two living room windows. Every room was dark except the entryway where the bright television screen was flashed a shaft of yellow/white from an innocuous program across the hardwood floor.
During the seven years that we lived together following my divorce, one of my stoic brother’s favorite habits was to walk around behind me and silently fling open the windows after I, shuddering, had shut them.
Must have happened again.
My call, “Paul?” went unanswered.
I flicked a switch and wandered through.
Paul didn’t answer because he was lying on the bathroom floor, on his back, extinguished cigarette in his small left hand. He had been lying there exactly12 hours, felled by a heart attack.
After perfunctorily dialing 9-1-1, I began circling the living room, like a starving exotic bird, pounding my hands into the pillows when I passed the couch, crying out “Why? Why?”
Desperately, I telephoned three friends to come by. Just sit here, I said. You don’t have to say anything. I need people.
I believed then and now it would have been smoother, better, more contented for all if our final roles had been reversed. He was the prince of placidity. I was volatile, passionate, emotional, the stirrer.
Since he always was much more sensitive and considerate than I, I have a theory that he chose to die in the bathroom where there was a tile floor rather than the much more combustible living room where the vulnerable flooring was largely blacked out by rows of books, a characterization that makes it sound tidier than it really was.
Every weekend, I post card four sets of relatives, and remembering milestones is my specialty. In reminding them that today marked Year 14 for Paul, I remembered something else. In 1997, Paul died on a Thursday. For several months thereafter, I felt a sui generis twinge on every Thursday. Not any other day.
When I returned home, emptily, from his funeral, I drove out to the desert. I don’t remember where, someplace I never had been before or since. Wandered aimlessly for hours, until it grew dark. I drove a convertible, top always down, in those days. When I expressed my disappointment to God at his choice of brothers to take, there were no vehicular impediments between him and me.
On my postcards, I committed what I expect may be interpreted as typical heresy. I said Paul’s was the most devastating death I have suffered, worse than Mom’s, Pop’s or Grandma’s. They died at later ages after illnesses. Paul just vanished without warning. Besides, we had been much closer in the last years. When Mom died, I had already been gone from home almost 25 years, and the rest longer.
Paul saw me/guided me through my most vulnerable period, after a (so far) 21-year divorce that I would not wish on a Democrat, no matter his character.
May Paul’s memory be a blessing for our family and his friends.
