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Left Unsaid (continued from preceding page) ~
Donny 2016
• You got lost as a very little boy after we moved from Connecticut to Newburgh, New York. You went to a neighbor’s door and said, “I’m Donny Doo from Old Saybrook.”
• You were famously carried off the playground by Mary, kicking your arms and his legs, enraged at some other kid.
• You beat up Joe Cantone on the sidewalk of Sacred Heart School outside the busses.
• When I was about twelve I got a Ralph Lauren polo shirt for my birthday, and, when I opened the box, I said dramatically, caressing the shirt, “My first Lau- ren.” You teased me about this for the rest of your life.
• Tears ran down your high school face at the dinner table after getting in trouble for your poor grades, the only brother out of three I have seen cry.
• You always paid for my dinner, even when I was well beyond thirty.
• You had a big, round head as a baby and sat and stared at a plant for many months, maybe years.
• You got in a car accident when you were a teenager. I remember the blood on your shirt by the washer the next morning. It was the first time we almost lost you.
• You picked us up from the pool in the summer and you’d tap the brake to the beat of Boz Scaggs on the eight track as we waited at lights.
• When you were little, your younger by one-year sister, Bub, sometimes dressed you for school.
• You would often sneak cash into my hand before saying goodbye.
• Every Bruce Springsteen song will always make me laugh and cry and think of you.
• You always picked me up at the train station, which wasn’t always convenient. Once, when the train was late and my trip got really screwed up, I started cry-
ing; you said on the phone, “Are you okay? Do you want me to come get you?”
~
Warren, 2015
After it was all over, the wake, the funeral, the burial, my well-meaning oldest brother, Warren, the one who had disappeared into his wife’s problems, a life in Indiana we were not a part of long ago, wrote an email to our sister, Honora. He told her how he had not thought about death very much before this. He said now he could not stop thinking about it. A first for him, not for me.
~
Bubsi, 2011
The waves were turning and pulling out. On another day, in another life, I’d be calm, transfixed by nature. That day, the waves just sounded angry. Their relent- less crash polluted my ears. Everything was harsh. The sand. The sun. The heat. The people. Even the children playing, burying each other, packing and patting sand sculpture, seemed sinister. All other beach goers obese or emaciated in their flimsy swim- suits. Everyone had a hairy backs or bellies, enor- mous boobs or butts. Conversations rose above the tiresome ocean, high-pitched laughter, an incessant seagull caw.
I removed myself from the circle of friends in beach chairs to speak to my sister on the phone. I was waiting for the call. My expression was pinched
as I shoved a finger in one ear to hear her tell me
her breast cancer had returned. My second sister,
my third sibling to suffer this fate. Tears; my heart dropped to the ocean floor. “I’m sorry, Bub,” I gasped/ screamed; despair rolling up in my chest, crashing.
~
Donny, 1989
We didn’t know anything about cancer then. We were part of that persistent crowd who thinks cancer be- longs to others, those who smoked or have the gene or did not get checked often enough, people who earned it, cancer people.
That early spring day I awoke in my dorm room as one of the others, the noncancer people. By late morning, I’d be walking down my sister’s dorm hall- way, toward the window at the end where she stood
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