When my brother got sick my father called me and I wasn’t too alarmed, but then my father called and said my brother was being life-flighted because his liver was shutting down, and I was alarmed… then my father called me and said, “You need to come now,” like in the movies. I lived in Los Angeles at the time so I got on a flight and I flew and flew but I wasn’t afraid, why should I be? My brother was 29 years old and had two young daughters. But when I arrived at the hospital, they said my brother was already in a coma, and they told me his liver and his kidneys had stopped functioning, and he would need more than one transplant, and he would probably have brain damage if he lived, which was unlikely. And I said there must be some misunderstanding, this is my little brother maybe you have the wrong family? But when I saw him his skin looked puffy and almost wet, like if you pressed-in his skin with your finger, there would be an indentation that would never reinflate. And after we decided to take him off life support, the nurses said we could gather around him one last time, my grandparents wouldn’t come in the room with us (they said they already had their memories), and my father asked that we sing Amazing Grace (I never much liked that song), and as we sang suddenly my father cried out, “My little boy! Who loved fire trucks!” and those words cut me so deep, I’ll remember those words, of my brother’s life and my father’s pain, until my bones are dust, it was like someone took a knife to my neck and cut me to my spine and my blood ran down through my shoes, and that song, that day, it destroyed my family from which we’ll never recover, my sister and I float like cursed ghosts pretending that we didn’t also die that day, that we aren’t already dead. And my mother fell on the floor, and the people from the church tried to talk to her then about Jesus, and she shouted at them, so I helped her up and walked her to the waiting room, even though she and I don’t really speak, and my father walked around outside in the mud in the cold rain, the rain falling in his eyes and in his heart and down his neck and down his throat, and he shouted at God, I imagine he said “How dare you take my son!,” see my father is a deeply religious man, even now he prays on his knees, and my brother was becoming a pastor and preached at a soup kitchen for homeless men, both of them, all of them, having poured out their hearts to God, and what good did it do them?And my son was there that day, he was just a baby, and strange thing is they’ve become merged in my mind, my son as my brother, my brother as my son, which doesn’t make sense, but in a way it does… see my brother, my little brother, my only brother, his name was Aaron (which means “mountain of strength”), and his middle name was Matthew (which means “gift from God”), and my son, my only son, his name is Noah (which means “to rest”), and his middle name is Matthew, named in honor of his uncle, my brother, who he never really met, so together their names mean something like, “go rest, on that mountain high.” But see Aaron was the brother of Moses, and his rod became a serpent to frighten the Pharoah, and Lamech was the father of Noah, like me, and the son of Methuselah, who lived 1000 years, and the grandson of Enoch, who walked with God and then was no more because God took him, like God took my brother, and my name is Nathan (which means “God has given,”) but has he, and I don’t believe in God anymore, so where’s that leave me? And sometimes I go to my brother’s grave at night, I sit on the cold ground and look up at the twinkling light of a thousand stars in the cold night sky, and I don’t really know what to think. I guess we all have to accept our mediocrity and our mortality and the millions of years it took for that starlight to reach me, and my brother beside me and we look at each other and we smile, what better way to let him go and hold him to my heart than staring up together at the light of an endless sky full of ancient dying stars.
Aaron Matthew Griffith 5/6/1981-5/22/2010
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