Later is now

Today is my brother Mark’s birthday. He would have been 56. It’s also his wife Diane’s birthday.

If I run into you in the neighborhood and you ask me how I’m doing, I’ll probably say, “I’m doing okay, thanks.”

If I see you in the grocery store and you ask me how my mother is, how my family is, I’ll say, “We’re all muddling through, thanks.”

If I see you in church and you say you’ve been praying for me, I’ll say, “Thank you. The prayers are appreciated.”

The truth is I feel like a 300 pound person is standing on my chest in high-heeled combat boots. The truth is that I hear my mother say she can’t live through this—our family is still grieving my father’s death and now another. We are just beginning to understand how much it hurts and we wonder how we’ll cope with yet another intense loss. There are no words that can describe this and, frankly, I can’t even talk about it any more. Don’t ask me what happened. Don’t ask me what’s happening to the man who killed my brother. Don’t ask me because I still haven’t found the words to explain it and I don’t think I ever will.

It has been six weeks since my brother Mark was murdered. Six weeks ago, when I was going to meet my sister at my mother’s apartment to deliver the bad news to my mother, I told myself that I would just will myself through what I had to do and I would face the grief later. Later is now.

Loss is piled upon loss. I can feel the ugly churning in my gut when I realize that this horror is real, that I’m not going to wake up in the morning and it will be gone. The trouble with later is that later comes eventually.