Chapter 5: When She Got Back, I Was Dead
was visiting my parents over the holidays. My mother loves nothing more than to break open a bottle of cheap chardonnay (Kendall Jackson if it's a fancy night) and watch home videos of us kids when we were little. It's pretty harmless, if a little embarrassing, so we indulge this habit with her.
We were watching videos of my sister and me dancing and singing and generally hamming it up for the camera when I was 4 or 5-ish. We watch like four of these videos and I notice in everyone that I talk to the camera about my younger brother. I keep saying things like "When I was 10 and my brother was 7 we did X" or "When I was 8 and my brother was 5 we did Y". I don't remember ever talking about this. There was a consistent 3 year age gap between this younger brother and me and all the things we did were activities on a large, rural farm. Between the ages of 0-7, we only ever lived in major metropolitan areas, my immediate family has never lived on a farm.
I asked my mom about it because it was weird. She said she always brushed it off because I was an imaginative little kid, I was always telling stories and I really wanted a younger brother. She said I stopped talking about it around the time my younger brother was born when I was 6. She said there was one time that I said something that really weirded her out. One time I apparently said, "When I was 12 and my brother was 9, I fell out of the tree near the silo. It hurt really bad. Buzzy went to get Mama but when she got back I was dead." I don't remember every saying this, my mom said I was really nonchalant and when she asked me about it, I wasn't bothered. I just said it again like it was a fact. My mom said that my brother was born a few months after that and I never mentioned it again so she let it go. She wrote it off as me trying to get attending with a new sibling on the way.
Flash forward about 3 days and my mom's mom and stepdad are there for Christmas. My mom's stepdad married her mom when my mom was in her late 20's and I was a baby, my mom didn't grow up with him and she doesn't know his extended family well. A few glasses of wine and back to the baby videos. One of them has me mentioning my brother again. My mom retells the creepy story from earlier. Her stepdad goes white. My mom knew that he had a sibling pass away when he was young, I had never heard that before. His oldest sister, Shirley passed away when he was 9. She was three years older than him. They were raised on a grain farm in Iowa. They were playing on a tree and she fell head first out of the tree when her foot slipped. My mom's stepdad was right there when it happened. He went to get help but she passed away from the fall.
The part that not even my grandmother knew: His sister couldn't say his name when she was little and mispronounced it as Buzzy. No one called him that after his sister died. He got really mad at me and was convinced that someone told me and that 5 year old me was messing with him. I had no idea he had lost a sibling. My grandma is the only one in our family who knew all the details about it, but even she didn't know about the nickname.
I have no memory of telling these stories as a little kid and even seeing all the videos hasn't helped my remember it. My mom and I haven't talked about it since. My mom's stepdad hasn't talked to me at all since.
