Make the Angels

 Today my two remaining siblings and I are going out to visit the two sites where our younger brother Jeb’s ashes are melted into the earth. One spot overlooks the Schuykill River. There’s an Amtrak railroad bridge nearby and down below this bluff is the West River Drive. The cars actually drive through a tunnel cut through the bluff where half of his ashes were placed. There’s a long ago deserted hillside garden that you walk through to get there, stone steps and walls. But first you walk across a lawn and step over a small stream set into concrete. Always a bit trashed and neglected, the sound of the cars zooming by is a random rhythm.

I went to a drum circle there at least once, further back on the bluff. The remains of the fire pit are still there. I’ll look today to see if it seems still active. Pot fumes rising, the beat predictable and relentless, squawks of a sax or shrieks of flute invade my memory. But perhaps I am remembering the sound of an actual Rainbow Gathering, I went to four nationals, starting with Washington State 1980. I’d set off for that Rainbow because I’d heard through some far reaching grapevine that he might be there. After two years of not hearing any word from him, I did find him, he walked right into our camp when we were setting up. But then he ended up here about 15 years later. Well, half of him.

The other half of his ashes are under a tree next to Walt Whitman’s tomb across the river in Camden. I Sing the Body Electric changed America, and it also changed me. I’d read Whitman out loud, almost religiously, in my early 20’s when I’d gone to live with my Grandmother in her shady home in Florida for a year. More than something to do, I felt he was kind of a saint, along with the likes of John Coltrane and John Lennon. If felt good to read the words aloud, just like it felt good to read the Pablo Neruda aloud, in Spanish as well as English. Even if I didn’t know Spanish hardly at all. I could guess how the meanings connected. Neruda also liked to celebrate the body. My girlfriend at the time, Maria, whose mother Chonita was from Mexico, we’d read Neruda aloud together. But when I was in Florida, a separation from Maria for a year, I’d read aloud, sitting in the hot water of the old cast iron tub.

Jeb actually passed away in ’96, when my daughters were two, or perhaps it was January of ’97. I always get a bit mixed up on dates, seeing as how I was born in ’59. He was born in ’61, and we’re a year and about 10 months apart. Somehow there seems to be quite a bit of difference between 1 and 2, and it confused me early on. There seems to be no comparison between the space between 0 and 1 and the space between 1 and 2. The confusion remains like an echo and I always have to think twice about certain kinds of math operations. Being a carpenter, it comes up quite a bit.

Jeb, the youngest of us four however, was kind of a runt and he had sight problems, teeth problems, leg problems. Apparently towards the end he may have known he had heart problems. In his belongings was a list of numbers which I’ve always wanted to back check to see if they were for health centers. Why would an apparently homeless person have a list of numbers? So, in comparison, my math problems that translate into time memory problems are nothing. I learned that early on. And I remember the moment. I was wrestling with him, which may have meant picking on him since I was always bigger and knew I could always win. I was dropping a ball of spit towards his face, with my knees on his arms so he couldn’t move, and I thought, This is terrible! Don’t do this! And I stopped. It seems to me that we became best of friends and brothers after that. There were never any resentments, at least on my part. And I always tried to help him and be there for him. Though in the end I failed.

That is the harsh truth, and through working to understand this truth, I feel like I am learning to make the angels, so to speak. There was a phone call from Jeb about 6 months before he died where he told me that he forgave me. For what, I did not understand at the time, but perhaps now I do. I've been thinking about these things ever since, and I think he knew way more than me when he called that day. I too went through alcoholism, and continuing depression. That ogre of suicidal ideation still hovers nearby, even in this moment. As it must have for him, perhaps from a very early age. My parents say that he almost died when he was six months old. The medicine he was given permanently stained his teeth yellow. But if we talk to the angels they can help us. Grandmothers, friends, acquaintances. Saints from the media of music or arts. Joan of Arc perhaps. Her testimony from her trial shouts across the ages about fairies that her grandmother saw under a certain ancient tree. They called it the Fairy Tree and put wreaths there. She says she may have danced there with the other girls but she sang more often than she danced.