Long gone but not forgotten... — 8 months ago
Today, September 6, is Scott’s birthday.
Scott is my younger brother. He was born when I was 5 years old. I have photos of Scott when he was a baby, lying on my parents’ bed with me and my brother Steve lying beside him. Scott looked more like my two parents than the rest of us, with dark brown hair and eyes. Scott was the middle child in the family, with an older sister (me) and brother (Steve), and also a younger sister and brother. Steve and Scott were close in age, and very close friends, spending lots of time together. But Scott got along well with everyone. He always had a happy, friendly, out-going disposition. He was also very bright. I remember as his Big Sister enjoying time I spent teaching him things that I was learning, like how to read, and how to play the piano, and the names of plants and animals and insects in the woods behind the house. I remember him teaching me things he was learning, like the names of all the dinosaurs. Often he told me that he wanted to be a naturalist when he grew up. When Scott was 8 years old, our mother died, and our father remarried within the year. Our new Brady-bunch family now had 7 kids. Scott was still a favorite, adapting to new family and new school and enjoying Little League baseball.
The summer when Scott was 10 years old, the family went for a weekend trip to my aunt’s summer cabin in West Virginia, on the banks of the Monongahela river. As soon as we got there, all us kids changed into bathing suits and raced down to the riverbank. Steve and Scott were together, wading along the shallows, while the rest of us got in a canoe and paddled downstream. When we were paddling back upstream, we passed a stranger wading along looking for something. It turned out that he was looking for Scott, who had got caught in a strong current and dragged under the water. We were still there an over an hour later when a diving crew pulled his blueish body out of the water and tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate him. I think we all suffered from PTSD after that experience, especially my brother Steve, even though back then no one had ever heard of PTSD. We all wanted to forget about it, to bury the pain of it, and so nobody ever really talked about it, or about Scott, after the funeral was over. (We didn’t talk about my mother either, for the same reasons.)
Anderson Cooper writes about something similar in his memoir “Dispatches from the Edge.” His story is about the early loss of his father, and the later loss of his older brother, and how his family never talked about what had happened, and how that influenced his life. He writes that “I tried to swaddle the pain, encase the feelings. I boxed them up along with [my father’s] papers, stored them away, promising one day to sort it all out. All I managed to do was deaden myself to my feelings, detach myself from life. That only works for so long.”
So today I want to wish my beloved brother Scott a Happy Birthday, and celebrate his life, and recover all my memories of him, both wonderful and sorrowful, and feel those feelings instead of burying them. I want to get out that box of photos that I’ve stored away and put one of them out and light a candle, andd maybe post a few of the photos here. I want to see if anyone else in my famiily wants to join me in this goal of remembering Scott.
