When you grow up in New England, life revolves around the seasons. Memorial Day kicked off summer, even though it was still too cold to swim. Labor Day meant back to school, even though it was still too hot for turtlenecks. Halloween nights you wore your costume over your coat and jumped into piles of colorful, crackling leaves. But at least you knew what holiday was next.

Moving to Florida was everything I’d hoped for. The soothing rustle of palm fronds, tropical breezes filled with scents of orange blossoms, the warm Gulf waters. The cookie-cutter forecast on the television screen a far cry from weather that could start out as snow, change to drizzle, freeze to ice, then melt all in the same day. Good-bye Nor’easters, hello hurricanes.

I thought the distance between the north and south, past and present, living and dead would be enough. That somehow I could leave my baggage behind once and for all. So I ran. Fast and far. But I couldn’t outrun it. The massive gray baggage showed up every where I turned. So many bags. All shapes and sizes. Weighing me down until I collapsed.

******

“Your father’s gone to Heaven to be with God.”

“Why?” I asked. I didn’t understand.

“Because God needed him. He had a special job for him to do.”

“But I need him here.” God is good? God is great? I hate God.

“Stand up now, pull your shoulders back and wipe those tears off your face. You have to be a big girl for your mother,” my grandmother said. I didn’t know how to be any bigger than ten.

No Daddy. Don’t be dead. Wake up! I shake his arm. It’s cold as ice.

The smell of flowers make me sick. Make me dizzy. I need air.

Please don’t let them put him in the ground Mommy. Please don’t put dirt on him. It’s too dark. He won’t be able to breathe. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to.

Time stops. Taps plays. The soldiers fold the flag. I stare into space.

In my room in the dark, alone and scared, I’m afraid to close my eyes. He loved you very much. He went peacefully. He died in his sleep, they said. For days, weeks, months I fight to stay awake because I know if I close my eyes and sleep, I too would die. My tears fall silently on the pillow. Mustn’t be a baby. Mustn’t make anyone sad. Mustn’t get in the way.

I take my tears and pain and stuff-stuff-stuff them way down to the bottom of a giant gray bag. I tie it up, roll it into the closet and slam the door shut. I will put my feelings away in storage and forget all about them. But something inside the bag stirs. Images I don’t want to see. Sounds I don’t want to hear. I hurry to fill my head up with mindless chatter. Quick-quick-quick my mind works. Pieces of this, thoughts of that, nursery rhymes or knock-knock jokes.

I sing songs from the Top 40 countdown over and over again until my head becomes a radio. I can turn the volume up and change songs anytime. Every waking hour I think-think-think so I don’t have to hear the unbuckling of Daddy’s belt or the slap-smack-slap of leather on skin. I drown out the muffled groans of my brothers as they fought to hold their breaths. One sound, one gasp and the beating got worse. The belt now hangs on my brother’s wall like a crucifix with the ghost of our father nailed to it.

Crackle. Hiss. Static. Noise. Soldiers play Taps. Daddy says he loves me. Chairs crashing, glass smashing, I search for a song to sing and turn up the volume. I blast away the good memories, the bad memories and the mixed messages of Daddy and pack them back up in my secret baggage, carefully hidden under lyrics and chatter.

Scratch-click-scratch-click, the vinyl spins round and round on the stereo. The album ended ten minutes ago but no one gets up to change it. The half-dozen junkies slumped around the dining room table are lost in euphoria somewhere. Their heads nod and bob as if their necks cannot hold them up.

Crap. There goes another one. I reach over and grab the cigarette off the table before it burns another mark. Not that it mattered. The table was covered with so much stuff you could hardly see the black marks left from smoldering cigarettes. Burnt bottle caps, bent spoons, syringes haphazardly tossed about. Beer bottles, bags of pot, all there for the taking. One brother still has a leather belt wrapped around his arm, the other one’s slouched over, chin to chest, still holding the hypodermic needle he’d stuck in a vein. He had to shoot it in his hand because he’d already run out of good veins. Not a good thing for a seventeen-year-old.

I get up and put on the Doors album. We always have the newest albums. My brothers just walk in and take them from the music store and haven’t gotten caught yet. They didn’t get caught breaking and entering the drugstore either even though the cops came to search the house. Man, we had jugs and jugs of pills and I was the keeper of the stash. A most prestigious job. I knew all the names too. Tuinal, Amytal, Seconal. I read the labels over and over again so I would know the names in case someone needed their stomachs pumped. They always asked that when you call for an ambulance, what type of overdose it was. I always wondered if that’s how they decided whether to rush over with sirens and lights flashing or take their sweet ass time.

I was the only one home when the police came that day looking for evidence. I played “dumb little twelve-year-old” and it worked like a charm. They didn’t search too long. I guess they felt bad that I was crying. But I was cool and knew the scene. Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. I knew it all. I was gonna make a good punk. I had good teachers.

I looked around the room, not knowing of course how the future would play out for this scraggly bunch of teenagers. How was I to know that Junkie A would get piss-ass drunk, steal a canoe, paddle out to the middle of Lake Chebacco, fall overboard and drown. How was I to know that Junkie B would hang himself in a jail cell, or that Junkie C would shoot a bad bag and die. How was I to know that when I looked at the young, wasted faces of my brothers, Junkie D and Junkie E, that I would stand at both their graves and sob. How was I to know?

Through the haze of heavy smoke I noticed the clock on the wall read ten-thirty. Better start clearing them out before Ma came home from work. It didn’t really matter though. They’d all just climb through my bedroom window later on and crash in my brothers’ room. Not that my mother would notice. She spent most of her time clinging to and slobbering over her new best friend Jack. Jack Daniels that is.

“C’mon you guys, get up.” A few stirred so I knew they were alive. The squeak of leather vests and the clink of silver chains a sure sign of life. “C’mon, wake up.” But one brother doesn’t stir. “WAKE UP.” Nothing. “Oh my God! Something’s wrong!” There’s terror in my throat as I sound the alarm. That’s all we need is another overdose. I have no idea where to put this fear. I push and push and push it down. My muscles tight with terror.

I call for the ambulance. The sirens scream. The lights flash. Time and time and time again.

Jim Morrison is still singing, “Hello, I Love You.” My pounding heart keeps tempo. “When she moves, my brain screams out this song.”

******

Work-work-work. Forty, fifty, sixty hours it doesn’t matter. As long as I don’t have to look at my baggage I will work and work and work. Climb the ladder rung by rung, more responsibility leaves little time to dwell. A wonderful husband, new home, new cars, island-hopping in the Caribbean. No one would guess where my roots are buried. No one would guess how hard my body and mind works to blot out the past. Images of me hiding under threadbare sheets so the zombies who’ve been sniffing paint thinner won’t find me. The sounds of bones hitting pavement when one zombie discovers he cannot fly. The slapping of skin on skin as we try to wake the dead. Keeping it locked up takes a certain skill.

I multi-task my way through the rubble, juggling the work of two, earning the well-deserved recognition. Look at me. I am normal. I am strong. I turn up the chatter in my head and stuff down the brutal scenes of beatings from drug dealers with guns drawn, looking for their money. Bits and pieces of this debris always swirling. I find a good song and turn up the volume.

“Your brother is here to see you,” a co-worker announces. It still feels odd to me to have a cup of coffee with JE instead of trying to rouse him from the gutter where he’s puked all over himself. Clean and sober for eight years now, we are just getting to know each other without the haze of a chemical between us.

“There’s no easy way to say this,” he says, his eyes averted.

I brace myself as I always do.

“JD tested positive for HIV. I was afraid you’d hear it from someone else before he got a chance to tell you himself. It’ll be okay, though. I’m going to be there to see him through. No matter what lies in front of us.” I believe JE.

I immediately go to work on my mantra. He will not die. He will not die. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. I look at Mr. Clean and Sober and swallow hard. I slowly nod my head as if I comprehend the words. As if I am an adult. As if I am…alive and breathing.

Eight months later, my clean and sober brother turned up dead.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” my oldest brother says, ” but JE died.”

“How?” I whisper into the phone.

“He choked on his vomit,” he says and I know at once. Heroin overdose.

I don’t cry. I get right to work. I take charge. Where is everyone right now? Where should I meet you? Should I stop at the store for anything? Got enough cigarettes? How’s Ma? JE’s wife? His three-year-old daughter? His three-month-old-son?

I break the news to my husband but I don’t cry. We gather with the rest of the family as mourners do, to drink coffee and smoke. My clear-headed husband makes funeral arrangements while the rest of us concoct the story. Heart attack? Aneurysm? What is an appropriate way for a thirty-eight-year-old man to die? We agree on heart attack. My husband doesn’t understand why the truth is not an option.

Standing at my brother’s grave I have my very first flashback although I do not know at the time what it is. I am slammed back in time. Ten years old, I stand at my father’s grave, watching the soldiers fold the flag. Then bam, I am back. And shaken. Afraid I’m losing my mind. I don’t know how long I was gone or if anyone noticed. I look up and make eye contact with JD. It is at that very moment the grim reality sinks in. We will do this very same thing for him. The pain in both our eyes cannot be described.

Back at work my veneer starts to crack, but I am still strong enough to hold myself together. The grief has yet to come because I don’t know which brother to grieve. For a solid year I focus on JE’s wife and kids. I try to hold them up. We try to make sense of it. I sneak moments of grief in for myself, but they are only that. Moments.

I manage to glue my veneer back into place and carry on like a trooper. I wear my courage on my sleeve like a medal of valor. I learn to excel in diversion and could deflect any questions that might uncover the truth of who I truly was, a wounded little girl pretending to be an adult. If I stopped thinking, breathing, working, I would fall on my knees. If I allowed myself to feel the loss from the past, the present, and the future, I would surely die.

******

Five years after the death of my clean and sober brother, JD lost his battle with AIDS. It was excruciatingly painful to watch this horrific disease whittle him away right down to his marrow. The unresolved grief, stemming back to the death of my father, rose up from the depths of my soul and I finally fell. Every single time I tried to stand up, I fell. Hard. I knew if I didn’t seek help, my life, as I knew it, would end.

Picking up the phone and making the call to a therapist saved my life. Opening up the heavy, well-worn baggage and showing the contents to another human being was terrifying. There were times I’d sit there silent, saturated with tears. For the first time in my life I acknowledged I had been abused. The grief and anger were bitter lumps in my throat and rendered me speechless.

“If the words are too painful, write them down,” my therapist suggested.

I wrote. I typed. I cried. Then I typed some more. I hated those words. I ripped the pages up, lit them on fire, stomped on them, but still I wrote. Then one day those words became my voice and my voice became strong. And now I share my story, writing those words and shedding tears for those who’ve not yet found their voices.

–Petunia

    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 25 May 2006
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.