My Brother's Bones

I wish I had listened...

My Brother’s Bones

When my mother was 89, she decided it wasn’t really safe to live alone any longer on our remote ranch. She was still driving, but everyone in the village recognized her and knew to give her plenty of room on the roads. She had finally come to the realization that she was too far from medical help if she fell or sustained an injury in her indefatigable rounds of gardening, tending animals and checking on her equally aged friends who lived in even more remote and rugged areas of the beautiful and dangerous volcanic fields of northeastern New Mexico. So she came to live with me in an apartment I rented for us near Albuquerque, close to doctors and hospitals and in a neighborhood where she could walk to the grocery store and the senior center. We persuaded her to give up her car keys and everyone breathed a little easier. She took classes at the senior center. She walked to the store every day. She was still the very bright light she had always been, interested in everything, deeply engaged in thinking and living.

One morning she sat at our little breakfast table, drinking coffee and eating her daily boiled egg and toast. Out of the blue, she said, I want to move Joc’s bones to the ranch.

I was always in a hurry then. To get to work. To worry some problem into submission. To try to comprehend the new world I was in after a serious accident and brain injury. It was two years into my recovery. I looked all right but I was not. How it happened that I, a newly brain-injured person, ended up caring for my mother as she declined in her last eighteen months of life, is a question I have pondered a lot. Each one of my four living siblings was unavailable, for very good reasons. And so I had this unrepeatable experience, this, I would have to say, transcendent experience, of accompanying my mother through her last days and nights.

When she said she wanted to move my brother’s bones, I am ashamed to say that I looked at her as if she had lost her mind. I was shocked by what seemed to me a very peculiar wish: to find, dig up and relocate whatever remained of the burned and broken body we had buried more than fifty years ago in the sandy soil of a high promontory overlooking the sculpted mesas and plains a few miles south of Clayton, New Mexico.

As I remember and ponder this moment, I have so many questions. Why wasn’t I able to engage with my mother, to listen, to explore what she was really asking for? Why did it make me so uncomfortable? What was she trying to say with this longing? Was there something else we could do to satisfy it?

I knew that, fifty years on, we would not be able to find the burial site. It was unmarked, save for the long, rough slab of wood into which we had each carved a message or symbol. Mine was the infinity symbol transected by the eternity symbol. A figure eight and a circle, carved also into my wedding band. Love and death, inseparable.

But what had that to do with my mother’s longing to dig up the remains of her golden boy and put them where her own heart had found its home? Put them where his daughter and widow and sisters could find him if they wanted to spend some time scolding or crying or beseeching. Or just sitting in the sun and wind of a different promontory, this one overlooking the Dry Cimarron River and the wild native grass meadows of the ranch that became our home, our reason to go on, our tiny beacon of hope after his death.

The older I get, the more these lost opportunities haunt me. The gaps and absences, the astonishing number of things I did not know or understand about my mother, things I might have been able to know or understand if I’d had just a bit more patience, a bit less preoccupation with things that now seem insignificant. I find both of my parents more and more mysterious as I age.

We buried what was left of my brother’s body in a plain wooden box high up on that bluff just south of Clayton, on the land of family friends. We did not have the ranch then. In fact, our family’s story, and the legacy of the ranch, came from my parents’ search for “a place to heal, and to create a living memorial” to their dead son. They actually said those words. I have written about this in my previous Substack posts. There is more. There is always more to say about traumatic loss, and about love, and about the extremely long and unpredictable experience of grief, which has its own subterranean life and a half-life that resembles that of plutonium, embedding in our tissues and psyches, shaping the lives that swerve in unaccountable ways around the absence of the beloved.

I wish now that I had looked into my mother’s eyes, or framed her lovely face with my hands and said, tell me about it. And then listened to the gush of grief that would have poured from her wound, raw as the day he fell from the sky.

A few days ago I read a beautiful essay by Hans Jorgensen on his Substack “What Lies Within Us” about how grief grows us. It never goes away, never really even diminishes. Instead, it grows our capacity to hold it, to tolerate it, to let its weight and mystery have their way with us.

My mother was never a large woman. She birthed six children and lost teeth and bone mass to each one. She survived multiple myeloma, when the chemotherapeutic agents used to treat it were derived from mustard gas. The illness, and aging, compressed her spine; she visibly shrank as she aged. At 89, she was tiny and light on the outside, vast and unknowable inside.

Her bones now rest on the promontory over the Dry Cimarron. The thought of my brother—quicksilver in life and in death—lies next to her, marked by a headstone so his daughter and sisters can find him.

Below is the beautiful Hans Jorgensen essay on grief:

What Lies Within Us