Death. It’s one of those things in life that no matter how often it occurs, I’ll never get used to. I’ll never get comfortable with. No healthy person wakes up in the morning hoping for someone they love to perish. Even in situations where death is inevitable, it’s always sudden. Unexpected. Heartbreaking.
I think often of things I could have done differently the day my brother died. There must have been a different route I could have taken home. I could have let him play in the park just five minutes longer like he begged for me to do. The only problem with these thoughts is that they don’t matter. I can’t go back in time.
“Fixer.” That’s what everyone always used to call me. I ignored all my desires just to make things better. When my mother died leaving Brayden and me alone with our father, I became his mother. When my father would drink until he would pass out, I would clean the house before he woke, empty the bottles of alcohol and pray he’d be too hung over to go out for more the next day. But he always did and after a while he got tired of my attempts to keep him sober and that’s when he would start to hit me. A couple of times he went after Brayden but I’d hover over him taking the impact of my father’s violence. That’s when I became Brayden’s father as well. By the time I was eighteen, I became his legal guardian and work two jobs to keep us afloat.
That’s why Sunday’s were so special. It was the one day of the week where we’d get out of the house, escape the mess of whatever was going on in our everyday lives and breathe fresh air if only for a little while. We did this every Sunday and nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. But anything can happen and part of me died along with Brayden.
So I’ve been asking myself for the past five years: how can I fix anything now that I’m so broken?
