Erm

Mom: "Remember for next time, OK?'

Noel: "I already stuck it in my brain."

....."but I think my brain's a little itchy."

Happy Birthday, Stefan

Tonight, at least 50 people assembled at the YMCA where my brother was a lifeguard for the past 6 years. We read a poem he wrote, sang a song written for him, sang an Irish Blessing, shared memories, and planted a sugar maple tree in his honor. We cried, got to know each other, ate barbeque, and missed Stefan together.

Still, there are moments when I feel like I'm in a movie, that this can't really be happening, that my Stefan can't be gone. I feel like there has got to be some alternate ending to my choose-your-own-adventure story. I just need to go back and re-read the path that I want...I just got sidetracked along an untrue, unwanted story-line.

I miss my brother so much

I still cry often, and sometimes daily for stretches of time. I've started running lately (in the hopes of playing football/soccer), but often tears start streaming down my face mid-run. These are the same sidewalks Stefan and I trained together for our Virginia Beach half-marathon.

I really hope that he can read my mind now….
Because there are way too many things that I never told him.
For example, although I don’t typically associate superheroes with the people that I know, whenever I would watch the newest Spiderman movie, I would feel as though I was watching my brother. He was always understated, underappreciated, undervalued. I never told him that he is the only person that I associate a superhero with.
I also never told him about the negligent lifeguard who did not move an inch while Noel struggled underwater and her 5-year-old friend attempted to rescue her and was pulled under herself. I was stuck in another room watching from behind thick glass and traversed the complicated maze of dressing rooms, shower rooms and other pools before getting there myself. That day I had written: “Now there is the lighthearted, “I need a drink” [giggle]. That was NOT how I was feeling. Instead, I had a rare bout of the other kind of need-a-drink: the kind where you have a pounding head and an image burning in your mind that you are desperate to forget.” I spent (it felt like) hours explaining to the young lifeguard and her supervisor how negligent that she had been and couldn’t help adding that my brother who lifeguards (and saved 2 kids-that we know of) would have been irate.
We never got to show him how Noel could ride her bike, sitting so straight with a proud smile on her face and wind whipping through her fine hair. My brother owned nearly a dozen cycles, in part so that he could loan them out while he worked on a new person to come along with him for a ride… He raced in the tri-borough bike race in NYC just 2 years back.

And I can’t help thinking: I want MORE. I want more time, more laughs, more memories, more conversations, more outings, more drinks, more, more, more with Stefan.