When I was eight or nine years old, I found out there had been another brother, Martin Arthur. He had died two and a half years before I was born. Martin died in the home in which I was raised. I am a replacement child.
There was no picture of Martin Arthur anywhere in the house. His name was never mentioned after that day when I had found out about him. It wasn’t unusual in those days to refrain from talking about a child who had died.
I didn’t talk about Martin at all with my father, until he was dying. And even then, my dad was in a coma when I mentioned him. Each night I would say to my dad before I left the hospital that it was okay for him to die. Not to worry. I would take care of mom. Everything would be all right. He could go and be with Martin. And then I would say, but wait until tomorrow. Dad died without me there. After dad died I talked to mom about Martin.
My mother never called him by name. She referred to him as “my boy.” I would visit his grave and come back and tell her and she would look up and say, “You saw my boy?” I carried her wistfulness in me. Her sorrow, her loss, her emptiness. In an attempt to help my mother, I told her a parable about a little boy who had suddenly died. Everyone wanted a reason for his death. It didn’t make sense. A little boy? What had such a little boy done to die so young? Isn’t that the universal question?
The story goes that we are born with a soul. And that soul grows inside a body which is the container for the soul. Sometimes the body gives out before the soul has finished developing. So God, in His infinite wisdom, puts the soul into another body until the soul has completed its growth. Then, when the body is no longer needed to cradle the soul, it returns to God. That’s why the little boy died. The soul only needed a place to grow for a short time.
Martin had died on February 27th. My parents’ wedding anniversary was February 28th. I was born February 21st. I think about that and wonder how did my parents celebrate their anniversary? But they did. We even surprised them with a party on their 25th anniversary.
I still visit Martin’s grave. I keep him up to date on the family. He’s listened to me as I became a parent and then a grandparent. I talk to him as if I have known him forever. And in a strange way, I have. I carry Martin within me. I miss a brother I never met, but seem to know intimately. When he died, so too, did the dreams my parents had for him. And then I was born and their dreams for him lived on in me and mingled with mine. And we became one. I internalized Martin. I sometimes think I have lived and am living two lives. I keep him alive.
When a parent loses a child, the sibling that remains loses two; the sibling and the parent. I never knew my parents as Martin had. In a sense, I had lost my parents, the parents they would have been, before I was born. Before I leave the cemetery, I tell Martin to take care of our parents. And I know in my heart that they are all together, on the right side of God, protected by the wings of the Shekhina, the Holy Spirit.
When I last visited my parents’ grave, I told them that I don’t know how they ever recovered from Martin’s death. I continue to be in awe of them. And at that very moment I pictured in my head a store near me called Recovering Nicely. You take in your tattered couches and chairs and they re-upholster them, re-cover them as good as new, even better. By re-covering them they hide the past by removing it from sight. People can’t be re-covered, and we certainly don’t recover nicely after such sorrow. We are not made or created that way. Our past is part of us. If we try to hide it, or cover it up, we suffer more. Repressing the past comes back to haunt us in the future. We don’t recover. We change, we adjust, we adapt and continue to live.
