Still pondering...

I miss my brother tonight. I hope he misses me as well.

It was his picture that brought this all to mind, a slight smile with his hand on his chin that graced the cover of his funeral service bulletin. It was a photo from better times yet it called to mind the worst time of all, the sucker punch of a phone call that told me he had died.

Too soon, too young, too much left to do, none of it made sense. It still doesn't. Probably never will. The medical facts wash right over me. The larger meaning eludes me. A bitter part of me could write a list of all kinds of people who should have died instead of Paul. Go figure.

And although I'm very sure it happened it all seems still to be unreal to me. My brain knows it but everything else is numb. I'm suspended in some kind of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual stasis. All I can do is ponder the mystery with a complete silence, the kind that comes with having the wind knocked out of you.

Yet remarkably my faith hasn't gone away. I am totally and utterly without explanation for what happened and at a loss for any answer and yet somehow I believe. I suppose it could be a delusion, the only medicine for a sickness like this. I have trouble seeing it as some level of my maturity because I know myself better then that. Perhaps God is just holding me far enough away from the reality of things to keep my soul from shattering like a glass thrown in an angry fight.

No reasons for it all on the horizon I am left with the simple fact of his absence. Admittedly our lives took very different courses as adults and so we weren't with each other day in and out like many friends and some brothers, yet he mattered to me in that unique way only explained by the connection of family, of the similar flesh, of the shared struggle to life, of the soulishness shaped in a common womb. And when he died a part of me died as well because of it.

So tonight I see his picture and it all comes to mind again. I pray for him in the small hours of the night when I'm too restless to sleep and hope he prays for me too as I crawl along through this world, my journey still incomplete. For some reason all this had to be and I wish I had some clue because if I did I'm sure I wouldn't feel quite as alone as I do right now.