January 2009 Pete Esvelt

My brother Pete showed up in a dream a couple of months ago.  It was more than dreamlike in realism.  I mean, I can remember the dialogue, which is unusual in my dreams.  He was just standing near a wall in a room with some other people, maybe a barroom or a party.  He looked perfectly normal, and wore a slightly mischievous smile.  I stared at him in disbelief, wondering if my eyes were playing some kind of mean trick.  Finally finding my tongue, I said, "It's you.  Isn't it?"  He said, "Yes".  I said, "But...you're dead."  He said, "How's that working out for you?"  I guess I could have replied a bit better,  but I’m pretty inarticulate in my dreams.  I woke up not feeling a bit disturbed by the interaction.  Now I can answer him, having thought a bit.  In the time since I recall the precise instant (though I was sleeping in the next room), I woke up to the realization his soul had left his body, I can talk about it.  Happiness began to come in gusts of warmth like surprise winter guests, about a year later.  The tapes that rewound involuntarily with the most horrific images and thoughts of guilt have quit, by and large.  I no longer awaken every day greeted by them.  I can swing my feet to the floor from my bed each morning and put one in front of the other without feeling heroic in the effort.  I can see the fog inside a bell jar and put distance between myself and it because the warning signs are clear.  Sometimes that exercise renders me insensitive to others' pain but it saves me.  The bell jar Sylvia Plath writes about didn't magically disappear a year after the deaths of my brother and mother who died ten weeks apart, leaving me without any remaining immediate family.  So now, when I awaken with no cloud to fumble through before I face the day, I'm breathing wonderfully fresh air.  The poison of depression didn't drift away in one fell swoop because of this or that.  It came and went and is always dangerously near.  I owe my recovery in large part to the individuals in my communities who welcomed me when I was most in need; they were lifelines to me.  I set out deliberately to connect with cousins, in-laws and friends, making long journeys in some cases to be with them.  I instinctively gravitated toward those vital elements of my life as if they were water for my parched throat and  I couldn't get enough in my extreme neediness.  The other element I needed was simple activity.  If I didn’t get these feet from the bed to the ground and to then keep moving I knew the most intense and seemingly natural impluse was to quit moving altogether.  No breakfast.  No lunch.  No work.  No play.  It felt perfectly natural to distance myself from the world around me.  For around six months I felt I was operating through some sort of mind-altering substance.  That would explain some of the poison in the bell jar.  Then I walked around for a year and  a half feeling like surely everyone could see the embarrassing problem I had of a kind of disablement, akin to a broken arm; I wasn’t all there.  But I'm out of that jar.  I'm even over the anger, which erupted with such ferocious, instantaneous insanity I had no idea where it came from.  I still don't know.  I'm just grateful I still have some loved ones who saw me through it all.  The person I am now, wouldn't have wanted to live with me then

Tomorrow will mark the third year since Pete died.  It occurs to me that I can now memorialize him with fondness free of the perpetual reviews of grim images surrounding his long battle to the end.  I suspect that means I'm more or less past the PTSD.  I like to think of the mornings that he visited me when he was alive, as if by some sort of time travel or channeling.  I'd lie in bed greeting the day with the awareness of him vivid in my emotional well-being.  He was simply there, ever conscious in myself, my brother.  I'll never know if he shared those moments; sadly I never asked him.  They didn't even demand a response from him; they were a more-than-usually realistic reminder of the ever-present part of my existence he was.  I think many of us share an intimacy with siblings born within two years, that never departs us, having shared so many hours of primal infant discovery. No other experiences between people can compare to those powerful bonds.  I wasn't close to Pete for most of my adult life.  So now, when I reflect on those mysterious moments, I know I didn't expect communication from him and, indeed, didn't really much need it.  I just felt his existence as one of the four walls around me that held my life, the others being myself, my mother and husband.  Now with him gone I no longer feel that wall.  I began to realize my part in the four walls of his life a number of years before he died, though.  It became clear that my visits on holidays were major landmarks in the seasons of each of his years. He always welcomed me, and in fact looked forward to seeing me months in advance.  I verified the power of that bond when he began to die, and confirmed it for the next 18 months.  I began to call him daily, and the links clicked back into place effortlessly with conversations that went on and on.  I just let him shoot the breeze with whatever came to mind, starting with the words, "What's new with you?".  Each day until the last seven, he had something to talk about, though he chose for the most part to avoid his own mortality.  Some days were a bit harder to get the words moving but I wasn’t ready to quit trying, ever.  He did a remarkable job of maintaining his razor-sharp wit and  for the most part, cheerful demeanor through the inevitable indignities of a slowly-failing body.  For those eighteen months I was his closest friend, and I know for a fact that my phone calls lit up each day for him with some moments of warmth and companionship when he most needed it.  From the distance of these 250 miles between here in Tacoma and his home in Spokane I knew I’d be hard-pressed to offer much better than simple friendship.   It didn’t feel to me as if we had lost any time between us as we struck back up our fraternal bonds; the words flowed as naturally as a fresh spring breeze.  And he had no hesitation to expose me to the rawest details of his condition when I visited, asking for intimate help when he needed it.  So I can honestly say we never truly drifted apart those decades of our adult years.  As much as I always knew him to be my one and only brother he obviously always knew me to be his one and only sister.